Hell On Wheels

Trans Denis workers load baggage at the Tana station.

Dawn light breaks across a peak in the highlands near Ihosy.

The grasslands near Betroka are striped with burned patches from brushfires.

A view of the savanna south of Betroka.

Written September 6, 2012

Manambaro

    The brousse ride from Tana to Fort Dauphin is an ordeal that every Sud-region Volunteer has to go through sooner or later.  The vehicles that make the trip are huge camions-brousses, like school buses with much more heavy-duty suspensions.  Even though the transport companies respect the rule of one person, one seat, the journey is cramped, dusty, boiling and chilly by turns, and three days long.

    After leaving Kelsey at the airport I went to the Peace Corps meva for the night.  I spent the next day there relaxing and taking care of minor business.  Travis and Adam introduced me to the latest in catchy American music-- which unfortunately turned out to be the amazingly brainless pop hit “Call Me Maybe.”

    The morning of the 25th I got to the southern Tana brousse station in time to board the Trans Denis brousse.  I was in the most ideal spot, two seats behind the driver.  Minimum shock from bumps in the road.

    We drove all day through the highlands and even made it past Fianarantsoa before we stopped for the night.  When there are no hotels, you sleep right where you are on the brousse.  That was the chilly part, until they turned on some kind of heater in the brousse, which made it stiflingly hot.  When we woke up, some of the women in my seat row decided they wanted their kids to sit with them, so instead of five people in a row we had six, plus four little kids sitting on their mothers’ laps.  This arrangement squeezed me so that my legs were immobile, but faced with Malagasy mothers’ attachment to their children I was helpless to complain.

    We had breakfast in Ihosy, then turned off the paved road onto Route Nationale 13.  Long, hot, dusty.  The brousse could rarely go more then 30 miles an hour on the rocky track.  Two of the towns we passed through, smack in the middle of the desert, had paved streets and sidewalks that looked as modern as those things get in Madagascar.  Perverse relics from when the government prepared to pave RN13, right before the 2008 coup sent everything out the window.

    We stopped in Beraketa for the night.  The drivers were determined not to go any further because of bandits.  This time I got out of my seat and went to sleep on the dusty porch of a closed-up restaurant.  I was genuinely happy to have so much space to sleep in, even if it was on the ground.  That night actually turned out to be one of the highlights of the journey.

    The drivers from other brousses that had stopped joined us in a convoy through bandit territory, and we got through unmolested.  When we got to Ambovombe most of the passengers disembarked, and I had the whole row to myself.  After that it was a breezy six-hour ride over comparatively better roads to Fort Dauphin.