All aboard the TB express!

Now I’m not saying that I have tuberculosis, but if it turns out that I do sometime in the near future, then it was definitely from this bus ride.

My intention was to simply mention my bus ride from Gondar to Gorgora as part of my larger story of my trip to the Ethiopian Highlands, but the spectacle that ensued became a story all its own. Our often handy, but sometimes horribly mistaken, Lonely Planet said that the 67km bus ride to Gorgora, on Lake Tana, was a cheap 1.5hr trip which sounded great so off I went. I arrived at the bus station and was directed to the bus headed to Gorgora. I was surprised to find quite a few open seats and for a fleeting moment thought I might get to ride a bus in relative comfort for a change, but in true African fashion, my fleeting moment was snatched from me as we were moved to a smaller bus. This bus, of course, filled up over the next hour and when we finally departed we had already consumed the Lonely Planet’s hour and a half. It still was not too bad as we headed off because we were only at full capacity and I had the very back seat next to a large window that I could keep open. However, as soon as we cleared Gondar we made our first stop to load on extra people. I thought it was a joke, that first crowd of people who ran up to the bus, but they all managed to cram on and my big window proceeded to be the entry and exit point for all newcomers’ stuff including bags of clothes, food, jerrycans, and very small children. For the next four hours I watched a scarily overloaded bus drop some people off but always manage replace them with even more people as half the goods in Ethiopia moved across my lap and, without fail, at every stop the folks who needed to get off would be all the way in the back of the bus with me. After more than five hours, having devoured an entire stalk of sugarcane and watched 3 million Ethiopians, many whom were coughing and hacking, get on and off the bus, I was literally the last person to disembark. My day ended well, though, as I was able to sit back with a cold beer, a big plate of goat & injera, a TV airing the BBC news and slowly digest another day in Africa.