Bus trips are bizarre

 7^th December 2011

Life is too short to sleep in. Then again, some days I feel that life is too short to not sleep in. This conflict is never a problem when traveling by bus in Africa because, believe me, you want to get to the bus station early. You want to take the first morning bus (usually around 5 a.m.). You want to board the bus as soon as possible. Once you see it pull into the station, you want to be on it. This is why I was at the Lilongwe bus station in Malawi at 4:15 a.m. yesterday.

If you’re not there early, things are nearly guaranteed to be more miserable than just being on a bus for 12 hours and praying/wishing/hoping that the bus won’t: breakdown, take a corner too fast, take a corner too fast while going downhill on a road without guardrails (wait, what are those things again?), hit a person who – believe it or not – is completely unaware of the bus honking its horn as it careens down the street and who decides to dart across the road just as the bus nears. Or maybe it’s a herd of cows that are in danger of being hit, as they meander across the road just as the bus turns a corner. There is, of course, always the risk of the bus getting waylayed by the police who decide that, because the bus is transporting too many sacks of potatoes, it cannot continue its journey for about, oh, eight very slow hours.

All of these are not what I want to experience on a long bus trip. But I have no control over them. What I do have some control over is my seat. So at 4:15 a.m., I climbed onto the bus for Lusaka, determined to get one of the coveted window seats on the two-seat-in-a-row side of the bus instead of the worse three-seat-in-a-row side. And at 4:15, forty-five full minutes before the time the bus is scheduled to depart, there is only one of those precious good seats left. And it’s mine.

The trick about being a woman traveling alone on a bus is to get a good seat neighbor. And by ‘good’ I mean not a man. Not that I’m trying to be sexist here, but I’d rather not have a man fondling my thigh under the cover of his trenchcoat that he has draped ever so casually over his leg and part of mine. (Yes, that actually happened to me once on the train from NYC to the town where I was living outside the city, on the very last train at around 1:30 a.m. I think.) I don’t want to be totally on edge for 12 hours on a bus. So I opt for women or children as my seat neighbors. I just place something on the seat next to me when a man boards the bus and remove it when a woman or child boards the bus. That simple. So you can imagine my surprise when, at 4:30 a.m. and still with plenty of empty seats left on the bus (and with one of my bags on the seat next to mine), a man asks me, in English, if someone is sitting in the seat next to me. I’m in the second to last row of seats on the bus, so I can see all the empty seats ahead of me. There’s absolutely no reason for the man to sit next to me.

"Is someone sitting here?" he asks, pointing to the seat next to me, where my bag is.

“Hopefully,” I say, not wanting to lie exactly.

 “Eh?” he asks, not understanding my response.

 “Hopefully,” I repeat again.

“Eh?” he responds, still confused.

“Hope-ful-ly.” I say it more slowly this time.

“Eh?”

“Someone might come.”

“Eh?”

Dude, it’s 4:30 a.m. Sit in the empty seat behind me. Or in front of me. Or across the aisle from me. But don’t make me want to kill you first thing in the morning. That’s not cool for either of us.

“YES,” I finally lie, and he looks crestfallen.

Boy, I sure ruined someone’s morning. But I have made my day more delightful when I move my bag off the seat so an 8-year-old boy, traveling with his older brother, can sit next to me. Children are my favorite. When the bus fills up, a little girl sits in the seat behind me. At one point, I place my hand on the top of the back of my seat, and she kisses it quickly, then looks away.

Bus trips are bizarre. Which is probably why I take them.