The Stockers' Stories

I’ve had to start changing the way I get back and forth to Kindle each week, partly because of the unavailability of fuel and partly just because of the expense. A 130-mile round trip to Kindle in a car eats up a full day’s salary, even if we are able to find fuel!

Tuesday was quite an adventure in travel. I left home shortly after 10 AM on Tuesday, walking to a major intersection with a heavy backpack. From there, I caught a dampa (bicycle taxi) to the bus depot–that got me plenty of laughs and pointing fingers along the way! I was happy to find a bus that was already full, because that meant it would be leaving soon. Unfortunately, the owner of the bus didn’t feel that it was quite full yet. We finally left at noon, after people on the bus had been yelling for half an hour that the bus is full, you can’t take any more people. The seats were full, the aisle was completely packed, and I was sitting behind the seat that was stacked to the ceiling with suitcases, boxes, bags, and buckets. I was thinking that it would make a nice picture, but I would have needed one of those IMAX cameras to get the effect: Solid people on three sides, with a narrow view to the window on the right, an armpit three inches in front of my nose, and above my head a precarious stack of things held in place by thin strips of rubber and string peeled from worn-out tires.

The real adventure started when the bus tried to move. It did fairly well on a downward slope, but sputtered & coughed on level ground and shuddered along at walking speed on every uphill stretch. The driver said the problem was probably contaminated fuel that he had bought on the black market. We made it perhaps five miles before they stopped the bus for repairs. I’ve never before seen anyone cleaning a fuel filter by sucking diesel through it as if it were a drinking straw, shaking it, then blowing it back out. After an hour of repairs, we were off again, with the engine running no better than before.

About halfway through the journey, we stopped again, this time at a “real” mechanic shop along the side of the road. The mechanics there worked on it for an hour or more, but again didn’t succeed in making any improvements. I was actually worried that we would never get out of that shop. To get there, we had pulled off of the tar and backed onto a slight downhill slope, and when it was time to leave, the driver couldn’t get the bus to move forward. It would roll backwards every time he tried to get it moving, even though most of the people were not on the bus. We ended up rolling backwards, away from the road, a hundred feet or more before we found a spot that was level enough to get a start moving forwards! After we got back to the tar and everyone hopped back on, the rest of the trip was uneventful, if slow. After another bicycle taxi ride and a bit more walking, I finally arrived at Kindle shortly before 5PM. That’s an average of just under 10 miles per hour.