Home » Burkina Faso » Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Travelling by plane to Ivory Coast is a fairly luxurious experience. Swiss Air provided us with individual TV screens, headphones, music, and lots of food and drink to keep us going on the six hour flight from Zurich to Abidjan. Flying into Abidjan you can see the coconut and palm trees beside the lagoon and a skyline of skyscrapers. We arrived just as the sun was setting, and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Ajcairns
2005-11-04 20:41:19

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in three hours time, so we managed to arrange two seats in a dina, which we were promised went direct to San Pedro. The journey was 100 km on good tarmac roads, so we were hoping it would take about an hour or so. It took about three hours.

The people responsible for the dina could best be described as cowboys, doing everything in their power to get a quick buck. In most of the villages we stopped in they did 2 or 3 trips up and down the main street, shouting "San Pedro, San Pedro!" to try and get more people into an already packed dina. They were squeezing five adults into each row, which were already a bit squashed for four. People in the bus complained, but were just ignored. One old guy made the valid comment, "You only respect money! You don't respect the people that give you the money, your customers, ... no!"

We also had to change to another dina, and wait 10 minutes or so while the drivers and their helpers traded money. It was plain that they didn't give a damn about the passengers - even to tell us, "Ok we're going to stop for 10 minutes, everyone can get out and take a break." No - instead we had to wait in the hot dina, crammed in like sardines. Still, we eventually got there.

That kind of sums up Ivorian transport. Not very comfortable or agreeable, but cheap, and you do eventually get from A to B. The coaches are a bit better than the bacas and dinas. They usually only stop in the bigger villages or sometimes in the countryside to drop people off.

Coaches and bacas provide a living for some people in the villages - every time they stop, there are a bunch of young children (typically girls aged 10 or so) who come over to the bus windows selling bags of cool water, peanuts, baked bananas, sweet bananas, sweet bread, cans of coke and 'Lotus' (small plastic bags of paper handkerchiefs). They also sometimes provide sandwiches filled with meat and onions (wrapped in a bit of paper ripped from an old sack), or atikée and fish (wrapped in a big leaf). All this stuff they carry on big bowls on top of their heads. If you have a few hundred francs CFA, then you won't risk going hungry on a long journey, although small change is strictly necessary.