How long does it take you to get to the bank, the grocery store or even the hardware store? Maybe five minutes? What about 10? Surely not over 20 minutes. And you would for sure agree with me that 20 minutes is a bit of a drive for a two-by-four or a gallon of milk. Well, when you live in Togo you end up driving 6.5 hours one direction to make those errands. Isn’t that crazy?
Randy has been taking these trips for over 20 years now. I have somehow been able to avoid many of these trips till recently. However, I’m starting to go down more frequently to acquaint myself with the layout of the capital city, so that while Randy and his wife are out of the country on furlough I will know my way down to and around the city.
You would assume that a city of over 1.5 million people would have a bunch of grocery stores, banks and hardware stores. In reality, there are only one or two grocery stores, and they would be considered low-stocked off-name-brand type establishments in the States. The rest of the stores are “mom and pop” type places. The banks tend to charge more to exchange money then private businesses or individuals on the street, and the number of hardware stores can be counted on one hand. Even those are only about ¼ the size of your nearest Ace Hardware. Sure there are some other fly-by-night hardware stores, and of course one can always find an entrepreneur in a back alley who is looking to broker a deal for a reasonable price. This world is very much different then what one would image in a capital city to be.
The drive south can be considered treacherous at times. Not only do you need to watch the road for seemingly endless pot holes, but you also must vigilantly watch out for the local animals such as goats, chickens, sheep, and even the occasional elephant. While the elephant was an exaggeration, you do have to watch for herds of cattle that often times roam into the road. And if that isn’t enough, one must consider probably the most dangerous element: the average pedestrian. Here, it seems that no one fears vehicles, nor do they yield the right of way.
Sometimes a person will be walking down the road, and a bike will pass them, then a motorcycle will take a wider birth to pass the walker and bicyclist, and if a car driver wanted to pass the person, bike and motorcycle, they drive in the other lane, into the oncoming traffic. While this may not sound like a major concern, it happens all the time. And when others are doing the same thing in the other lane it makes driving unpredictable. Most times you find yourself riding down the center of the road, honking your horn at just about anything that moves or looks like it will move!
Last week, Randy and I decided to fly from Kara to Lomé, effectively cutting a 6.5-hour drive down to a mere 2-hour flight. Astonishingly enough, the flight is just nominally more expensive then the drive, and the time and headache that are saved seem well worth it.
We arrived this past week in Lomé and made all our shopping in a half a morning and one afternoon. We needed to stay in the capital for a bit of business that evening. The next morning we flew back to Kara. We made the whole trip in just over 30 hours instead of the usual three days.
