Traffic

“Candidate must be willing to learn to ride motorcycle. “

This is a line from the job posting that got me here. Soft sell. Pickup line for when I get back: I like long walks down the beach and uncontrolled intersections. Both under moonlight. Or dirt paths through small villages. Watch out, small, shirtless children. Staying in second gear to avoid stalling & murder.

Here they build speedbumps like they mean it. Slow down, one way or another. On the bike or not, as you like. Dirt roads mean dirt speedbumps, logically enough. They build them at least a foot and a half high so the erosion takes longer. In the meantime… found new ones on my road last night. Thanks, civil engineering. Who speeds down dirt roads anyway? Isn’t the whole mass of pedestrians and brave goats enough? I go thirty and feel like Evil Knievil.

Riding with two people is tricky. Our bikes max out at an optimistic 70 klicks with one person. I drove Peter, our water project engineer, to Kpanduli the other day. Well, Peter, camera, tripod, backpack, laptop, etc. We stopped by a filling station to buy purewater for the construction crew and I thought I heard the bike scream. We bottomed out the suspension just going from the paved road to the dirt one. At this point, my influence on our center of gravity was proportionately negligible. I pointed us in a direction and prayed against potholes. We came up to a herd of cows chewing cud in the road. I steered between them. Peter wasn’t happy. The animals are unpredictable he said. Be careful.

In the main intersection in Tamale there’s a board posted with stats on traffic deaths in Ghana, organized by city. Every morning I scoot through the traffic cluster underneath. I imagine the two story trucks that barrel down the road to Bolga, crammed with people, appliances and livestock. If I end up on that board, it better be for good reason. Not some cab door opened at the last minute or badly-timed outside pass. I’ll take a cow herd or a tro-tro flipping down the highway. Give me a fatal pileup with an African flavour.

Some local commuter will saunter up in the chaos to steal my helmet. Stupid saliminga should’ve learned how to ride the motorcycle. And steered around the cows.