You know you've been working in the galley too long when you can estimate the number of people on the ship at a given time by the number of food pans that come back from the dining room after a meal.
You know you've been left behind on the ship during a ship holiday weekend when you have eighteen thousand food pans coming back, and am really tempted just serve yesterday's leftovers and not to cook anything the next day.
This past weekend was a scheduled ship holiday—nearly everyone got their Fridays off to make this particular weekend a three day weekend, so most of the crew took advantage and headed out. Sure, there were still people moseying about—people on duty, people who were sick, people who were too broke/tired/lazy to get off the ship, etc. etc.—but the ship just felt very strange and eerily quiet over the weekend, as if it had just been suddenly emptied out. My team had to work this weekend, which for us meant a 1 PM start time on Friday instead of the usual 8 AM (yay), but which also meant that we were left behind on the ghost of Africa Mercy while everyone else was off having their fun ship holiday adventures (sad).
So on Sunday night after our shift finished, Rachel and I are just hanging out (and by “hanging out,” I mean just sitting around looking pathetic because we’re so dead tired) when we looked at each other and just simultaneously had one of those “We need to get off this ship” moments. Before I came, I bought a West African travel guide book, and I’ve been reading the guide off and on for the last couple of weeks. So far the book has been pretty much useless to me, since Africa is a huge continent and little is written about the tiny sliver of land that is Togo, but the book had a teeny tiny paragraph about these waterfalls located near Badou—the Akloa Waterfalls, the tallest waterfalls in Togo. Hm, only 4 hours away from Lomé, you say? We had just come off the weekend shift and we had the next two days off; why not take a random, spontaneous journey to see some waterfalls?
We gathered up our entire galley team, and Rachel, Sara, Andrea and I— and we invited Johan along, since he’d also worked the weekend— left the ship on Monday afternoon around 1:30 PM.
One of the Mercy Ship drivers was kind enough to take us all the way to the bus station where we could find taxi drivers willing to take us all the way to Badou. There's one main "highway" that runs north from Lomé, but the roads that branch off of it are pretty terrible, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a taxi driver willing to make the trip. Surprisingly, we found a driver and agreed to pay 3,500 CFA each, or about $7 USD, for the (supposedly) four hour taxi ride. Not bad, eh? The five of us squish into a taxi, and we were off to Badou… or so we thought. The taxi ride up though was absolutely stunning...
I was already sitting in the trunk, but the taxi driver decided that we absolutely had to get one more person in the car. You know, since we're already on the way, why not cram more people in? So Johan got a not-so-little visitor in the front seat:
Three hours later we land in Atakpamé, the fifth largest city in Togo. The taxi driver stops in the middle of the city center, gets off, and goes to talk to the people standing around the buses parked right behind us. Ewe, ewe, ewe— he soon comes back to the taxi, and announces that we’re to switch into a bus now because his taxi “cannot get up the mountain”! See the bus in the picture for yourself; there’s no way that his relatively new-ish taxi couldn’t get up the mountain if this rickety, ten million year old bus could.
I mean, look at the thing! This is a picture of what the steering wheel looked like; doesn't that make you just feel safe? We argued for several minutes about the fact that this is not what we agreed on, 
but eventually- and very begrudgingly- we all squished into the bus, which already had 12 people squashed into it. At first we were really unhappy, but then it suddenly became hilarious because of the sheer ridiculousness of the whole situation— going along the bumpiest, most pothole-filled, winding-est mountain road in the oldest van known to man. Sara and I weren’t even sitting on real seats, just boxes covered in a blanket, and even the driver was squashed up against his window because there were four people sitting in his row instead of the normal two. The driver also kept stopping in random places to talk to his friends that he saw along the way- once he stopped for a full half hour, and when we asked why we were stopped, one of the people in the van said nonchalantly, as if this was completely normal behavior, "Oh, he's just selling his corn". There was a grandpa sitting back-to-back with me, and apparently he thought I was the seat-back because he kept leaning more and more backwards until I was basically in a completely crouched position. And the funniest thing—the grandpa (we think he had some kind of Alzheimer’s) was talking absolute gibberish the entire time, so Johan starting talking Dutch back to him, nodding and making random hand gestures as if he understood everything. The entire van was watching the interaction and laughing, and we were wondering what was so funny, until we finally figured it out—the crazy grandpa was trying to “buy” Sara as his wife! At which point, Johan “claimed” Sara by pointing at her and then back at himself (“Thanks for claiming me, Johan” became a favorite phrase of ours for the weekend)… but not before offering to barter her for 2,000 camels!Oh, and later we found that there was a baby somewhere hidden in the car and we didn’t know it until we reached our destination 9 hours later.
Yes, you read correctly. NINE HOURS. Three hours in a taxi, five hours in a squashy bus. Oh, for the love.
(I just had to include this picture because... look how unhappy Andrea looks- I can't stop laughing at her expression.)We eventually made it to Badou, but not without seeing some... interesting things along the way. For instance, we saw a massive truck that had completely driven off the side of the mountain; it was seriously a miracle that the driver hadn't died in the crash because the entire front was smashed in. Local Africans were trying to use a bulldozer to lift the truck out, and in the process, ruining the asphalt roads ("So this is why all the African roads are terrible...").
When we finally got to the hotel, we just about crashed because we were exhausted, and knew we had an early morning and a long hike ahead of us.
Johan, of course, was a gentleman and a scholar and "offered" us his mattress (ie. we stole it from him while he was in the bathroom). Sorry Johan. Lesson: don't go to the bathroom next time.
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