Chicken Bus

During certain parts of my trip I've had to do an incredible amount of moving around in the course of only two or three days. One of those times was when I flew from Heho, Myanmar to Rangoon and then on to Bangkok all within 12 hours, then only a day later flew on to Bhutan. Another time was when I flew from Nepal to Dubai, stopped to look around for 36 hours, then flew on to Addis Ababa and then to Lalibela the next morning. Right now I'm in the middle of another one of those times. This morning I hiked five hours from Sankabar to Debark, then took a filthy bus to Gondar. Tomorrow morning I'll fly to Addis Ababa then the morning after I'll fly on to Nairobi to start a three week safari.

Hiking this morning was fun, but also really tiring. Since I split from Txomin and Nagore to catch an early bus back to Gondar, I didn't have the luxury of a mule and mule handler to deal with my bag, so I had to carry it myself. A scout for the Simien Mountains National Park met up with me at 6:00 this morning to guide me back down the trail to Debark. I was a little frustrated the whole way down because the guy walked so far ahead of me that I could barely see him through the mist. I felt a little ridiculous having such a hard time keeping up with a man who must have been in his fifties or sixties, but I had to remind myself that I was hauling a forty pound pack along with me.On the way back down to Debark the clouds occasionally cleared away to reveal amazing views of the green valley below us. I really wanted the clouds to all clear up so the light would be right for taking pictures, but I didn't get that lucky. I consider myself fortunate anyway though; I saw plenty of baboons yesterday and I didn't get rained on during the hike down today, so I shouldn't have any complaints. Once during the hike down we passed a group of seven or eight large gelada baboons. They were only twenty or thirty feet away from us but they were still hard to see because of the mist. I really wanted to stop and hang around with the baboons like I did yesterday, but the scout seemed pretty determined to make it to Debark in record time and besides that the weather wasn't so great for it anyway.After a long, exhausting hike with my pack that felt like it was filled with lead bricks, I finally made it to Debark. The scout lead me through a narrow road packed with goats and roosters and with mud about four inches deep. By that time I had completely given up on keeping my shoes clean and I trudged right through the stuff and on to the city bus station, which is nothing more than a rocky field about one hundred feet square.One time a co-worker of mine asked me if I've ridden any chicken busses while traveling and I didn't really know what to tell him. Up to that point I had ridden in a nasty Peruvian bus with a filthy dog breathing in my ear for six hours, I had ridden in a minivan in Guatemala with thirty-two people inside and a few hundred pounds of avocados strapped to the roof, and I had ridden in more busses than I could count where I was the only white man inside, but I couldn't recall ever riding a bus where there was actually a chicken physically inside the thing. Well after today there is absolutely no doubt as to whether or not I've ridden a “chicken bus”.

In typical third-world fashion I sat inside a bus for about an hour this afternoon waiting for it to fill up with people so the driver would start the engine and head to Gondar. The ride was ordinary enough at first - jam packed with locals and very smelly - but after a couple of stops some people came on bringing cargo with them that added serious legitimacy to my “chicken bus” experience. About thirty live roosters were dragged inside the bus. The birds were bound together at the feet and their owners held them upside down by their legs. Along with the roosters came about ten gas canisters that had been filled with eggs and a few lumps of straw to protect them. I have to admit that I was a little irritable because I had just hiked for five hours with a massive pack strapped to my back, then I had to deal with a four-hour third-world bus ride, but the squawking of the roosters in the back of the vehicle brightened my day a little bit. I'm sure that just about any bus in Africa is the same way and that thousands of tourists have had the exact same experience themselves, but it's one of those things that I felt like I just had to do to be a legitimate, well-seasoned traveler.