Sit tight

We’re ready to go.

After 45 minutes waiting at the taxi stand in Parakou for other passengers, three and a half hours of sitting 8 people in a station wagon on a paved road that has seen limited maintenance, an hour and 15 minutes of sitting at the Dassa taxi stand, Dave and I are ready to start the last leg of our trip home from a weekend at the office in Parakou.

Our driver, however, is not ready to leave.

Currently, he is surrounded by a ring of people as he and a motorcycle taxi driver are wrestling in the red dirt of the taxi station. There is a festival of traditional wrestling at a village near ours next weekend; we assume this late afternoon scuffle is practice for that, but after traveling with goats eating your shoelaces, passing trucks carrying at least 30 people and loading enough baggage on the roof of the car so it is now twice as tall, this is just another voyage in Benin.

After he puts his shirt back on and drinks some water out of the metal bowl handed to him by a child on the sidelines of the match, he signals to us it’s time to leave.