200 francs, Tsinga

If you need to go somewhere in Yaounde that is too far to walk and you don't have a car (which is most people), you don't hope on a bus or metro; you take a taxi. As in much of Cameroon, taxis are the primary form of transportation in the capital city, yet the system is very different from that of the United States. First of all, taxis here are communal, meaning that the driver will take as many passengers as he chooses, picking up and dropping off people on the way. As one can imagine, this means that taxis are often packed tightly with people. "Doubling" riders in the front passenger seat is to be expected, and it is not at all unusual to have four (or more) in the back. Occasionally, you even see taxi drivers sitting on other passengers' laps. This move is called "petit chauffeur". It is also common to pick up people from the market loaded with hefty baskets full of produce to toss in the trunk, along with the occasional live animal.

To hail a cab, you stand on the side of the street where traffic is moving in the direction that you want to go and wait, although on slow days, drivers will often pull up beside any random pedestrian to offer a ride. Once the driver slows down near you, you generally have a window of about two seconds to call out the neighborhood you want to go to and the price that you want to pay. If the driver is going that direction and/or likes the price you offer, they nod, honk and stop for you to hop in and specify the location before barreling off down the road and repeating the process with other potential clients. Sometimes it can take several tries to find someone who is going your direction; the communal aspect means that drivers are restricted by the destinations of the other passengers.

The first few times that I took cabs this had not been explained to me, and I got offended as driver after driver shook their heads at me and sped off. By now, taking cabs has begun to feel fairly natural. I know the correct names and locations for the places that I go regularly as well as the prices. It costs me 200 francs (the equivalent of a little under 50 cents) to go from my school in Bastos to my house in Tsinga, and I've been conditioned to reject any driver that insists on 250 or even 300 francs. There are some drivers who assume that they can charge much more that what is normal since I am obviously foreign, but generally I name my place and price with enough conviction that people believe that I know what I'm talking about.

The roads of Yaounde are always filled with taxis; generally yellow and in various states of disrepair. Through my American liberal-arts-school lense for sustainability, the environmental impact of using taxis for public transportation instead of, say, a good bus system is hard to miss. However, the taxis provide a ton of jobs in a country where the unemployment rate is through the roof. They are at least cheap and efficient, and provide the background for a lot of wild adventures.