The fun in dying?

Good afternoon / evening / morning / whatever!
I'm back in Accra. This weekend I ventured out to Kumasi in order to visit Bonwire (bon-wir-AY), a town some forty minutes drive from Kumasi where Kente was born. Seeing as I am studying Kente as my research topic, a visit to Bonwire seemed to make sense. I headed out on Friday evening with Trina, who was bound for Nama (the village she stayed in while I was in Benim) to spend a week with the villagers while doing more research for her ISP.
Now, I've made the trip to Kumasi before. And, all things considered, it was one of the easier trips I've had along the dusty unpaved roads of Ghana. However, for all of my previous excursions I have been with the full SIT Ghana Arts and Culture group, meeting at an assigned time to take a chartered death-roach-bus... I mean trotro... to our next destination. So you can understand when I say I was a little apprehensive about our trip.
It was very easy though, getting to Kumasi, so I needn't have worried. I met Trina at Circle, one of the largest stops in Accra for trotros, and after some confused calling around and vague descriptions of landmarks we found one another. After we met up we headed to the VIP bus depot, a popular chain of buses that always have trips to and from Kumasi going, and waited to buy a ticket. Granted, we walked into a den of shouting and yelling and ticket grabbing at first, but once we figured out the system and waited in line and avoided the angrier of the waiting passengers, we made our way to a bus and began our journey.
Unfortunately due to some setbacks (see: vague landmark descriptions, waiting times, etc) we set out very late in the evening. Despite the relatively short distance between Accra and Kumasi, the drive takes anywhere from four to six hours, depending on the number of stops your bus makes, the amount of traffic you encounter, and how fast / crazy your driver is. Our ride wasn't bad at all (I slept through most of it, thankfully), just a little peppered with a horrible film* on the bus' television. We were going to be met at the station by Kwame, one of the SIT leaders who had helped us out and around when we spent our two weeks in Kumasi so long ago.
Due to setbacks on the road and other obstacles, we didn't get into Kumasi until around midnight. Considering most Ghanians go to bed around seven in the evening, Kwame was understandably fatigued. He had promised to meet us at the station with a chartered cab to take us to his house. After getting off our bus and the standard Ghanian greetings, we looked around for our ride. Seeing nothing but an empty parking lot with some trotros waiting in the corner, we turned in slight confusion to our host.
"I couldn't find a cab, so I got us a trotro." He said.
Well, that was fine enough. Maybe a little awkward, considering the lateness of the hour and the fact a normal trotro holds 17 - 20 people and we were three. We greeted the driver, and in an attempt to be funny / amusing / endearing / adorable / all of the above, I made a really lame joke about being the mate of a trotro.
The mate, you see, is the person on the trotro who accepts the change from the passengers, keeps track of who gets on where and who gets off where, and interacts with the passengers so that the driver can, well, drive. Our driver was mate-less. Presumably, we were soon to learn, because he had left him at the bar.
Well, the driver screamed in laughter (literally) at my really lame joke or because I was so funny / amusing / endearing / adorable / all of the above. Although slightly unsettled, we clambered in (each taking up a bench) and began our descent into hell.
Ok, it wasn't THAT bad. But he did proceed to put petal to metal and shoot out of the abandoned station, over unpaved roads, bumping us so high in our seats my head hit the ceiling. We then rocketed along the abandoned streets of Kumasi while our driver turned around and kept speaking with us, eyes abandoning the road. After Kwame's instances, he DID turn the little attention he possessed to the complicated process of not killing us, but all the while talking to the absent mate. Each time we barreled past a stop, he'd call it out, asking "Yen se wo he?" (Where is your [collective] stop?). We were too busy holding on to answer.
But somewhere in between the buildings flying by, the violent shaking of the car, and the realization that he wasn't driving with both headlights on I began to have fun. Maybe it was the sheer absurdity of the situation or just the fact that if I were to die in Ghana, to killed by a crazed trotro driver would be quite an acceptable way to go. Trina and Kwame seemed to come to a similar realization, because when I looked around our small, shaking cabin, I saw them smiling. Or maybe crying. I can't really remember.
After fifteen minutes of said ridiculousness, we reached our destination, where our driver immediately shot out of the trotro as if it were on fire, sat down on the ground some feet away, and started yammering on his cell phone.
We looked at one another and started laughing.
Also, did I mention we ran over a chicken? Yeah. Chickens are like pigeons here (and lizards are like squirrels, just FYI) and we definitely flattened one during our wild and crazed ride.
Regardless, after surviving the trip to our accommodations, I slept quite soundly and got to go to Bonwire the next day, where I interviewed some master weavers, impressed the locals with my tricks (Look! I'm an Obruni! And I can WEAVE!), purchased some kente I couldn't live without, and had a merry time. Because Trina and Kwame were so entertaining, I decided to stay on another day and hang out / run errands with them rather than head back on another late-night bus.
So on Sunday, after said hanging out / errands, I went to the station and boarded another bus. Unfortunately, due to my timing and the fact it was rush hour, there was only one seat left on the bus: the jump seat. So I sat in the jump seat, sandwiched against the Bus' mate (who asked me to marry him every five minutes... funny for the first hour? Not so much after five) trying to ignore the pungent B.O. wafting from his unwashed body and attempting to finish my book. Oh what a fun fun time.
So I'm back now in Accra. I finished another Kente today! I'm quite proud of it, not only because it has some of the most complicated patterns I've learned yet, but also because I managed to turn one really, really big mistake into something that kind of looks like the Chrysler Building in New York. And I love that building, so therefore my mistake is awesome. For my next cloth I'm going to break slightly from the ones I've done in the past and work with a different back pattern. It's hard to describe, but it's keeping me from getting too repetitive in my creations.

I'm out of time (again), I'm growing to really dislike Internet Cafes, but I urge everyone to drive with both headlights on, strapped in a seat belt, paying attention to the road, and (if possible) avoiding as many chickens as possible.

Love to you (yes, YOU!),
Lo

* I don't know why, but Ghanian films or their imported Nigerian films are some of the worst I have ever had the misfortune of viewing.