The Road Warrior

My driver's license arrived yesterday. My wife and I don't have to take a test, per se, to get our license to drive here in Kinshasa. We had our pictures taken at Photo Guy, the local photo place, and Acme did all the paperwork to get us our licenses. After almost three weeks, they were ready so the head of transportation at Acme took us out for an impromptu driver's test yesterday.

Now, I didn't figure to be doing much driving once I got to Africa. I'd walk everywhere, take a canoe downriver, swing on vines, or ride on the back of a trained wildebeest or whatever to get where I needed to go. I certainly didn't expect to see all the traffic that Kinshasa has on its roads. The main roads in Kinshasa are in good shape; the side roads are not. Even though gas prices are higher here than in the US, cars are expensive, and you have to constantly deal with congestion and bad roads, people still drive everywhere.

From what I've seen so far, the driving experience here is comparable to picking someone up at the airport arrivals area on a holiday weekend, or trying to get around a mall parking lot on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas. Everyone is heading the same direction with the goal of getting where they're going to as quickly as possible, yet no one pays attention to staying in a particular lane and cars are randomly starting and stopping or swerving to the right and left. Here, you also have to deal with immense potholes and various beggars, street children, and vendors wading their way through the stream of cars in pursuit of a handout or sale. At least there aren't a lot of speeders around here because the roads are either so rough and/or congested that it makes speeding impossible.

For our driving test, we drove downtown and back again. Parallel parking, three point turns, and backing around a corner were not covered. I think it was just a test to see if we could drive a manual transmission (almost all cars are stick) and stay on the correct side of the road (the right side). Most of the time we were in stop and go traffic. I guess we're supposed to have one more driving "lesson" this weekend which should be interesting since I think Saturdays are the busiest driving days.

At least I'll have a driver's license soon and some ID to carry around with me.