Night in Tunisia

Slowest Cab in the World

Slowest Cab in the world...

Generally in Tunisia the cab rides are somewhat interesting. If the regular traffic makes up its own rules and gets irritated when they are not followed, Tunisian cabbies tend to push this to the extreme. For canadians, they talk about the orderly and civilized drivers of Montreal who always obey the law and never honk their horns - they talk about it like the contrast of night to day. Nuff said.

But then not all cabbies are insane. Unfortunately. I had to get to work this morning, and after waiting for ten minutes to catch a cab (two is about average) I sat down in the slowest cab in Tunis. Woualla (swear to god), I have never seen anything like this guy. Traffic rushed on by us at rush hour as we crept along in the slow lane. We didn't break 40 kph.

To make it even more interesting, we would slow to a dead 10 kph crawl for every crack in the road that could have punched out the vehicles linchpin and left us stunned on the concrete. Apparently linchpins are something to be careful of in cars. This car, anyway. And the driver regularly slowed as his hacking stopped him from being able to pay attention to the road. That way, more people could pass us with propriety. Did I mention it was a slow ride? Sssssllllloooooowwwww.

I have been in a cab where the driver's wife and kid were in the backseat, the latter practically crawling over it to get to him, and we didn't drop far below 70 kph. It was still a rather slow ride by Tunisian standards... but acceptable.

Anyhow, eventually I got to my destination. The cost was on par for normal since time is negligible with respect to distance on the meters. Thankfully. Seriously, I've had to make the trip at rush hour, and it wasn't rush hour this time, but it took almost as long. About double the average and triple the frustration.

And now I will go on with my day.

posted by Loren @ 4:07 p.m.