Taxi tales: Your instinct is your best friend

When you have been using Ugandan taxis for a while, you develop a taxi instinct. A well-honed taxi instinct that will warn you off boarding a taxi you find parked by a stage. Unless you do not mind, in this new heat wave, baking a while as you wait for this taxi to fill up.

A tried and tested taxi instinct wisely advises you to get a seat in a taxi with more than two bazungu, the more they are, the better. Bazungu in taxis tend to be tourists, going all the way on a route and if you are in a hurry, they are the best to travel with. The taxi fills up faster. Taxi conductors also seem to have qualms about squeezing in more passengers when they are on board. They want them comfortable, so they can make them pay tourist taxi fares, not the usual ones.

A well-travelled taxi instinct with thousands of hours of taxi time will alert you when it is time to get out of a taxi in a jam because experience tingles it to life with the memory of past gridlocks. It does not let you sit there getting madder and madder, that with this jam, you will have to endure much longer, the smelly nest of unwashed hair from that woman in the seat ahead of you. Your instinct gets you out of that taxi, and instead of wasted energy in angry look-backs at the conductor and driver, incorporates the enforced cracked pavements walk in your day as exercise good for you.

An unerring taxi instinct means, if you have a radio-phone, you will never let yourself get caught outside your home without your earphones. You may not once use them in two months of taxi travel. But your instinct understands there will be that one evening when you get in a taxi with a Judith Babirye fan for a driver whose taxi’s CD player works. And he has one Judith Babirye CD. On a three hour journey. Your earphones, then, will save you from going Boko Haram on him.

There is always something baffling to render us wide-eyed Nakawunda about Ugandan taxis. Like fuel prices go down but taxi fares continue to rise. You need your taxi instinct to make it every day.

tumusiimed@ug.nationmedia.com