And You Thought Your Travel Karma Was Bad!

Written on January 30th, 2010
Dedicated to Beth Ritter

So I know in the US we all have our fair share of unpleasant travel experiences. I know that Beth in particular has had a lot of bad luck when it comes to trying to get from point A to point B. My experience today however might take the cake as far as absurdity in travel is concerned (and I know that I can only look forward to more experiences like this in the next two years.)
So today, Saturday, I decided that I was going to go visit my friend Erica who lives in a village that is about 20 km west of me.
I left my house after breakfast around 9 and headed out to the main road to wait for a car. Last weekend I had to wait about 15 minutes for a car so I wasn't expecting to have to wait for to long. Between 9 and 9:45 one car drove by and it was full. I talked to one of the other ladies who was waiting for a car and she explained to me that since it was the last Saturday of the month it was seet setall. Seet Setall is a nation wide campaign for everyone to spend the morning of the last Saturday of the month cleaning their villages and surrounding environs. This means that any public transportation on the roads faces a potential fine because this means that they are not in fact in their villages cleaning up. I was unaware of all of this so I had unwittingly decided to travel at the worst possible time of the month.
Finally around 10:30 a car came with space, I got on and breathed a sigh of relief assuming that I would make it to Erica's in about an hour. Oh how foolish of me. About 5 k down the road we got stopped at a police checkpoint. The driver explained that he was just bringing all of us to the neighboring town to go to the market. So we continued on down the road dropped off a bunch of people and then pulled over in the shade while the driver got out and walked back to the police checkpoint, for no reason that I could figure out.
Once the driver returned we continued another 10 k down the road and then around 12:15 the driver pulled over in the shade again, got out and walked away. I was able to figure out that we would now have to wait until 1 for Seet Setall to be over and then we could continue on. We had stopped in this particular patch of shade because just around the corner was another police checkpoint.
So 1 finally rolled around and we continued on. I got out of the car soon thereafter in Erica's village and four hours later had finally traveled the 20 k. We promptly ate lunch, got back on another car and went to Barra to get cold beers. It was really quite a Saturday. Now I know never again to try to travel on Seet Setall and I guess that's a lesson it's best I learned now rather than later.