Bus Rides

20 February 2010 – Let’s talk about bus rides.  If you have done any amount of backpacking, you know that bus rides pretty much go hand-in-hand with being a backpacker.  Bus rides are to backpacking like cheese to one’s quesadilla, the rice to my beans and the rump shaking to merengue.  It is unavoidable.

The bus crew

Now, I’ve had my fair share of bus rides.  I’ve rumbled and tumbled down crater-sized, pothole strewn dirt roads in Cambodia for hours on end, sat next to live chickens being held down on their owner’s lap in Nicaragua, shivered for hours on end on a night bus in Peru that was bitter cold with nothing more than shorts and a t-shirt on, while all the locals wisely boarded with thick blankets in hand…. I know the joy of chasing after buses high in the mountains of Ecuador that have pulled away, while my pants are down around my ankles and I’m hiding behind a bush trying to go pee.  I am still jealous of the fact that men could hop off the bus, pee right next to it and hop back on.  While the women?  I never saw a single woman get off during numerous ten hour bus rides and I remain befuddled as to how these women have such ironclad bladders of steel.

I’ve been on bus rides so packed to the gills that not another soul could fit, when they pull over to pick up a few more passengers.  The bus driver makes a silent nodding motion with his head for everyone to move over.  People silently scootch, squeeze and pile onto one another.  They teeter on bags of rice, sit on people’s laps and somehow manage to make enough room.

Gazing out the window for hours on end

I say this because, as a backpacker, you need to have a supreme sense of patience – an almost Zen-like ability to endure long bus rides.  I’ve never been able to read on buses without instantly becoming carsick, so I’ve taken to staring out the window - watching the endless landscape pass and pondering (and solving!) all of life’s greatest quandaries.

 

Every now and then though, there comes a bus ride that is so unbearable and torturous that it makes you stop and question what you are doing with your life.  Why would any sane individual willingly board a flaming-shit stick (as I’ve so gingerly named it) to cruise to the far corners of a country?  Why, the hope of seeing something wonderful and amazing of course.

Posh digs

A recent bus ride that left me second guessing my life choices was a 15 hour fiasco from Bogota to Medellin.  First off, it was supposed to take nine hours, but you always factor in at least an hour for delays, so I figured we would arrive in Medellin by 7:30pm.  We didn’t arrive until 12:35am.  Traffic was so bad that it took an entire two hours just to leave the city of Bogota.  Our decked out chariot that promised air-conditioning and wi-fi (we were so foolish to believe such things) was in reality a tired, tired bus that had seen better days.  Both televisions had large cracks in them, the seats only slightly reclined and it reeked of the pleasant aroma of urine.  While dozing off, I felt something crawling on my arm, looked down, saw a cockroach and swatted it off.  I’m a bit dismayed to report that I was not even slightly shocked or alarmed by this disgusting little visitor.  C'est la vie.

While taking the most roundabout way possible to Medellin (first south, then east, then north, then east again), our driver drove as though he was in the autobahn – racing up the windy mountain roads and drifting around corners with the real panache of someone that has a true future in racing.  Never mind the fact that I felt as though I was aboard a horrible rollercoaster that would not end.  That and the air-conditioning did not work.  The bus had only small cracks of windows that opened on one side of the bus and the stale air was so mind-numbingly hot that it made your head spin.  Now, I’ve been on countless buses without air conditioning before, but the complete lack of airflow was unbearable.  I was sweaty and nauseous from the jerking back and forth up the windy roads, slamming on breaks and suffocating heat.  To say it was a long ride is an understatement. 

 

Our "flaming shit-stick" chariot...looks deceptively swanky

After sitting at our “lunch break” for two hours, backing out, pulling across the street and sitting for another 20 minutes, all while roasting in our sauna, we were needless to say, getting a bit fed up.  I went and asked the bus drivers, who were all standing around outside smoking if something was wrong with the bus.  “No.” “Nothing is wrong?” “No.” “When are we leaving?”  “Now.”  “Like right now?”  “Yeah, now.”  They continued to stand there for another 15 minutes, so when another bus heading towards Medellin pulled up my brother, some fellow travelers and I jumped at the chance to switch buses.  It still took another four and a half hours to get to Medellin, but we had glorious, glorious air conditioning - making the extra $15 a head worth every extra penny.  I am pretty sure our first bus is still inching its way towards Medellin as we speak.