Road Trip

There were no maps. No routes. No schedules. No stops. Just a bus. A big, cranky, big-bully bus, gaudy and ornate, crashing down the streets, its passengers clinging to the rails in the ceiling, swaying with the fringed tapestries dangling from the rearview mirror, and sticking to their seats like the Tweety Bird and Minnie Mouse characters gummed to the walls.

The first morning, as I boarded one of these buses and squeezed between a muddy window laced in dust and a fat man with a big mustache who smelled of last night’s rum, the words kept running through my head: “Never get on a bus.”

The advice seemed pretty reasonable as we rumbled down the crumbled roads, the bus swiping fruit baskets from little boys’ wooden carts and driving delivery donkeys off their lazy paths. I had no idea where I was, no idea where I going, and no idea where I’d been. For all I knew, we could have been driving in circles, passing the same street every time, and I’d never know it. Without my escort, I would have stayed on the bus forever.

Of course, I knew the real reason everybody at home told me to never get on a bus, and it wasn’t just because it was chaotic, confusing, and downright impossible to navigate. They had heard the stories of the FARC, the Colombian warlords, holding up city buses in rural areas with loaded guns and ransacking the pockets of the passengers, taking blonde hostages as meat for bribes and later throwing them out like the weekly trash after securing their funds. They had heard stories of terrorists placing suicide bombers on buses and detonating bombs just as the bus pulled out of social territory; petty thieves who robbed travelers blind just as they accidentally drifted into a momentary cap nap; desperate men waiting at stop lights for the right moment when they could thrust their dirty hands into the open windows and tear open the buttoned blouses of the women, who always kept their cash neatly tucked in their bras and not in their purses. None of these horror stories surprised me, for I had heard the stories too.