Thursday, August 28, 2008
THE Bus Ride
I can’t resist dedicating an entire post to the 7 hour bus ride from Puno to Cuzco. I should have known when the ticket was so cheap that we would be stopping in EVERY small pueblo, village, town, etc. along the way and that arriving punctually wouldn’t really be of concern to the driver. The first few stops were fine since by then the bus wasn’t full and I was still interested in seeing life on a Saturday morning in small town Peru. After about an hour, when I finally thought we were cruising, a self-proclaimed healer got on the bus and proceeded to give us a 30-min lecture about how dangerous our current eating habits are, how probable it is that we will all get diabetes, and how ginseng will save all our lives. It didn’t help that he screamed the entire speech so that everyone could hear and that I happened to be right next to him. But he finally got off after convincing five people to buy his ginseng and I thought we were home free to Cuzco…. until a woman selling a chicken dish got on. Now, it’s very common for food vendors to get on buses here, sell their goods, and get off quickly to pursue the next bus, but this woman actually brought a small electric stove with her to prepare the food ON THE BUS. Luckily we could open the windows…. she then finished up and I tried to concentrate on my music. We still had about 4 hours left at this point and more people kept getting on the bus even though it was already clearly over capacity (this bus company apparently lets as many people on as can fit standing up in the aisle). So really I was just glad I had a seat! At hour five a woman gets on with a crate of live chickens and then at hour six a guy with a small lamb that he lets run up and down the aisle for the last part of the trip. Needless to say I can only laugh at this point and hope that the Cuzco bus terminal appears in front of us as quickly as possible…. I definitely learned to expect the unexpected but was EXTREMELY happy when we finally arrived and swore that on the return trip I would choose a different bus company.
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2 comments:
Haha, that is an AWESOME story. It reminds me of a seven hour bus trip I went on in Ecuador once. This one we were expecting to be seven hours, but we were also expecting there to be a bathroom on the bus (as there had been on our trip to the town we were returning from), and we'd already been holding our pee for an hour because the women's restroom in the bus station was out of order and everyone was using the men's, which had no door or stall doors and the men were standing right there peeing into a big trough on the floor... and the entire bus station smelled like urine, so you can imagine how that bathroom smelled. So we decided we'd wait and go on the bus, except that there wasn't one, and there wasn't padding on the seats and we were in the back row so every time we went over a pothole -- which was often -- I went flying out of my seat and landed back down with a crash and my suitcase crashed down on my lap. And then a drunk got on the bus and sat next to me and proceeded to fall asleep on my shoulder.
I like your story better, though. :)
I told my parents this story after you told me about it, and they didn't believe me at first!! After I convinced them it was true, they thought it was hilarious :)
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