I couldn’t agree more but also see the irony here. Sure, the extortions are a massive problem, but it is not the only issue on the road. Anyone who has ever travelled the roads in Guatemala knows that many bus drivers are suicidal maniacs who put the lives of the passengers in their overcrowded busses in peril. As colourful and fantastically decorated those chicken busses are, as soon as they hit the roads they turn into lethal beasts. In their hurry to haul in as many as paying customers, the ayudantes basically drag people into the busses, quite often doubling the maximum number of 52 passengers, as a forgotten sign over the drivers head mentions, a forgotten relic from when the bus was yellow and used to haul schoolchildren, two per bench, in grey but quiet suburbs.
Chicken busses, I love them as much as I hate them. As big and fast and scary as they are on the roads, especially when the bus driver starts racing a bus from a rival company, they are absolutely fascinating. Riding a chicken bus while, often quite literally, hanging on for dear life, is an experience that assaults all your senses at once. The smells may not always be the best (the aroma of food sold by vendors squirming through the isle is by far preferable over some more human odours); the music simply deafening; the touch factor a little too close for my taste (don’t forget to hold on to that hand rail with all your might!) and the visual impact not more than a colourful blurs; it all adds up to being totally emerged in the chicken bus experience. If you haven’t ridden a chicken bus, you haven’t lived Guatemala…
The very best are of course the busses’ make-over, both inside and out. The more work, the better, although it’s all for looks and little is done to make things more comfortable for the passengers. The springs are poking through the seats? Can wait. The whole bench is bend so you keep gliding off? Not the driver’s problem. A new dashboard sticker on the market? YES!!!
Many busses have girls’ names. It’s not always clear what the driver’s relation is to the person the bus is named after. A bus on route to my neighbourhood is called Angela, featuring the name in big read letters over the windshield. Underneath it says: Explosión de Amor. Let’s assume Angela is the legal wife or girlfriend in this case, not the driver’s little girl.
It is also very important to ask for God’s blessing in loudly coloured stickers and to decorate the area around the driver with significant cultural icons, mostly Playboy’s bunny, the silhouette of a topless girl and Jesus Christ. Stickers are printed to fit the surface, not to respect the original image, hence the sometimes weirdly warped eyes of Our Lord staring at you.
Many busses now have TV screens up front with a typical mix of music videos (with girls as barely dressed as the chrome ones that decorate the bus) or extremely violent movies. The music is ear-splitting and can somehow always be turned up a notch. Nobody is ever bothered by the distorted sound, not even babies that tend to do the whole chicken bus experience while sleeping anyway.
I think my very favourite chicken busses are the ones from the town I used to live to the terminal in Antigua. The whole route takes no longer than five minutes. The busses are never full (except at the end of a school day) and it beats me how eight different busses can make a living of this route, charging people Q1.50 ($0.20). Students only pay Q1, after a short but fierce war when the fare went up from Q1 to Q1.50. Not that expensive, but a 50% increase nonetheless and it adds up when you have several kids taking the bus to school every day. In the end the war came to a peaceful end when the compromise was made to keep the rate for students at Q1.
The busses from San Bartolo to the terminal and back are not the most beautiful ones, but they are the dearest to me, I guess because they are so much part of the community. No bus would ever leave when someone started running a whole block away (well, what Guatemalans call “running” anyway), holding up the bus for a couple of minutes. Every person getting on gets a heartfelt Buenos días from the driver and the rest of the passengers. And best of all, when the buss arrives at its destination, a whole five minutes later, the drivers says: Servidos! And then you get up, pay the driver and get off with well wishes to and fro.
And after a day in town the bus is waiting for you at its regular spot. Always and every day.
