Adventures in Public Transportation

he main streets in the large cities like Lima or Quito are crowded, noisy, and overwhelming. There is only one rule for pedestrians: There are no rules.

Drivers zip around corners giving a short honk on their horn just before entering the intersection. Anything that weighs more has right-of-way over anything that weighs less. Public buses slow down, not even to a full stop, as passengers hop off or on. In Quito taxis stop at red lights only during daylight hours. I'm not sure why they even leave the traffic lights on during the night.

If taxi drivers were animals, they would be eagles, circling around the landscape, capable of spotting a lone mouse from a mile away. I made it a game - a challenge - to see how small a gesture it would take to stop a bus or taxi. I found that I could loop my thumb through my daypack strap, stand on the side of the street at any place (there are generally no bus stops), and do nothing more than wave my fingers, keeping my thumb looped through my backpack strap. That would be enough to cause the next taxi or bus to screech to a halt at my feet. I confirmed that even eye contact and the faintest nod was enough to stop a 5-ton bus.

Nine times out of ten, the taxi driver would state a price (usually negotiable) before the trip. Sometimes a taxi driver would want to charge by the meter, but if the driver insisted, I would thank the driver and say that I would take another taxi. I didn't trust meters. In a few places taxi prices were very standardized. In Cusco, Perú, for example, taxis cost 2 soles (about 57 cents US) to go from just about anywhere to just about anywhere. After 10:00 p.m. the price went up to 3 soles (about 84 cents US).

During my first days in Quito, many taxi drivers would want to charge me gringo prices which were two or three times as high as they normally charge local customers. I considered it a personal triumph that at the end of my trip I could flag a taxi with a nod, hop in and state my destination in Español, and the driver would offer the same reasonable, low fare that the local residents pay.

In Quito, there were two classes of public buses: the blue Servicio Popular and the red Especial. Blue costs only about 15 cents, but you weren't assured of a seat and might have to stand. The red ones cost 40 cents but generally only let on passengers when seats were available. Nearly every bus driver (chófers) had an assistant who collected fares, gave change, and sometimes hung out the door calling to people on the street to please hop on and use their easy comfortable service, or sometimes just whistled at pretty girls. Most assistants were young boys between 8 and 15 years old. Occasionally a young person would hop onto a bus at some random place and try to sell bread, cookies, candies, or fruit to anyone who would listen, then he or she would hop off at some equally random location. I don't think I ever saw one of those vendors pay for making their sales pitch. Sometimes a bus ride was worth 40 cents just for the amusement.

The 2-cent Terminal Permit

paid $10 for a bus ticket to travel by "luxury bus" from Loja in southern Ecuador to Piura in northern Perú, a 9-hour bus ride. In Ecuadorian terms, a ticket bought in advance for a "luxury" bus meant you got an assigned seat, a receipt for any checked luggage (which might be tossed on top of the bus if there wasn't room in the luggage compartments), and an on-board toilet, but no guarantee that it functioned. Luxury didn't necessarily imply comfortable seats, and didn't guarantee that there wouldn't be people standing in the aisles carrying chickens, baskets of fruit, or bags of grain.

With my $10 bus ticket in hand and luggage slung over my shoulder, I started to go to the area to board my bus to Perú. "I'm sorry, sir, but you must have a Terminal Permit to pass into that area," said a clerk in Spanish, watching the turnstiles.

"What is a Terminal Permit?" I asked.

"It's a separate ticket that you have to buy at that window over there," the young clerk pointed. He continued to explain in Spanish, "it's a kind of tax that the bus terminal charges to make a profit. Buy your Terminal Ticket and then you can go board the bus."

What? Another line to stand in just to buy a ticket to fund the bus terminal? Why didn't the bus companies incorporate that tax into the price of the tickets? Well, I guess I didn't have any choice.

When I worked my way up to the permit window, I found a older clerk with a tired expressionless look. "How much?" I asked.

"Two cents," she answered.

I thought I misunderstood. I asked again to clarify. "How much for a Terminal Permit?"

"Two cents," she answered distinctly and slightly impatiently. I dug in my pocket and slipped two pennies to the clerk. She dropped the coins in a drawer and handed me a little yellow piece of paper. I wondered how two cents per person could pay as much as the labor it required to collect the fee.

Back at the turnstiles at the bus boarding area, I handed my two-cent Terminal Permit to the clerk and remarked, "Que extraño... ¿solamente dos centavos?" (How strange, just two cents?).

"Sí, es extraño," he smirked, and let me through so that I could board my bus.

The Van Without a Door

t was time to leave the resort-like town of Vilcabamba and go to Loja, Ecuador where I'd catch a bus to Perú. The transportation system for the one-hour ride between Vilcabamba and Loja was very informal. There was a continuous stream of riders between the two towns. At one end of Vilcabamba, taxis and mini-vans dropped off passengers from Loja, then waited for a full load to take back to Loja. The standard fare was one dollar per person, and a taxi or mini-van would typically wait until it collected a full load of passengers before leaving. For a little taxi, that meant five passengers plus the driver. For a little mini-van, that meant however many people they could cram into the vehicle.

I just missed a taxi, and the only other vehicle available was a mini-van. It was rapidly filling up, so I paid my one dollar and tossed my duffel bag onto the precariously loaded roof. As I took a seat inside the van, I noticed that the big door on the right side of the van was missing. Just gone, as if the whole side of the van was missing.

At first I got a seat near the missing door of the van. The van was build for about 12 passengers, but as we started heading out of town, picking up a few locals here and there on the way out of town, we soon had a very crowded van. My seat, comfortable at first, became a bit squeezed. As we started up the narrow road hugging the side of a steep mountain, I could only see open sky out the side of the van.

At one stop more people boarded with crates of fruits and vegetables and I would have had to hang on to anything I could find to keep from falling out the side of the van. The locals took pity on me, smiled at me, and told me to take a seat closer to the middle of the van where it was safer. The locals who knew this van and knew the road took the seats next to the gaping hole in the side of the van. They didn't mind holding on and they wanted this gringo tourist to feel comfortable.

From the middle of the van packed with more than 20 people, I could still see the wide open sky and deep valleys on the right side of the bus. To my left I was squeezed against a local mother breastfeeding her infant child. On my right I was squeezed against a local boy carrying a box of fruit that seemed half as big as he was.

At midpoint between Vilcabamba and Loja the van slowed to a stop at a police checkpoint. A well-fed policeman waddled over to the van and spoke to the driver. The driver shut off the van, got out, and walked with the policeman to a little shack beside the road. An English-speaking passenger in the front of the bus spoke with another passenger and exchanged a conversation that I could barely understand. The second hand story, according to the English-speaking passenger, is that this was a game that the police played with this bus driver. The police said it was illegal to drive the van without a door. The driver couldn't afford to install a new door, and for whatever reasons, he had come to like the van without a door. Perhaps it was more convenient to load and unload passenger who were squeezed into the van like sardines in a can. So, apparently the driver and the police had a deal where he was allowed to pass after contributing a share of the bus profits to the policeman.

The Old Woman

n Loja, I checked my duffel bag, boarded the bus, and settled into my assigned seat for a 9-hour bus ride that would end in a different country. The bus wasn't full, but I knew from experience that the bus driver would probably pick up additional passengers along the way even after there was standing room only.

One of the last passengers to board was an old woman who hopped on without a ticket. There was an assistant on the bus who collected cash fares from anyone without a ticket. He asked the old woman where she wanted to go. Despite her deeply creased aged face, she was full of nervous energy and her rapid Spanish was much too fast for me to follow. With eyes continually darting back and forth, simultaneously hesitant and nervous, she said something about her son and about meeting him in either Loja or Vilcabamba. We were already in Loja, and Vilcabamba was an hour away, in the opposite direction from where we were headed.

The bus driver and his assistant spent some time trying to explain to the woman that if she wanted to be in Loja, she was already there. "This is Loja," they explained. They tried to explain that this bus would go all the way to Perú, and she should get off here. The old woman kept repeating her nervous plea about her son, about Loja, and about Vilcabamba.

I asked the passenger in the seat next to me what was going on, where did the woman want to go? He shrugged his shoulders and said that he couldn't tell either. The poor old lady was obviously confused. And the driver was too impatient to deal with her, so he drove off with the woman still aboard.

Several times leaving the Loja area, the bus stopped to take on additional passengers. As the bus filled, the driver, his assistants, and sometimes other passengers would try to convince the old woman to get off the bus so that she could still get back to Loja or Vilcambamba. They would point to other buses headed the opposite direction and say, "See, there is the bus that will take you where you want to go. Hurry, go get on that that bus before it leaves!" At some stops, the woman got as far as the door of the bus, but her nervousness turned into fear at the thought of getting off the bus. She knew she needed to be somewhere. She was afraid to leave the bus that she was on, yet afraid to continue.

At one stop two assistants tried gently to physically force the old woman off the bus. One young man took one of her arms and the other assistant tried to pry the woman's grip from a vertical pole by the bus door. The woman was frozen with fear and could neither leave nor stay. The young men didn't want to hurt an elderly woman, so they gave up, exasperated, got back on the bus, closed the door, and took off again with the old woman still on board.

Many hours later we arrived at the Ecuador-Perú boarder. It was no more than a wide spot in the narrow mountain road with a few office buildings for the Ecuadorian and Peruvian border guards, customs officials, and police. While a few passengers stayed on the bus (I don't know how they were allowed to) the rest of the passengers had to get off to get permits to leave Ecuador and permits to enter Perú. Somehow the driver got the old woman to get off the bus with the rest of the passengers. After we all were back on board, the bus left, but the old woman wasn't on board. I hope that officials from one or the other side of the border saw to it that the woman got transported to wherever it was that she so desperately needed to go.