Where do buses go when they die?
Now I´m in Quetzaltenango also called Xela ("Shay la"). It was a crazy day of chicken buses to get here. The public buses here are old school buses from the US and Canada. Some of them are painted other colours but they´re usually bright yellow. They´re called chicken buses because people bring livestock on them (although I have yet to see this. Once I did store my bag in the back of a collectivo with a goat).
The whole experience is totally surreal. I got on a bus today and all of the seats had 3 people on them. So I stood. Then this woman motioned to a 3x3 inch section on the seat beside her. I sat there and put her daughter on my lap, so there were 4 of us on the one seat, originally sized for school children. I had only 1 cheek on the seat, which wouldn´t have been awful except we were rounding crazy curves. I worked out a system where I was bracing myself with the seat across the aisle.
The (school bus) seats are packed and people are standing in the aisles, and there is the guy who collects the money walking from one end of the bus to the other.
The back emergency exit is used as a door. We were barrelling down the highway and someone was walking along the open windows outside of the bus (you could only see his feet). There was a hardcore gringo couple. The husband was putting there stuff personally on the roof and the bus was moving and the wife was screaming at the bus driver in spanish that her husband was on the roof. Then he pops in from the back emerg exit and all is well. And there´s a sound system hooked up with speakers in the back.
Now I´m in Quetzaltenango also called Xela ("Shay la"). It was a crazy day of chicken buses to get here. The public buses here are old school buses from the US and Canada. Some of them are painted other colours but they´re usually bright yellow. They´re called chicken buses because people bring livestock on them (although I have yet to see this. Once I did store my bag in the back of a collectivo with a goat).
The whole experience is totally surreal. I got on a bus today and all of the seats had 3 people on them. So I stood. Then this woman motioned to a 3x3 inch section on the seat beside her. I sat there and put her daughter on my lap, so there were 4 of us on the one seat, originally sized for school children. I had only 1 cheek on the seat, which wouldn´t have been awful except we were rounding crazy curves. I worked out a system where I was bracing myself with the seat across the aisle.
The (school bus) seats are packed and people are standing in the aisles, and there is the guy who collects the money walking from one end of the bus to the other.
The back emergency exit is used as a door. We were barrelling down the highway and someone was walking along the open windows outside of the bus (you could only see his feet). There was a hardcore gringo couple. The husband was putting there stuff personally on the roof and the bus was moving and the wife was screaming at the bus driver in spanish that her husband was on the roof. Then he pops in from the back emerg exit and all is well. And there´s a sound system hooked up with speakers in the back.
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