First Impressions of Peru : The smuggle bus

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We left early on Saturday to catch the bus up to Cusco where we had a trek briefing at 7pm. We'd been promised a very nice looking bus which would take 6 hours to make the journey in complete comfort and through beautiful scenery...

After an hour we stopped at a place called Juliaca to find more passengers for the trip and ended up waiting there for an hour with passengers shouting at the driver that they wanted to leave and complaining that we were going to be late. Juliaca is described in our guide book as a 'seedy place full of contraband'. And it turned out to be true. Around 20 people got on at this stop and we soon had enough passengers for the driver to decide that we could leave. Little did we know at the time that these other passengers had each loaded several TVs and other electronical goods into the hold of the bus as well. From that part of the trip onwards, we would stop from time to time and another car would pull up in front of the bus, these people woiuld rush off with as many of the passengers' coats as they could find and transfer some of the TVs into the car and hide others in bushes by the side of the road. We would then get to a checkpoint, they would all get off and flash their paperwork to the officials and we would carry on happily down the road until we were out of view and could reload the TVs all over again.

The two of us and a Greek guy were the only gringos on the bus and seemed to be the only ones not involved in the smuggle. I even saw an old lady sat next to me take a black bag from a total stranger and wrap it up in a big rug and hide it in the overhead compartment. Anyway it was quite amazing to see so many people helping each other to smuggle things in the bus and even more amusing to see people carrying TVs in the jackets as if they were small children when it was so blindingly obvious that if they were children then they had no arms and a very square shaped body.

Oh, and when we asked what time we were meant to arrive we were told that we were on the cheapest company which is the slow one and not the one that the cheeky agent had shown us the details for. So suddenly the 6 hour journey turned into 10 hours but we still arrived in plenty of time for our trek briefing and a little more amused than after some of the other more boring bus journeys!

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