Advertisement
Published: April 14th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Tim Version:
* I lived on a bus, well, 4 buses, for 77 hours as we got bogged, broken down, and shook all around.
The long winded but will never feel as long as this bus ride version:
77 hours. It was meant to be 60. Flights out of Santarem are hellishly expensive, double the price of those from Manaus or Belem, but to get to either of those places I needed to travel by boat either 2 or 3 days and then pay more than my bus fare, so bus it was!
I'd been warned by both Lonely Planet, my host in Belem, and the NGO running guy in Maguery that the first part of it is a hellof a trip with unmade dirt roads and they weren't wrong! The first thing you notice getting on the bus in Santarem is the strong winch at the front of the bus, the 4wd tires, the much more basic interior and that the thing has some pretty good clearance underneath.
For maybe 2 hours out of Santarem it was smooth sailing - clean good enough roads, not much traffic, and the sun was shining. After that though
the road turned to dirt and the fun began. Really, it was actually fun at first! 4wd in a large bus full of people much more so than the 4wd bus that took me to Jericooacoara. The rain kicked in and the road started turning slushier and slushier. This was to be the first 2 days, 48 hours, solid. 4wd is a hell of a lot of fun, pushing your way through precarious situations involving mud pools that you have no idea of the depth of, sliding on a 45 degree angle due to the wheel spin, having to get pulled out when you're bogged, but when its a large bus full on people sliding on a 45 degree angle at reasonable speed on a slippery mud track with the engine revving up its quite a different experience! Mix that with it being midnight and no visibility and I had some serious respect for the drivers by the end of this part of the voyage. A few times we got totally stuck and either had to be pulled out by other trucks or by using the winch, including one situation where we got stuck in a very deep spot of
mud maybe 50cm high at about 2am and the drivers had to hop out in the crazy rain jumping into the mud to try and find a way out. The down side of all the excitement and why I can recall stories from all hours of the night is that it is impossible to sleep when the bus is contacntly bumping around so much that you fall off your seat, can't read even with the pages 5cm from your face in a big font, and there are people being sick because of the motion sickness. One such incident involved a kid seemingly from "The Exorcist" throwing up putrid smelling watery stuff that, due to the bumping, sliding and crazy angles that the bus was on, managed to slip and slide its way under everyone's seats and the smell around the air conditioning system in an incredibly short time. Too bad we were in the middle of nowhere and couldn't stop for 2 more hours... I did feel very sorry for the kid though!
As much as it was an incredible experience that I loved having, when we arrived at a breakfast stop and were informed we changing buses to
a beautiful new shiny looking bus with all the mod cons I was overwhelmingly happy! Sleep, finally I could sleep! I seem to have lost my ability to sleep on buses these days but at least I can get a little sleep on the comfy buses. I'm pretty sure I heard a happy *sigh* from a good half of the bus as we got on and settled into the much more comfortable bus for the cruiser better made-road travel into the stateof Matto Grosso (it is the Amazonia state part that is unmade). The roads were still rubbish but at least they were made which helped a bit. Unfortunately at around midnight we hit something that must have been a pretty gargantuan pothole as it made the whole bus jump and a hell of a noise, and then commotion broke out down the back. I still have no idea what happened but an old man came yelling and stumbling up the aisle and the bus stopped, he got out, and after 10 minutes he returned still looking shaken up we continued the journey. Perhaps the shock jolted himout of a deep sleep, or perhaps he was hit by falling luggage,
or who knows, but whatever it was we had one of the guyson the bus checking up on him every 15 minutes. By 1:30 we stopped at a bus terminal, just outside the main Cuiaba bus terminal, but the bus shut down... none had really done that so far, they kept the engine running. I was so chronically tired that I kept sleeping but half an hour later we were still there. I got off and found the driver was nowhere, anambulance had just left next door, and it seemed no-one knew what was going on. We were there until about 3:30 when the driver returned and we took off again, but slowly... turns out, the bus seems to have suffered as much as the old man from the jolt. We hobbled for a bit, stopped, the driver checked some stuff, we hobbled a little more then pulled into a roadhouse. The bus, she was dead. Doh. Being so tired my ability to speak Portuguese had all but evaporated so I just sat around in silence. At 8am we hobbled the bus to a Mercedez Benz dealership. By 9am we had a mechanic looking at it with the bus driver
telling me it would only take 15 minutes to fix - we had already however been waiting and going nowhere since the 1:30 stop as in the daylight I could now see the Terminal we first stopped at! By 10:30 it wasn't looking good, and by 11am we knew it wasn't as the driver sped off in another car. At 12 a replacement bus arrived, and we hopped in and drove off. I got to speak a bit of Portuguese to practise, and we got some free coffee and water at the Mercedez Dealership, but other than that it was a big waste of time. My batteries for my MP3 player and laptop were long gone too and I had no books to read left =(
After some more sleeping and window watching we arrived at a place about 5 hours from my destination for a 30 minute stop and bus change - again we were changing to another bus from another company employed to pick up our tired crew to try and finally get us to where we wanted to be. It was an awesome bus though and I was kinda sad we only had it now and
not for the rest of the trip! It even had powerpoints that I could use to charge up my gear. The next part was very uneventful, although the lady next to me loved asking me the same questions in rapid fire Portuguese over and over laughing with her friend that I couldn't understand (not in a cruel way but being so tired my sense of humour had dropped a little). Only 20 minutes out from Campo Grande, of which I was now counting the minutes to and was going to be 17 hours late into, we stopped again for dinner. This annoyed me but turned out to be a very good thing... upon arriving at the Campo Grande bus terminal after we found that the seedier than seedy description is totally correct - it is not a place you wanna be at night, and wandering around looking for food could have been a very silly dodgy thing to do, especially in a very tired state. My couchsurfing host was no longer able to host me I found after a quick call so I had to go hostel hunting. I read the lonely planet description, something like "Directly opposite the bus
terminal". I looked up and there it was, less than 50m away. Done, time to sleep! A cross between a hostel and a hotel it didn't look socially great at all but it had hot water, internet, breakfast included, and a bed for me. Good enough!
An incredible bus trip breaking my record for long bus journeys well and truly but not one I plan to relive again anytime soon! In a train yeh maybe but a bus no... that box is ticked. Now to go find me some animals in the Pantanal...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.102s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 10; qc: 25; dbt: 0.081s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb