The Bus Trip From Hell

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The Bus Trip from Hell (Liam to Quito) Prior to me leaving Australia I had booked a Tour of Ecuador with a company called Gap Tours. The tour was scheduled to start 28th of January and finishing in16 days on the 14th of February. Even though the first country I landed in was Chile I didn’t plan on exploring it much because I knew that I could do that on the way back down from Ecuador to Brazil. However since I was in the country I decided to travel around a bit and see what I could. This is dangerous because one day quickly turns into 3 or 5 and then a week has passes by without you even blinking an eye. I was having a lot of fun traveling up the coast of Chile checking out all the different beaches and other sites. I also had met Sarah my first traveling partner she was from Switzerland and proved to be a useful friend because she spoke very good Spanish and had already been in South America for three months so could tell me some good places to explore. She had learnt her Spanish in Cuenca. Sarah was a very happy person who had a good sense of adventure. She was short brown hair always smile and loved pancakes. This is something we has to always look for on the desert menu of a restaurant, if the menu had pancakes then that was usually the deciding factor for where we would have dinner. Doing a short Spanish course is something I will look into as I am travelling around somewhere.

I was having a lot of fun traveling around Chile about a week before my tour of Ecuador was scheduled to start I rang the company to see if it was possible for me to delay my tour and start on a later date. However this was not possible. At that stage I wasn’t too worried as I had a week to get there and I had booked flights from Santiago to Liam and Liam to Quito as part of my around the world ticket and the tour wasn’t scheduled to start for another week. So a day later Sarah and I caught a bus down from Le Serrina to Santiago. At the bus station in Santiago a funny incident happened. Sarah and I decided to get some food at the bus station once we arrived in Santiago while Sarah waited for her connecting bus to Argentina. I went to get some fried chicken at one of the fast food joints; at this stage my Spanish was still very bad. Sarah had taught me the word of Chicken (Pollo). The lady behind the counter was in her early twenties and reasonable good looking. So I went up and asked for some chicken. She then asked me a question in Spanish which I didn’t understand at all so I gave her a completely blank look. She then asked it again this time as she was saying it she ran her hands along her breast and then pointed to her leg. All the other girls in shop just laughed. Of course she was asking me if I would like a breast or a leg I naturally replied like any other red hot blooded male I would by pointing to her breast. Sign language is a very effective form of communication. Here Sarah and I said our goodbyes she caught a bus to Argentina and I went to my hostel. I did manage to see Sarah again some 9 months later in her home country of Switzerland.

My hostel was called Casa De Rojo (Red house) this hostel was owned by an Australian and has cricket nets and swimming pool out the back of it. The following morning I caught a bus into town to book the dates of my flights from Santiago to Liam and Liam to Peru. With around the world tickets you can always get a flight however you may not be able to get the date you want as there is only a few seats on each flight that are reserved for those types of tickets. I arrived at the LAN Air office and went inside to book my flights. I always have to ask for an English speaking person because changing flights can be quite difficult at times. The First flight from Santiago to Liam was no problems as there was one leaving the following day. However the second flight from Liam to Quito is where my problems started. All the flights for the next week were fully booked and I was unable to get a seat. This meant once I got to Liam I would have to catch a bus to Quito.

I though nothing of that at first for the bus trip only takes about 36 hours and I still had five days to get there. The next day I caught my flight to Liam. After I had checked into my hostel I caught a bus into town to book a bus ticket from Liam to Quito. In Liam there isn’t just one station where all the bus leave from, each bus company has its own little depot. I managed to book a ticket for the next day so that I would arrive two days before my tour started in Quito. The following morning I arrived at the bus station to catch my bus at 9:30am. When I got there they told me that the bus was delayed to 2:00pm as it was getting fixed. So I caught a taxi back to my hostel to kill some time. From the hostel I went down to the beach with some friends. The sand was very black and the water looked very uninviting. We sat on the beach till about 12:30. I then caught taxi back to the station only to be told that the bus was delayed again till 5pm because the bus driver was sleeping. You can only imagine how annoyed I was to hear this but I had little choice as I had to get to Quito and had no other choice but to wait. So I went and got something to eat and had a very uncomfortable sleep at the station on a couple of chairs for a few of hours. The bus finally left Liam at 5pm some 8 hours later than it planned departure of 9:30am. I should have known that this wasn’t going to be a good trip from the first time I was told the bus was being delayed. After driving for about six hours it had become dark so I started to fall asleep then there was a loud thud underneath the bus. The thud was loud enough to wake me up. The bus had broken down again!!!!, we were in the middle of nowhere. We had to wait six hours for the mechanics to come a fix the bus. I was so tired by this stage that I just fell asleep. Too make matters worse the bus was totally full not spare seat in site. It is not a pleasant sight to wake up and see mechanics walking up and down the bus carrying pieces of the buses engine in their arms. They finally got the bus fixed and we were off and running.

The movies on the bus were way too loud and everyone had to listen to the movie since they did not have individual ear phones for everyone. They also had very poor selection and of course they were all dubbed into Spanish so I couldn’t understand a single word. The music they played in between the movies was pathetic and very loud so as a result I had very little sleep on the bus. We finally got to the boarder between Peru and Ecuador. This is the only boarder that I know of in the world that has an electronic stamp and not a manual one for your passports. We got to the boarder at about 1:30am it was very cold and windy and just starting to rain slightly. We all lined up to get our passports stamped and just as I was about to get my passport stamped the computer systems went down. Now I naturally thought they would just pull out the manual stamp and we would be on our merry way. But with the way this bus trip was going that didn’t happen. They told us that it would take about 3 hours for the system to come back up. Now what were we supposed to do for the next three hours we were in very small boarder town and we couldn’t leave the line because we would lose our spot. The boarder guards kept on coming out every half an hour to tease us to see if the computers were working but or course they weren’t. With in two hours the line behind me had become very long as a number of buses had pulled up at the boarder by this time. But there was nothing we could do but wait for the computers to start working gain. The system finally started to work at about 3:30am. That fortunately was the last mishap of the trip. We finally made it into Quito about 24 hours later than I intended to get there. I still had one day and a night to spare before my tour started. I found my hostel and just crashed out in seconds

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