Road Trippers

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As I type this next sentence, I´m most pleased by the fact that I'm not doing it from prison - my ass will never be the same again.

5000km round-trip on a bus - Buenos Aires to Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine (where ironically, for 4 days I was wishing I could take a bus instead of walking with 15kgs of dried pasta and oatmeal stuffed in my backpack) and back. Yep, travelling by bus is a very serious business in South America, as is all modes of road transport.

We´ve in all likelihood spent over a quarter of our whole trip tempting fate and deep vein thrombosis, ruminating over innumerable crust-free ham and cheese sandwiches, gazing out a 2-storey bus windscreen accessorised with miniature super-novas of bug intestine. And, despite regretting at the time that there wasn´t a more effective way of medicating myself to make the whole journey just go away, I´ve learnt a few things. And for the record, I already suspected there was no God...

Bus travel is relatively inexpensive, considering the vast, boring distances they´re prepared to drive you. The kicker is, it´s complicated to organise, the service and the quality of the bus has nothing to do with the actual price of the ticket, and they´re never on time. We arrived at our first destination on our way south (Bariloche: another blog for another time), and (as would soon become standard operating procedure) I was forced to sucker-punch a 90-year-old woman in the back of the head, so I could climb over her creatively gaffer-taped SONY boxes to reach K and my backpacks, all the while winding up to fend a juvenile theif before he could make off with a garbage bag full of my soiled clothes. He has no idea what a favour I did him.

All around lay the wreckage of a badly-packed luggage compartment. One particularly gruesome victim - every traveller´s nightmare - was a small green suitcase: zip busted open, what I surmised was shampoo oozing from a suppurating wound in the fabric caused by yet another SONY box (this one obviously filled with sterner stuff than the usual contents of cheap red wine, UHT milk and contraband smallgoods).

The Chilean owner was remarkably stoic: bottom lip quivering ever so slightly, baggage claim ticket held in an outstretched hand - if you´d swapped her ticket for a cigarette lighter and popper her in the front row of a Michael Bolton concert, she´d have gone completely unnoticed. Until of course, the baggage handler casually wiped a smear of shampoo from his palm and then, equally casually, pitched a further box (this one can only have contained bricks or lead-weights) from the door of the bus, scoring a direct hit on the already wounded suitcase. I frantically searched my bag for my Latin American phrasebook, feeling certain there must be a translation for 'at least it's not suffering anymore' or 'don't be sad, it´s gone to a better place' - but finding none, we said a quiet thank-you that it wasn´t our Pantene-stain on the tarmac, and made our way quickly out of the terminal.

And that´s the way it goes in South America. On a different trip, we passed a small town in Uruguay, and an even smaller funeral home. Judging from the battered, faded, 1980-something Tarago that served as the town´s hearse, it became clear to me that if life is cheap in this part of the world, then death must also still be relatively inexpensive. And judging from the proprietor leaning casually on the bonnet, bus- or body-driver, it´s equally okay to wipe your hands on your shirt front.

Not that this is the last long-haul bus we´ll be taking this trip (though I live in hope) - but it has been the one that robbed us of our innocence. We travelled 32 hours from Bariloche to Rio Gallegos, a town where the tourism office can only make one recommendation - 'Get the hell out, fast!'. Here´s the scary bit: Despite the nice little sticker on the inside of the bus saying 'our driver can only legally operate this bus for 5 hrs at a maximum', we had 2 drivers. The whole way. More or less non-stop. Which probably explains why we didn´t get any food, and had 'Ghost Rider' - the Nicholas Cage movie that makes you wish your head was a small, green, Chilean-owned suitcase on the bus to Bariloche - on repeat. In Spanish.

And to be fair, there was one stop:

We were in the middle of the Patagonian countryside. The novelty of pointing out of the window and excitedly declaring 'Llamas!' had worn off about 16 hours previous. Our bus, now three hours late (and consequently making us miss our connecting bus out of Rio Gallegos) pulls into the emergency stopping lane, and swings a sharp U-turn. Thankfully, like much of Argentina's infrastructure, the men responsible for the concrete crash-barrier separating our lane from the oncoming traffic had at this point lost interest in the whole thing and the wall now only stood 15 centimetres high - only enough to scrape the transmission of the Bus, not enough to strand us all miles from nowhere, only Llama-steak on the menu. Surely this doesn´t mean we´ve been going the wrong way for the past 40 minutes! We´re already late!!

It was okay - we did another U-turn two minutes later, then pulled over and stopped completely. We waited anxiously. If the Llama knew what 40-odd very hungry people, trapped on a bus for 26 hours were thinking, it would have been anxious also.

Turns out, the drivers were so tired they were virtually hallucinating, and had stopped to drink maté - the guarana-caffeine packed green-tea stuff they all slurp, all the time. I still reckon it´s got cocaine in it, and at the time, I hoped that it did. They drank maté, engine running, for an hour. Then, without announcement or apology, now four hours behind schedule, we set off again.

I pulled my eye mask firmly over my head, and slept fitfully, dreaming of the Uruguayan mortician and his Tarago, and wondering why, with a bus service like this, he doesn´t head south to make his fortune chasing tour buses around Patagonia?

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