The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  AT THE COLOMBIAN BORDER I had my passport stamped below a wall of wanted posters of FARC commanders, walked across the San Miguel River into Ecuador, and ten minutes later was seated on a rundown bus bound for Quito, with blue-and-white bunting and dangling tassels over the windows. Over the next six hours two guys in the seat across the aisle sucked down a fifth of Suiza tequila, as Rambo, dubbed in Spanish, played on the TV in front of the bus, cranked out over speakers above my head. The bathroom was locked—only for the ladies, said the driver—and mortars flew and bodies exploded and Rambo kicked guys’ heads in. Chick flicks did not play on South American buses, ever, I would eventually learn. As the hours fell away, my body ached and my head pounded from the altitude and no coffee. I was hot, dirty, slimy, hungry, and lonely, and Quito, twenty-six hours after Bogotá, didn’t help. We crawled through raw ugliness, mile after mile of square concrete boxes piled on each other like a modern Anasazi city, amid choking traffic and acrid exhaust, a growing city stretching, cracking open like a stretching, peeling lobster.

  I didn’t linger. Quito’s terminal covered three stories, with eighty gates of buses pulling in and out every few minutes. Ticket agents sang their refrains.

  “Cuenca, Cuenca, Cuenca!”

  “Pedernales!”

  The smell of exhaust and gas filled the station, the sounds of clanking horns. In an hour I was on a bus with the Statue of Liberty painted on its side, barreling back into the mountains again, bound the long way to Guayaquil via the coast. The hours passed: the curves, the dips, the climbs, the sudden braking. The constant music and explosions from the television stupefied me and everyone else. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. No one read, and passengers barely spoke; on a bus your seat holds you prisoner. My seatmates were a string of Marias—people traveling unbelievably long rides for short visits with family or for work. Vendors swarmed on board at every stop, hawking grilled corn and hot sodas and Rubik’s Cubes. “Jugo! Cola! Esta bien!” A stream of salesmen got on, talked and talked, holding up bottles of little green pills or small pieces of candy. “My product is better!” they all said, walking down the aisle, now filled to standing room only, passing out samples, talking some more, then collecting a few coins or taking the samples back. The thought of selling penny candies or medicines on a moving bus was impossible to imagine; day after day after day, the same spiel, all for pennies.

  But I was starting to see something, to understand why there was always a bus to take you wherever you wanted to go, and why those buses were always plunging off cliffs. It wasn’t some inborn South American recklessness, some wild and literal leap of faith for people draped in crosses and bracelets of the saints. It was simple economics. American roads were paved and lined with signs and guardrails because America spent billions of dollars on its infrastructure, money collected in taxes. American buses had good tires and fresh brake pads because regulations required them to, and Americans paid commensurate fares. But, relatively speaking, none of my fellow passengers had any money; they couldn’t afford good roads, good tires, good brakes. If they’d had money, they would have flown. But there were a lot of them, and they were on the move. To make money from people who had none, buses went without maintenance and squeezed every person aboard they could. Drivers drove for hours on end; they fell asleep at the wheel, they drank, they hardly saw their families. The police weren’t paid much money, either; they took bribes from bus companies and drivers instead of forcing them off the road, or even prosecuting reckless drivers. Danger, more than anything else, kept fares low. A week later, five British women would be killed on this same route when a truck sideswiped their bus at dusk. The driver didn’t even shut off the engine; he just fled.

  There was no respite. PELIGRO! REDUSA SU VELOCIDAD AHORA! read yellow signs that the driver ignored, careening around corners with no guardrails on the edge of 200-foot drops, and mudslides tumbling into the road. Time was money and the amounts were so small here, so hard to come by, death was a risk worth taking.

  I had been gone a week, had been on buses for almost fifty consecutive hours, and as the bus descended from the mountains into the hot, humid coastal plains, a world of banana trees and cycads and thatch and sand roads, I felt like I was beginning to wake from a long sleep, the veil between me and the world beginning to fall away. These early buses between big cities were a practice run for later, and I suspected they were easy, a picnic before getting into more remote areas. But they were doing the trick—they were breaking me down, opening me up. I was starting to relax, to feel a rhythm, to surrender that illusion of control; the road was whatever came my way, and that was okay. No, it was more than okay; it was good.

  THE DEEPER I TRAVELED on these South American buses, the more in harmony I was starting to feel. And I was starting to trust the efficiency of this whole ad-hoc, unregulated system. In Canoa, a sleepy fishing village on the Pacific coast of Ecuador, I stood on a muddy street for only five minutes before a bus scooped me up, depositing me two hours later by a pier in the dusty town of San Vicente, all unpaved streets and unfinished concrete buildings. Twenty of us piled on a long wooden panga, paid thirty-five cents, and motored across the bay to Bahía de Caráquez, where I stepped into a waiting pedicab that dropped me five minutes later at a bus departing in minutes for Guayaquil. Though slow and statistically dangerous, travel at this level was as cheap and available as bread. Competition was so fierce, regulation so absent, there were always more buses than you needed, always pedicabs or taxis angling for another fare; you never had to wait, and you never had to worry about food or thirst because there was always a vendor selling something.

  From Guayaquil, I rode a single bus twenty-eight hours to Lima. Five hours to New York on the China bus had seemed long, twelve hours to Toronto forever. But twenty-eight hours straight was starting to seem as normal to me as it did to my fellow passengers. And I was hardly even noticing the bus’s condition: torn upholstery, bald tires, heat and humidity and crowds—that was all of a piece with the surrounding countryside. I was still reading Lawrence Osborne, who wanted to find “the end of the earth, a place of true adventure.” Here, on these buses, I was anywhere but at the end of the earth; I felt right smack in its crowded heart, surrounded by everyday people. I was traveling via a series of veins and arteries that didn’t show up on most of the developed world’s anatomy charts.

  We tore past flooded fields under a pewter sky, Brahmin cows with long horns and humps standing in water up to their chests, on roads of packed sand and ribbons of blacktop yawning with craters and dirt roads covered in shimmering puddles. In the station that morning I’d noticed a clearly middle-class family seeing its two daughters off; they’d hugged long and hard. Marina, a twenty-four-year-old “food engineer” whose favorite dish was spaghetti, clutched her cell phone while her twenty-one-year-old sister, Vivien, hugged a Latin American edition of Cosmo, and they sat across the aisle from me. Marina’s father was from Ecuador, and he owned a shoe factory in Guayaquil; her mother was half Chilean and half Peruvian. They’d had visa problems, and after living twelve years in Lima, her parents and younger siblings had relocated to Guayaquil while Marina and Viviene had stayed behind with their grandmother. They thought nothing of taking the bus twenty-eight hours between cities. “It’s cheap,” Marina said, “and I like to look at the world.” It was a world both big and tiny; my friends and most Americans I knew would be horrified at the idea of such a long bus ride between countries. Yet beyond this marathon slog over mountains and bad roads, she’d seen almost nothing. She’d never been to Cusco, Peru, or Quito, Ecuador, or anywhere else beyond the road we were now on. And to her I was a strange interloper in their little world, and she and her sister peppered me with questions. Was I married? Did I have children? Where was I going? What was America like?

  Which was even odder, because Hollywood’s version of America was right there in front of us for hours and hours and hours, on the bus’s TV screen. America was anything but an abstraction. It was lite
ral, vivid, reinforced every time a South American went to the movies or turned on the TV. It was a constant tease, this magical place where everyone was rich and beautiful (not to mention violent), and I tried to imagine what it would be like to watch a daily stream of Colombia—how powerful the idea of that place would become. We watched eight movies, including Armageddon and Resident Evil III, while inching through the crowded market town of Huaquillas (six-foot-tall plastic flowers; quail eggs, four for a dollar; stilettos and skinny jeans and a whole pig upside down on a hook), and rain in Chiclayo so driving it flooded the streets up to the curbs. In the morning we paused in the hot sun and washed our hair in a concrete trough by the side of the road. “Only seven more hours to Lima!” roared one of the drivers, shaking the water out of his hair like a dog after a bath, before lathering up his armpits. Known as conductores in Spanish, the drivers had gold teeth and faded, mystical tattoos on their shoulders. They traded the wheel every five hours and slipped the bus through its seven forward gears like it was all they ever did. Which was true: they drove twenty-eight hours to Guayaquil, spent the night, then returned to Lima before going on to Puno, Bolivia another twenty hours south, before turning around and doing it all over again.

  “Lots of accidents,” they said, laughing. “Do you have a driver’s license? You want to drive?”

  We passed through broken-down towns of tiny, garage-sized brick houses and sun and wind and Internet cafés, a weird world that had so many layers of culture it sometimes felt, in a way, nowhere at all. When she picked up a cell tower, Marina chatted on her cell phone; the Bee Gees crooned on videos between flicks; sheep and donkeys wandered in the dusty road.

  In Lima, I made my break. I needed to go deeper; I’d been on too many highways, too many long rides between big cities. These buses were beginning to feel too civilized. East of Lima rose the Andes again, and deep within them lay Ayacucho. It was there, in one of the poorest areas of Peru, that a sociology professor named Abamael Guzman had started the Maoist Shining Path movement in 1980, which had risen to become one of the most violent and ruthless guerrilla armies in South America. I’d always been fascinated by the brutality and longevity of the Shining Path, and I’d long wondered how guerrilla movements were so hard to stamp out even when, in Peru’s case, soldiers and militias and right-wing death squads had been everywhere. I wanted to get to Cusco; via Ayacucho it would take thirty-six hours to cover the 450 miles.

  Back in Washington it was spring break, and I invited my seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily, to come along with me. She’d be going to college next year, and I wanted her to get some sense of what my life was like. And after days and days on beat-up buses, I no longer had any concern about anything happening during our five days together. I picked her up after midnight and dragged her to the bus first thing the next morning. As we boarded, a little man videotaped us, marching up and down the aisle shooting each passenger. “What’s up?” I said.

  “In case someone steals something or there’s an accident,” he said.

  “So there are a lot of accidents?”

  “Oh no!”

  “A lot of thefts?”

  “No!”

  “Anyone killed lately?”

  “Oh no!” he said.

  Ayacucho was only a few hundred miles as the crow flies from Lima, but it took ten hours to get there on a freshly paved road. The mountains were steep, high, relentless, and I realized I had miscalculated. I was used to the endless hours squished on buses, used to the twists and turns on the road and uncertainty of the whole enterprise—I had done it for years. But Lily had been chatting with her high-school friends one day and was being crammed on a bus through the mountains of Peru the next, with no transition. She was dizzy, exhausted after the long day, and her Spanish was good so the political graffiti shouting “Assassins” unnerved her. Cusco was another twenty-four hours away, and there were only two choices: a bus at 6:30 a.m. or a bus at 6:30 p.m. “But don’t take the night bus,” the hotel clerk warned. “It’s dangerous.”

  So on the bus we were again, at six thirty the next morning. And immediately it was clear why it took twenty-four hours, why the night bus was dangerous, and why it can be so hard to dislodge festering guerrilla movements in the mountains and jungles of South America.

  There was no road. Or what was called the road was a one-lane dirt track that rose and fell thousands of feet in altitude, full of switchbacks and cliffs and eroded sections that dropped straight down steep mountainsides. Looking out of the windows, it felt like flying, albeit in slow motion through turbulent skies. Mountain ridge after ridge, valley after valley—traveling ten miles took hours, through villages of adobe mud and thatch, atop high, treeless mountain plains where there was nothing but sheep and alpaca and round, waist-high thatch shepherd’s huts. We passed a truck with no windshield, its front crumpled from a recent crash; we jerked to a halt on a hairpin turn inches from crashing into a truck filled with watermelons. We plunged into river valleys that were hot and humid before climbing back up above the trees, all at the speed of a walk. This was the highway; anyplace off the road, and there was only one way to get there—walking in brutally steep country. Every six hours or so we’d stop and we men would pile out—sixteen of us pissing on the side of the road. The women didn’t budge.

  At a small village we paused for a quick break and I snapped a photo of the rugged landscape. “Are there no rocks in the U.S., gringo?” said a woman. Lily was quiet. I ate whenever I was hungry, as vendors piled in with hot, waxy corn with kernels the size of quarters, and chunks of fried bread filled with warm cheese, but Lily wanted nothing. I worried about her, but it was nice to have her along, not to be alone.

  At dusk we pulled into Andahuaylas to change buses. The station was wild, dirty, almost medieval, full of feral, begging dogs and piles of dirt and women in bowler hats and twin braids. Carleton, a mid-fifties Indian-Canadian and the only tourist I’d seen in days, was freaked out. “I promised myself I wouldn’t take any night buses,” he said, “but the rest of the journey is at night. I’m really scared! I had to turn my eyes away a few times on those cliffs.”

  I didn’t feel any danger. I’d taken so many overloaded helicopters and airplanes in the past few years, I’d learned to resign myself to fate, or fate mixed with preparation; you controlled what you could (hence my excellent first-aid kit), kept your eyes open and your wits about you, but then you just rolled with things. Carleton couldn’t eat; I wolfed down a quick meal of rich, gamey chicken soup ladled from a pot big enough to throw a couple of toddlers inside, sitting on a on wooden bench the width of a single two-by-four under a ragged blue tarp. Lily didn’t want any, but the chef could spot a hungry, nervous girl and brought her a bowl, insisting that she eat, which she did under the pressure of a mother, even if it wasn’t her own. Then, as church bells pealed, we piled on an even older bus. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get sick?” said Carleton, shaking his head. “I’m starving, but there’s no way I’m going to risk eating that!”

  I looked at Lily and we laughed. “See how brave you are!” I said, secretly praying she wouldn’t get sick. As soon as the sun went down, roaches swarmed out of the curtains; they fell into Lily’s lap, crawled into my coat, scurried under our feet. It was black outside, the bouncing headlights illuminating dirt road and sheer drop-offs. Lily was scared; I felt bad for her and proud of her. I hoped she’d love the journey, but even if she didn’t, at least I knew she’d remember it and feel, perhaps only later, strengthened by it. That she’d learn that the world was big, rich, complex, sometimes dangerous, always interesting. That you could hide from it or explore it and embrace it in all its complexities.

  The bus stopped every few miles, quickly filling to standing room with people who were so brown and withered they looked like canned mushrooms. Soon a dog joined us, and then an old man dressed in a black suit and so small and frail he looked like a marionette puppet.

  All this time on buses was odd time—time in sort of a sus
pended state. With no light, we couldn’t read. We were in the heart of things, but removed, too; I wanted to climb out of the bus and be in places and not just passing through. And it was physically painful—the seats were close together, there was no legroom, and the bus was so crowded we couldn’t stand to stretch our legs. At some points I got Zen-like, just succumbing to the pain in my knees and my aching neck. It was out of my control, and I rose out of that suffering into a state of grace, totally surrendering, my mind dancing to distant places. It was easy for me to do, but harder for Lily; she sank into lethargy, though she never once broke down. She smiled, kept her cool, learned to trust her instincts and to open herself to experiences beyond her usual boundaries. She was being transformed only by learning the strengths she already had, who she already was: someone capable and confident, and sometimes scared and happy, even at the edges of the world. I’d fall asleep and wake up confused, shocked to find myself on a bus in South America with my daughter.

  When we got to Cusco we spent two days wandering, eating on balconies in the sun, forgetting, in a way, the journey I was on. So quickly she had to go, and I took her to the airport and she disappeared through security and I sat waiting for her plane to take off and cried. Five days hadn’t been enough time. I couldn’t tell if she’d enjoyed the trip or not, couldn’t tell if she’d gotten to know me more or had liked what she’d seen. And it was easier for me to feel content the more distant my home and family became; having Lily with me and then not left me feeling empty, deeply conscious of what I’d left behind. I missed her and felt guilty for not being more normal, for pursuing a life that took me so far away, for needing to experience the intensity of loneliness and danger and discomfort.