I think I’ve watched the bootlegged Will Smith Collection DVD at least four times now on the double-decker headed east out of Asuncion. I can tell you just about anything that’s going on or about to happen in I am Legend, Hitch, I Robot, The Pursuit of Happyness or Enemy the State – even though they’re all in spanish. As sick of the fresh prince as I am, it still beats the Sylvester Stallone collection.

I’m lucky though, my outbound trip from Asuncion is an air-conditioned-double-decked-bootlegged-dvd-showing 4 and half hours of the most comfortable travel in the country. I love my Crucero del Este – even if I have to ride with Will. The rest of the rides certainly aren’t as comfy, but definitely more interesting. A taste of the forgotten art of long distance group ground transportation.

There are 3 main classes or categories of buses shooting around this country. The long haul, the inner-city and the campo lines. First up, the long-haul. These are found on the main rutas (highways) and while there are a few double-deckers roaming around out there, the majority are your run-of-the-mill Greyhound style cruisers spiffed up as well as can be on the outside in what must be an attempt to fool unsuspecting and overly trusting Americans like myself. What ever effort was put into shinning the logos on the outside was clearly at the expense of the interior improvements. If you’re lucky there’s AC with strategically place condensation drips over the seat of those same foolish north americans. If not, it’s windows open. Freezing in the winter and nice hot blasts of asphalt heated air in the summer. This is rarely noticed though, as most time with the windows are open is spent trying to get the wind-filled spinnaker of curtain to keep from fluttering in your face and knocking your headphones from you ears. Getting on a passing bus is no problem, just stand on the ruta and stick your hand out. Getting off is just as simple – just let the chauffer (the driver’s sidekick) know where and they’ll pull on over. Easy as pie. The result being the bus stops about every 150 feet. I’ve averaged the speed on trips into the city at 48 km/hr. Pretty sure I souped up a golf cart with those kinda numbers once.  If you’re lucky you can find your way into a window seat. Usually I’m an aisle guy, but that’s when the aisles are used for walking – not as passenger space. When the seats run out and all the kids and baby’s are stacked high on their mom’s laps and whole extended families are sharing a two seat space, the aisle starts to fill. It fills and fills ‘til you think no one can pass and then it fills some more. I was once on a full bus, with people standing in the aisles and all, when we stopped to pick up folks in a broken down bus. Somehow, we fit them all in and continued the journey without breaking the axle. There must have been 115 people in a 55 seat bus. Luckily I had the window that night – even if I was getting rained on.

Personal space is a myth on this continent – and pretty much everywhere else outside the western world. It’s a good thing, cause otherwise bus travel would be impossible. I once rode with a strangers kid on my lap and have lost count of the number of butts, bosoms, crotches, chipa baskets and anything else on that level that have hit me in the face or how many hands have used my head to support a lumbering walk down the aisle. Someone standing in the aisle once had each of their hands placed on either side of my headrest – one to the left of my ear, the other to the right. I’m not sure how this is possible – or remotely comfortable. In fact, I think body contortion may have been involved. Aside from the tactile experience of being a passenger there’s also the smells and sounds. Chemical weapons grade bad perfume applied with a Monsanto spray rig being my favorite. And if you’re real lucky, 12 different people on 4 different sides of you will all be playing music out of their cell phone’s speakerphone – unless of course a Jean-Claude van Dame trilogy is being played out of a tube television stuffed inside a box with old seat cushions and wired to the ceiling – in which case you’ll be listening to that.

But all that said, as a friend reminded me one day, they show up on time and they get you to where you’re going – a lot of the rest of the world doesn’t have that luxury.

Next up is the campo bus. These depart from the intermediate-sized cities and pueblos along the ruta and head out the unpaved road to where a lot of us PCV’s live – if we happen to have a bus that comes out our way. Remember all those buses you see in the movies rumbling through the African bush or the Indian countryside or the Colombian highlands – that’s what we’re working with, only without the stuff strapped to the top. It’s all inside. Any and all of your personal cargo is put on where ever it will fit – in the aisle, on the seats, on your lap, on the dash, hanging from the hand grips. Then of course there’s all the stuff that needs to go out to any of the businesses in the campo – mainly dispensas (corner stores, that are rarely on a corner or classifiable as stores. Basically just goods sold out of every other neighbors house). Crates of beer, whiskey, soda; corregated roofing material; brooms and bales of textiles; groceries and boxes of veggies; chickens, dead and alive; tractor tires and mechanical spare parts; motorcycles; banshee children; and the occasional stack of lumber. The seats are city bus-style standard coated fiberglass. The windows are cracked, but amazingly intact for the amount of vibration that’s on par with a Huey that’s had it’s tail rotor shot off. The shocks were changed when Strossener was in power and I’m not sure how the transmission is still intact since it feels and sounds like they’re forgoing using the clutch each time we build up any “speed”. I use the word lightly – a 22 km journey can take north of 90 minutes sometimes. But, they come on time and they get you to where you’re going. Most likely though, you and everything you own – including the inside of your respiratory system – will be caked with red dirt that flies in as dust through the open windows or the cracks in the floorboards. Unless of course it’s raining – in which case the bus won’t be coming.

Last but not least the city lines. These babies plow through the Asuncion traffic like icebreakers used to through the arctic until all the diesel fumes they put out melted Greenland. There’s a reason every South American metropolis has  the air quality rating of West Virginia coal factory – it’s the 1940’s diesel Mercedes buses that got their last oil change before Rockefeller handed over the reigns to OPEC. Forty-two cents gets you anywhere in the city you wanna go though. And on your way you can even do a little shopping. Vendors ride for free for a few blocks and are peddling everything from beer and cough drops to fresh fruit. Twenty cents gets you an ice cold coke (in a glass bottle!), which goes along way when it’s 112 degrees on the pavement. Rainy days bring out the umbrella entrepreneurs and if your headed to or from the terminal you’ll be bound to run into someone peddling philosophy textbooks. Sometimes you’ll all be serenaded as the more ambitious among the street performers tries to pick out a guarani polka over the squeal of melting brake calipers. But they come on time and they get you to where you’re going – and you may even have time to buy a vegetarian cookbook along the way.

paz

kb