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I never actually rode on a chicken bus. During research for a trip south, you hear so much talk about these so-called chicken buses as the form of transportation in Central America, but I did not get the pleasure of riding on one. Don’t get me wrong, I rode on more buses than I can count during my three months there, but unfortunately none of them qualify. I never saw a person handling a live chicken on a bus, as I heard I would. Never had to try to block out the clucking to keep my sanity. There was a parrot on one bus I was on, but it didn’t say much. I was also on a Banana bus (I’ll explain later), which was odd because I have heard of a banana boat, but not the bus variety. I suppose it fits though, because I did see a little girl holding a live chicken upside down from its feet while we were on a boat in Guatemala. Chicken boats, Banana Buses. The closest I came was a Chick Bus. Some woman had a box full of chicks on her lap, but that doesn’t really count now does it. Regardless of whether or not I was on a chicken bus transportation in Central America can be, well, interesting.

The mode of transportation down there is mainly bus, a new twist for a backpacker that learned his trade in Europe. The buses run the gamut from old American school bus to new streamlined style cruiser, but I have to say the former is the norm and the latter is rare. I even was on a bus once in Honduras that had been used to transport convicts, according to the placard on the back of each seat that told what to do in case of crash, fire or chicken attack. Had I known I might have the opportunity to revisit my child hood, I would have carved my name on the back of a seat on the way to school in first grade, so I could have identified the bus later. Of course I’m talking about the school bus, not the convict transport bus. It wouldn’t have been a complete re-visitation anyway. After all when I was a kid on the way to school the school buses were not packed to the brim, or passing other vehicles at 50 mph around a blind curve on a mountain pass.

Many of the buses have ornate decorations, that can include Looney Tunes stickers blanketing the dash, swinging stuffed toy monkeys hanging by the driver, or giant murals of Jesus that cover the drivers side window. It’s a good thing that they often also have stickers that say, “God blesses this bus and all its passengers.” It’s good because the giant Jesus decal often blocks the drivers view out the side window, and the passengers need the all the blessings they can get. Often the space above the drivers head is adorned with charming bumper stickers in English that read something like; “I spend most of my money on women and beer, the rest I just waste.”

In most of Central America, the bus stop is a very abstract concept. Why they must think to themselves would a bus be limited to pre-decided places to stop, when any spot on the side of the road works just as well. As a traveler sometimes it is a blessing that you can flag a bus down anywhere along its route and hop on. Sometimes it is a curse. The buses are very often so packed you have someone crammed on either side of you, someone crouching next to you in the aisle, someone hovering over you, and someone laying horizontal across your lap. In this state of sardineism you are itching (well you would itch if you could maneuver your hand to that part of the body) to make it to your destination so when you stop every ten yards to pick someone up or let someone off it makes you cringe. And they sometimes do stop ten yards after the previous stop, and you wonder why the second person couldn’t have gotten off and walked the rest of the way to their doorstoop. Often the bus will be as packed as I mentioned and the bus will stop to let more people on. You think to yourself that they must be joking, and there is no possible way any more people can squeeze on this bus. Yet somehow the bus stops 10 more times to let people on before anyone gets off, and somehow, they fit. But things change, people get on and off all the time, and just because you are extremely uncomfortable now, does not mean that in 30 minutes and four miles down the road that you will still be forced into an twisted headstand to find space on the bus.

It’s an odd change from North American highways, because at home, the buses and the 18-wheelers are the slow vehicles on hills that are being passed. Not in Central America though, the large vehicles are the passers, as the little cars and trucks putt along happy to remain the passee. They must feel the need to go slower because when confronted by a game of chicken from a giant bus coming the other direction, they know they will get the short end of the stick. Once in Guatemala, traveling from Chichicastenango to Quetzaltenango (I’m not making those names up) I was in a bus accident. Nobody was hurt but it could have been a lot worse. Another bus tried to pass ours, and didn’t quite make it before it had to swerve back to the proper side of the road. The rear of the other bus banged into our bus, smashing the driver’s window. Luckily the poise of our driver remained in tact, and he did not swerve into the ditch on the right, or it could have been bad, very bad. The two drivers pulled over and argued for a half hour. My Spanish is decent, but it does not encompass a heated argument between two locals. For the life of me I could not figure out what the stance was for the guy that hit us. What could the platform be for his argument? He hit us, end of story.

I came across the banana bus (of which I promised a mention earlier) in Nicaragua. I was traveling from Rivas in the south to Granada, and the bus was packed. The only difference was on that bus I was one of the ones hovering in the aisle, because I had come to late to get a seat. I was hot, tired, crowded and dying to arrive at my destination as I had been traveling for more than eight hours. The bus stopped, which was nothing new, but what was new is that as I looked out the window, bananas were flying towards the roof. I looked down and saw a pile half the length of the bus and half the height as well. The driver and a few other guys were chucking the bananas roofwards so that they could be transported to the market. As I contemplated how long it would take them to get all those bananas on the roof and how long I would have to stand there in the cramped heat, I thought surely they must have been kidding. They weren’t kidding, and an exhausting twenty minutes later 1 bus, 100 people and 10,000 bananas sped towards Granada.

Its not all bad news on the buses, there are defiantly some upsides. On my trip I started north, went west, came east again, headed south then back north, in and out of several countries several times. In other parts of the world you could not do so much backtracking with out shelling out a bundle. The buses are cheap, so complaints should go to the You-get-what-you-pay-for department. I took a bus from Tegucigalpa to Choluteca in Honduras and it was five dollars for a two and a half hour bus ride. It seemed very expensive when I paid the fee, but this bus had (If you’ve traveled in CA, you should be sitting down because this will shock you) AC, a movie, scheduled stops only, and a stewardess giving out complementary sandwiches and juice. Unheard of! I felt like the king of Honduras. Do they have a king? Another gem is that if you rush to the bus in the morning, with not enough time to grab a bite to eat, before long a horde of peddlers will traverse the aisles selling anything from toothpaste, to ears of corn, to God. More food though and less God, so if you are hungry you’re set.

Travel anywhere in the third world presents challenges, for people who are used to a different way of living. Yet reflecting back to all my frustration about traveling only 20 miles in an hour, something new occurs to me. I have worked in a job in Los Angeles, and I used to sit in traffic for 45 minutes each way each day to cover the 13 miles between my house and work. The final result is the same; it’s just the process that takes adjustment. In the end, the buses of Central America have provided me with inspiration to write a travel story, traffic in LA just gave me an ulcer.

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