Oh Honduran buses, how I hate thee. Sorry to start off on such a negative and weirdly theatrical note, but I have spent over 24 combined hours on various Honduran buses in the last week and the experience was harrowing. I will use this blog to try to acquaint those of you who are unfamiliar with the experience to just how un-enjoyable it just can be. To start off there are three types of buses in Honduras: the real luxury bus lines, the bus lines that claim to be luxury, and the chicken buses (that make no claims to anything including passenger safety, which is honestly pretty refreshing… until a child throws up on you while riding one of them). On my most recent adventure I had the pleasure of riding two of these types of buses (neither of which was the least bit luxurious).
To give you some background, I was traveling from my home in Ocotepeque (the farthest south western department of the country) to visit friends on the north coast (located coincidentally on the northern most part of the country). In order to get there I had to travel across the entire length of the country (or roughly the distance between like DC and Delaware). While this seems like a piece of cake trip to those of you accustomed to travel within the US (and usually in private cars), it is a daunting nine hour trek across some of the worst roads in the hemisphere (especially when one is living on a PC budget and forced to take 1970-1980s era US school buses).
The trip started off with a serious bout of luck, when I was able to catch a jalon with someone leaving my town headed to Santa Rosa. This was the first leg of my trip since SR is about 2 hours north of me and a fun place to spend a night. I was even so fortunate as to get a seat in the cabin of the pick up (truly luxurious by my campo standards) and the driver wouldn’t take any money for the ride (thus saving me about 60 lempiras, or 3 dollars US). I spent the night in a friends hotel room in SR and went out on the town with some other volunteers, overall a great first day of my vacation. Sadly the rest of my travel was not so enjoyable. I awoke the next morning to find out that the engineer from my mancomunidad who had offered me a ride all the way to my friends town (since it was right next to the town where he planned to vacation with his family) was not going to be headed up that day and was instead waiting till later in the week. This meant that I would have to cowboy up and hop on a bus headed north. After an appropriate grieving period, and a hardy breakfast of fried food, I made my way to the bus station and hopped the first school bus I saw headed to San Pedro.
This trip started as pretty much all of chicken bus experiences started, with a kid next to me vomiting (though at least this time he managed to get the majority of it in a grocery bag held by his father).
[As an aside I would just like to point out that while Hondurans will throw just about any piece of trash they accumulate during a bus ride directly out the window, they as a whole seem steadfastly against throwing their bags of vomit out. I honestly cannot comprehend this. Apparently a bottle or a churo bag or a plate of food scraps is un-bearable to hold onto until they come to a trash receptacle, but a bag of human vomit is totally ok. Often times they even place it on the floor of the bus and let it roll around, not sure what they think will come of this, but what it usually results in is an exploded bag of vomit on a crowded bus. Sorry, back to the story at hand]
To be honest though, I was actually pretty impressed by this kids skill, he actually managed to start puking before we had even left the bus terminal, no small feat seeing as we were only going about 10 miles an hour. Besides this puking, this part of the trip was relatively un-eventful and we reached San Pedro in decent time.
As a bit of background on San Pedro, it is Honduras’s most populous city, and has the highest murder rate in a country that is second in the world in killings per capita (it has a murder rate of over 120 people per 100,000, compared to say DC which has one of around 20). For those of you unfamiliar with Spanish, the name San Pedro Sula roughly translates to Holy crap get me out of here. To top it off it is located in a valley and the weather alternates between hot, hazy, and sunny, and hot, hazy, humid, and rainy, with an average temperature of balls hot. This last part is important to the story, since on this occasion I was left waiting on a turned on bus for 2 hours as they tried to jam more and more people on to it (in Honduras seating capacity on busses is taken more as a minimum than a max, and a bus is not considered adequately full until the entire aisle is full as well). My 2 pm bus eventually got on the road at 4, by which point I had literally sweated through my jeans and t-shirt and had successfully lost any chance of catching a connecting bus in La Ceiba to get to my friends house. Luckily for me everyone else traveling to my friends house that day had run into similar trouble on their bus from Teguz and my friend was able to get his host parents to come pick us up. Also luckily, the mall at which we ended up waiting for a ride has a Wendys, so I was able to cool off with a Frosty.
Well Ill just conclude by saying that all the busing was worth it, since it resulted in me spending 2 days on a tropical island paradise, and then 3 more in the happening colonial city of Trujillo partying with fellow volunteers. Also on the way back I got to ride next to a lady on a chicken bus who actually had 2 chickens in a bag on her lap as well as a toddler on the other knee (this time the kid did not throw up, and neither did the chickens for that matter).
