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I’m on a 19 hours long bus trip from hell from Tarapoto to Piura at the moment so I thought I’d rant! We took Sol Peruano since they were the only one with a final destination of Piura, but I think it would have been much more comfortable and faster to take Movil Tours to Chiclayo and then transfer toward Mancora from there. This bus was supposed to be a semicama, meaning almost like having a bed, but in reality is about as comfortable as your average airplane seat, even with a little less room. To top it off, it’s filled with Peruvians, who as a possibly unfair generalization, are fairly oblivious to being considerate of things like noise, garbage, and personal space. I never would have taken this bus if I had know that it would be uncomfortable, crowded, stop frequently, and have no overhead lights or curtains. At least it’s got a bathroom, one you’re only supposed to pee in, but a bathroom nonetheless. I’m sure you could get away with pooping in it though since it’s just a hole that opens directly onto the road. Fortunately I’m mostly recovered from my flu that I’m just getting over, so the bathroom isn’t as essential as it would have been a day or so ago.

Don’t think we didn’t ask a few questions before buying tickets. The problem is, people here can’t communicate about details to any useful degree. Honestly, at first I just chalked it all up to a language barrier thing, but now we’re sure we understand most people and they’re just awful at communicating. If you ask them yes or no questions, like “is it a semi-bed type bus?” they’ll almost invariably say yes whether it’s true or not. It seems like people just answer yes because they think it will make you happy to hear what you want. We have to remember to refrain from asking yes/no questions in the future. Also if you ask for descriptions of time or distance you will ALWAYS get a drastic underestimate usually with fairly vaguely infurating words. For example, ahorita is the diminuitive form of ahora which means “now”. However if someone says something will happen ahorita, it could mean anywhere from 5 minutes to tomorrow. It’s a fairly meaningless word. As is “cercita”, which means close. To say that the waterfall you’re walking to is cercita could mean it’s another 5-10 miles away. People often just guess information they don’t know, but they answer as if they did.

As I’m writing this someone is loudly puking. He could just be hocking a loogie as this is done frequently and very loudly by most everyone all the time. Earlier a little girl (adults do this sort of thing too and more often) got up and walked over to the stairs and spit ON the stairs. I never really thought that considering spitting on the floor gross could be considered differently depending on the culture. I’m hoping this puking sound is in the bathroom, but it’s hard to tell with the baby and mother behind me making never ending noise. Did I mention there’s no light so people on this double decker bus can’t see to walk down the stairs or while in the bathroom?

Of course the lights do go on every time we stop, which is close to every hour. With every stop about 5 or 6 people get on the bus to sell whatever crap they have, usually gelatin, which they try to sell by loudly announcing repeatedly what they have. This makes sleeping fairly impossible for more than a few minutes at a time.

Did I mention that there’s a small child and a gigantically fat woman with the cell phone sitting behind me? You really can’t avoid traveling with children unless you rent your own car, and that’s really not a good options considering the roads are full of crazy drivers and in terrible shape. This bus recently had to drive through a shallow stream because the bridge that goes over it is not wide enough for the bus. Many sections of the road are washed out and incredibly bumpy. They are doing a lot of construction to improve the roads, but construction here goes oh so slowly because so much work is done by groups of men with shovels. Imagine trying to create mountain passes through the Andes with hand tools and it’s fairly obvious why it takes so long. The roads are frequently shared by all types of transport moving at all speeds: motorcycles, double decker buses, cars, semi-trucks, farm trucks, horses, donkeys and people walking.

The adults on trips can often be much worse than the children though. It’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit where people can’t control the volume of their voice. There’s also people with this lovely new cellphone technology and I think everyone here is still in the mindset that you have to talk much louder on the phone than you ever do in person. There’s definitely people like this in the US too, but I swear there’s more here and the biggest thing is nobody local ever asks them to shutup. In the US if you’re one of those people sooner or later somebody will ask you to shut the hell up and everyone will applaud or something. Here nobody says anything, even if they’re annoyed , and we’ve met a few people who are annoyed, and say all their fellow countrymen have bad manners. If we ask these people to be quiet they ignore us or laugh since we’re foreigners. People just don’t seem to demand in any way that those around them behave well. People just seem to put up with everything, and I’m often unsure if they’re oblivious or just unwilling to confront anyone.

Another habit people have that nobody ever says anything about is throwing garbage out this windows. Everything goes out the window while you’re driving. This applies during long distance bus trips and in the cities in taxis. Plastic bottles, empty beverage containers, candy wrappers, dirty diapers, food scraps and more just get tossed whenever you’re done with them. I think people expect that someone who works for the government should clean it up. However, even if they stopped littering in some places and put stuff in trash cans, the garbage just gets hauled to be dumped in the local river anyway. This is what they did in Leymebamba anyway and I’m sure most other small towns. I’m not sure what they do with garbage in the larger cities, but whatever they do there’s plenty of it in the streets. Sometimes I think they just dump it in abandoned lots.

At least one thing they DON’T have on this hell trip is blaringly loud cumbia music. They did play cumbia for a few hours but I don’t think they could get it loud enough so gave up on it. Someone in Huanchaco the first week we were here said they only thing that matters to a Peruvian when buying a stereo is how loud will it go, and then I thought that seemed an unfair generalization – now I don’t. They have speakers wired up here, but no lights. If you haven’t heard a lot of latin american music before, you probably won’t be able to tell cumbia from salsa (cumbia usually has a rhythm more like a horse’s clip-clop-clip). Either way, salsa or cumbia, it’s not something I would consider worthy of listening to for 5 hours straight, especially since they there’s a group here called “Grupo 5″ that is so popular I think most people really do just listen to them for 5 hours on repeat.

Phew, I’m finally off that bus. I actually managed to sleep for a few hours despite the crowing rooster someone carried on. Of course it took longer than expected, something just short of 21 hours. We’re now sitting in another bus terminal in Sullana, which really doesn’t look like it has anything interesting, waiting to catch another bus to Mancora. From here on out we should start seeing a lot more foreign tourists, which I’m actually quite ready for. Being around almost exclusively Peruvians for the last month and half has definitely shown me I could never live comfortably among them. I don’t think I mentioned staring. There’s two little boys who are just staring at me as I write this. Children and adults do this equally and nobody seems to think it rude, and asking them to stop usually only works for a few seconds before they’re back to just openly staring. They’ll stare even if we’re just sitting still, reading a book, even in areas where I know they see a lot of tourists.

OK, that’s enough for now. I could probably go on, but I’m exhausted and fed up. Hopefully the world looks better after a decent sleep.