The Transportation Posting. This has been a long time in the works and I hope it’s worth the wait. Bus fares are dirt cheap in Guayaquil, and you get what you pay for: a rag-tag, unregulated fleet of vehicles and drivers and a daily free-for-all that puts life & limb in jeopardy before, during and after the ride. The buses don’t really pull to the right lane, nor do they really stop, to let riders on or off; they just kinda slow down. I haven’t witnessed an accident yet, but there are zillions of ‘em. The photo below was taken by someone else; note the strict lane usage. If this was a two-way street things would look about the same.
One day I got on a south-bound #92 bus, named the “Apache VIP,” that was familiar to me from a previous ride. Now I wouldn’t pretend that this machine was decked out in ‘full-zoot’ Mexican livery, but it was a contender: fuzzy dice, fake wood dashboard and overhead, crocheted curtains and more. A guy with a dead chicken got on at one point. No suspension. Use your imagination to conjure up the worst and you wouldn’t be far wrong.
Vehicle inspection is still the law here, and I reckon that’s a good thing. But the crazy thing is that the inspection station is adjacent to the busiest place in town, the Terminal Terrestre bus depot. The entire area surrounding the Terminal is under construction, and so the traffic pattern for the inspection station has been changed: the morning of the last weekday of the month, I saw cars and small trucks and motorcycles lined up as far as the eye could see, blocking one lane of a busy boulevard, waiting their turns. As I’ve come to expect here in Ecuador, the whole affair turned into a circus, with food stalls, auto equipment hawkers and repair stations popping up willy-nilly.
“Walk, Don’t Run.” The Ventures might have been correct in their advice, back in the halcyon days, if you were living in Southern California, but here in GUY, if you're crossing the street, it’s “Run, Don’t Stop!” Otherwise you're a dead man.
[photos to follow]
