hen you board a bus in many countries in
the third world, you never know exactly what to expect. The one certainty is
that anything could happen. I’ll never forget my first bus ride in South
America. It was a trial by fire experience which took me from the bustling city
of Barranquilla along the oppressively steamy Caribbean coast of Colombia. It
was the bus ride we’ve all seen in movies: noisy, chaotic, complete with
chickens, pigs and just way too many people in one vehicle. Every time we
stopped along the five hour journey to Santa Marta, street vendors would swarm
the bus, hawking everything from soft drinks in plastics bags to roasted parts
of animals long believed to be extinct. That was, for me, just the first of
many, many bus rides in South America. I’ve frozen my butt off on pre-dawn rides
through the Andes. I’ve roasted under the equatorial Sun, huddled on the roof of
a bus with two pigs and a goat. It’s always an adventure.
And now, here I was in the jungle town of Tena, Ecuador, having survived yet
another heart-stopping ride on narrow, winding mountain roads. I guess the
driver had done the run so many times that the thought of plunging over the side
of the mountain didn’t provide the rush he was looking for. So, just to spice it
up a touch, he drag raced another bus pedal-to-the-metal all the way into town.
We arrived unscathed at the terminal and I was pleased to learn that I had a
four-hour wait until the departure of my next bus. A little decompression time
would be good and Tena is really a very pleasant town, resting comfortably on
the bank of the Rio Tena. A foot bridge spans the river, and after stashing my
pack at the terminal, I strolled across the bridge and went exploring. A
curandero, a healer and vendor of natural cures peeked out from his thatched
roof stall where he was hiding from the afternoon Sun. Along with bundles of
dried herbs and potions, several ocelot skins were displayed inside. By the time
I was heading back towards the bus station, the Sun had begun to set. Folks were
coming out for their evening walks and vendors sold individual cigarettes and
Chiclets at small candlelit kiosks. The air was cooler now and I made my way to
the terminal where I spent the next hour watching the almost ceremonial loading
of the bus. This alone is worth the price of the ticket. In this part of the
world almost everyone and everything they own travel by bus. As I sat, leaning
against my pack, I smoked a small cigar and wondered if I looked as cool as I
hoped I did. The station crew was loading up the roof of the bus with luggage,
boxes of every description, furniture, plastic drums of "who-knows-what" and even
sacks of concrete. A woman had come to Tena to buy a very x-rated bed of chrome
and red velvet. It was carefully wrapped and loaded on top. Some guy was in for
a big night, but not this night. Finally, the whole load was covered with a
giant rubber tarp to protect it from the tropical rains. It was almost time to
depart on the next leg of my journey which would take eight hours, arriving in
the town of Puerto de Francisco Orellana, more commonly known as Coca. We were
scheduled to arrive around four in the morning. I don’t like to arrive anywhere
at four in the morning, especially a place like Coca, but what the hell….I was
traveling alone, hade no schedule to keep, and it was going to be just another
bus ride, right? As I said, I’d been to this rodeo before. So I stepped right up
and presented the driver with my ticket for....The Night Bus To Coca.
I claimed my seat which was the first seat on the right hand side, right behind
the door. I always try to get that seat because I don’t do well in crowds, and
being by the door, helps to keep my claustrophobia in check. I know now that if
I had gotten stuck in the back of this bus that I would surely be
institutionalized by now, drooling Thorazine-flavored Jello down the front of my
bathrobe. When it appeared that everybody had boarded, I turned in my seat,
pleased to see that we were full but not crowded. Promptly, at eight-thirty the
driver fired up the engine, let it warm up for a couple of minutes and then we
pulled out of the terminal just as nice as you please. We went exactly one block
and stopped at the corner. Ten more guys got on the bus. One had a huge
cardboard box tied up with scraps of rope. He managed to get up the stairs,
about halfway into the aisle, and that’s where he and the box stayed. Again, I
looked behind me and thought, “Jeez we’re really packed in here now.” Wrong. I
just thought we were packed in. I didn’t know it, but we had just started. As we
made our way through the dark streets of Tena, folks kept materializing out of
the darkness and getting on the bus. I wondered how long this would go on before
the driver would start passing people by. Silly me; we were the last thing
rolling out of town and nobody was going to get left behind. Someone had hauled
a fifty-kilo sack of rice aboard and it was flopped over the big cardboard box
in the aisle. Some folks were sitting on the sack and others were sitting on the
floor, leaning against the box. By then, it seemed everybody else was leaning on
me. In the pitch blackness, I had anonymous body parts resting on the arm, my
left leg, and my head. But what the hell, I figured, these people aren’t going
far. They probably live across town or on the outskirts. Ten, fifteen minutes
and they’ll all be history. We left Tena behind us and no one got off the bus.
It was beginning to look like all hundred and nineteen gazillion of us were
going to Coca. I’m pretty sure it was one of the guys leaning on my head who was
alternately babbling, singing, and bursting into hysterical giggles. He was very
drunk and as he laughed, I just knew that his cane liquor euphoria was going to
change, as it so quickly can, and that he would certainly then puke down my
neck. As luck would have it, a shack came into view and somehow the driver knew
to stop. The drunk lurched forward, climbed or fell over the half dozen or so
people between him and the door, tripped over the box and slid down the rice bag
into the waiting arms of two other guys who the got on the bus. We rolled on
like a giant sardine can rumbling down this fairly new dirt road which was
subject to washouts, derrumbes, landslides; and as I was shoved, poked
and nudged from every direction, I got to thinking that I wished the Pope was on
this bus. I figured it would take him about ten minutes to rethink his views on
population control. As we bumped and ground our way through the night, I slowly
became aware that the lady who was standing in front of me, hugging the
stanchion and straddling my legs was experiencing a bladder management problem.
Poor baby, she was fighting the good fight, but the forces of nature were just
about to win when, as if by divine intervention, the driver pulled off to the
side of the road. I peered out into the dark and saw what looked like several
trucks parked side by side. The desperate woman jumped over the box, cleared the
rice bag like a hurdler, and disappeared between two trucks. Then almost
everybody got off the bus and found a quiet spot where they could express
themselves. As we reboarded the bus, the mood was understandably more relaxed
and although tired, almost everyone, even the folks who had been standing for
the last four hours, appeared to be in pretty good spirits. I, on the other
hand, was feeling beat up, exhausted, and generally over it. And I had a seat!
Such as it was, the last of the springs was poking me where nobody should ever
get poked with a spring. But I’d found a way to squirm around it and anyway, I
had resolved myself to accept that this ride was what it was and there was no
way I could change it. I had come to this realization a while ago, when I
thought I couldn’t take being squished any more and no matter what, I had to get
off the bus. But the fact is, all your stuff is up on the roof of the bus,
buried under the tarp, and you can’t go anywhere without it. And even if you
could, where you gonna go, man? There’s nothing out there but jungle and when
the bus gets out of sight, it would be dark as the inside of a coal mine. I was
in this for the duration.
I know I finally dozed off, because the next time I opened my eyes, I saw that
we were stopped at the bank of a river. I thought I must be dreaming. I got out
to take a better look. Sure enough, we were at the edge of the water, and
somewhere in the distance I heard a generator fire off. In a couple of minutes,
a ferry barge slowly floated across the river to get us, pulled by a thick,
steel cable. The driver pulled onto the barge and with more clanking of gears
and revving of the generator, we started towards the opposite bank, most of us
choosing to make the trip standing around the edges of the barge. When we were
about half way across, I saw what I thought was the loom from Coca. An hour or
so later, when we approached the town, I realized that the lights weren’t from
the streets of Coca, but from the gigantic support facilities of the oil
companies. There were pipe yards with what looked like a million miles of pipe,
and floodlighted, chain-linked compounds with elevated guard towers and
shotgun-toting security men. Finally, after eight and a half grueling hours, we
pulled into an empty lot behind what they said was a hotel. The driver killed
the engine. It was over! The bus emptied out very quickly. Everyone seemed to
have a place to go and scurried off into the night. I hoisted my pack and found
a four dollar room for what was left of the night. Any hopes I might have had to
sleep late were dashed by the din of heavy machinery, truck backfires, and men
shouting outside my window. I tried the shower down the hall, but not water came
out so I went to scope out the neighborhood. Coca will never make the cover of
Travel & Leisure Magazine. Coca is an oil town and like all oil towns it is
dirty. It’s one of those places that the travel books would say, “has little to
offer the traveler.” The streets are either muddy or dusty, depending on the
weather. They are sometimes sprayed down with waste oil to keep the dust down.
The result of this well thought solution to the dust problem is a nice oily mud
that’s impossible to get off your boots and therefore, gets tracked everywhere.
The air will choke you by day with the stench of oil and exhaust fumes. At night
you get all that plus the sweet bouquet of the cheap perfumes worn by the
Colombian prostitutes who flock to Coca to make a few petrobucks on their own.
It’s said that armies travel on their stomachs, but it seems the oil business
travels on its crotch. The truth is, without the comfort that these women
provide, the oil companies could never get guys to work in such a dismal place
so far from home. So I feel that these ladies are, in their own special way very
much an integral part of the “awl bidness.”
The good new is this: You are not real likely to find yourself in Coca. It’s not
on the grand tour of South America. In fact, it’s so far off the beaten track
that unless you’re a “good ol’ boy” from Texas or Louisiana, or maybe a
missionary, you will never have to go to Coca. But if you do, just remember
this. Fly from Quito. Take a boat from upriver. And if you absolutely must go
overland, try to hitch a ride on a truck. But never, and please trust me on
this, never take….The Night Bus To Coca.
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