Sabana de Torres, Colombia
The 27 Hour Bus Ride
December 28, 2007
There's somethin' wrong with the world today
I don't know what it is
Something's wrong with our eyes
We're seeing things in a different way
- Aerosmith
After a few days of recovering from the trek to the Lost City in Cartagena it was off to Bogota on what was supposed to be an 18 hour bus ride, which cost 130,000 pesos since it was peak travel season in Colombia. For the first time in Colombia I actually had a timid taxi driver and arrived at the bus station only 10 minutes before the bus was scheduled to depart only to find that I was first person to load luggage onto the bus. Despite this we actually left more or less on time and the bus proceeded along good roads. We made a stop at some restaurant/store/bathroom/bus stop in the middle of nowhere around 9pm. Naturally I was the only non-Colombian there and drew lots of attention.
The bus service in Colombia is a little confusing. Even though I was on a direct bus service to Bogota people still got off and on the bus randomly and we occasionally stopped to pick people up. I doubt that these people would have known if there were seats on the bus with things changing over so often so I guess that they were riding on a standby status. We passed through numerous little towns which had seemingly no reason for existing except that they were along the road. At around 5am we stopped to let off this elderly couple at an abandoned bathroom in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea how they got to their destination from there, but I'm sure they knew what they were doing. About 15 minutes later we came to a stop behind another bus, and we waited for a long time, at least an hour or so judging by the rising sun, without moving an inch.
At around 7am the driver shut off the engine. From the window I could see lots of people standing on the side of the road. Eventually a few people got off the bus and I did as well. I asked someone why we were stopped and they said that there had been a head on collision not far ahead of us. Seeing the way that the bus and other traffic often drives this was not overly surprising. Those lines in the middle of the road aren't even a suggestion in Colombia, they are generally just ignored. You can pass someone around blind mountain curves; just honk your horn before you pull into the other lane to pass. If there is a shoulder you can even pass in the face of oncoming traffic, the cars coming towards you are then obliged to move onto the shoulder to give you room to pass, sometimes they don't even slow down but merely flash their lights. Needless to say, there were numerous close calls when our bus pulled these same maneuvers.
After we had been waiting for about 3.5 hours, engines started and everyone piled back onto the buses and we began to crawl forward. At this point cars and buses were trying to pass us in the other lane, making it almost impossible for oncoming traffic to pass by us. The two lane road had 3 lanes of vehicles on it. It took us another 30 minutes to reach the scene of the accident, which was maybe a 1/3 mile away. It was now about 9am, the accident had supposedly occurred at about 5am. Four hours later the cars were still in place, there were no police or other emergency personnel on the scene, and traffic was being directed by random people holding fence posts that they had pulled out of the ground.
It was total chaos and luckily we were finally moving past it. It was hard for the bus to move because there were three to four lanes of vehicles on the two-lane road and our bus had difficulty squeezing by. Once we started moving we passed a long line of vehicles just stopped in the road with their engines off and passengers standing in the road. The sun was out and glaring down on everything in sight so people were sleeping under trucks and in the shadows of cars trying to find whatever shade they could. There was so much traffic since everyone was heading out of Bogota for New Year's Eve. I estimated that traffic was stopped like this for maybe 20 miles. And not once did we pass any police or anyone coming to the scene of the accident. Sadly these people were going to be stuck in traffic all day.
To me it was unfathomable that this would happen on a major road to and from the capital city. This five hour delay surely put us way behind schedule but no one really knew exactly where we were and in Colombia there aren't many road signs to provide guidance or hints. I had nothing to do but listen to music and look out the window. I started thinking about Colombia and the things that I'd seen so far. As we passed soldiers standing by the road I had a hard time seeing anything but kids with guns behind their camouflage after interacting with the soldiers near the Lost City. The minimum age for military service is 18 but some of the soldiers we talked to had said that they falsified documents or lied and were only 15 or 16. Military service is also mandatory but I was told that you could pay your way out of it if you wanted to, $1,500 in exchange for one year of military service. When you pay the money or serve in the military you receive a card that you need to show in order to get a job or got to school. With so many men in the military this might be one explanation for the large number of young single women with small children that I've seen everywhere. It is strange to always see young women with kids far outnumbering the number of young couples. I'm not quite sure why this is but other travelers agreed with me regarding this observation.
The prevalent cocaine culture is quite fascinating as well. I´m sure that a significant number of the rich families in Colombia have ties either directly or indirectly to the cocaine trade. It is not hard to imagine how much money this generates as the coca leaves that a farmer grows, like the poor farmers we met near the Lost City, can be sold and turned into cocaine in a single day. That cocaine was selling for about $5 a gram on the streets of Colombia, for a profit, and by the time it reaches the streets of the US it sells for over $100 a gram, probably after being cut several times over. The soldiers that we hiked with to the Lost City were out on patrol looking for coca plants; when they find them they spray them with pesticide which kills the plants but not the roots, in about a years time the plants will grow back, healthy as ever. For the people involved in the drug trade there are tremendous amounts of money to be made, much more than a farmer could ever hope to earn via other crops.
Another difference in Colombia is the communications system. Cell phones are very prevalent but there are many different cell phone companies and each has their own plan with included minutes, much like the US, and there are different prefixes for the numbers from different companies. However, calls from one cell company to another are charged at higher rates, so there are call stores everywhere where they have cell phones from all the different companies that you can use to call a certain number and save money.
The best culinary aspect of Colombia so far has been the assortment of tropical fruit juices; they are all excellent. I´ve had so many different kinds, the majority of which I have no idea what they are and others that people haven´t even bothered to describe what they are. Some of the ones that I´ve tried and I don´t know if there are English translations to these or not: maracuya (passion fruit), lulo, zapote, barajo, tree tomato, mora (a type of blackberry), guanabana (sour sop), cherimoya (custard apple), plus a few others that I don´t even know how to spell in Spanish. The fruits are blended with either milk or water and they are cheap, costing only a dollar or two. I think there are at least a dozen that I haven´t tried yet, but hopefully I will have the opportunity to sample them in Ecuador too.
Meanwhile, the bus ride continued past some nice scenery along the Rio Magdalena then the road climbed up into the mountains via a slow and winding road until I finally saw a sign that Bogota was 110 km away. On this road, with our bus trying to pass along the blind curves that probably meant at least 2 if not 3 more hours. As we entered the sprawling metropolis of 8 million people that is Bogota the scenery became less spectacular until the mountains bordering Bogota on the east side came into view. Soon thereafter we arrived at the bus terminal around 4pm, completing the 27 hour bus ride. I had been warned to carefully check the serial numbers on the taxis to make sure that the license plates matched the numbers on the side, roof, and window, and that these numbers were identical to the number on the driver’s license displayed inside the taxi. There are some fake taxis which have been known to kidnap people and take them to ATMs to withdraw money. Fortunately, everything checked out fine with my taxi and within 20 minutes I was at my destination, looking forward to not being on the bus anymore.