Bus travel

Editor's note: This is a long post! I thought about what to write during the entire course of my most recent bus ride, and it was a long ride, so I thought of lots of things about bus travel that are interesting. Sorry for the wordiness! Skip the post if you want- but you'll need to compensate by visiting me so I can talk your ear off instead about the magic of bus rides. There will be a quiz soon. 

I've been travelling outside of Quito a bit more than usual lately. Earlier, I travelled about nine hours in one day to see a waterfall, last week I travelled five hours south to Alausí in the province of Chimborazo to do the Nariz del Diablo train ride with two friends (pictures to come soon!), and earlier this week I travelled another five hours west to Quinindé (also known as Roza Zárate- labelled as such on the map) in the province of Esmeraldas to visit a cocoa cooperative in the area. Bus travel in Ecuador is incredibly cheap (it costs about $1 per hour- a 5 hour bus ride usually costs around $5), and because it's cheap, it's also pretty common, so it's easy to get around by bus. Most major and smaller towns have bus terminals, and you can always wait along the side of a main highway and hop on the bus when it passes by.

You can see the Andes pass through Ecuador. Rosa Zárate is Quinindé (W of Quito), and to get to Alausí we stopped in Riobamba (both S of Quito). The waterfall was on the way to Nueva Loja (E of Quito).

While spending three hours in the car to visit my grandparents seemed like a long time when I was a kid, nowadays it feels like it's no big deal to take a five hour bus ride on one day, and to make the five hour return trip the next day. Is this what growing up is all about? Having more patience to sit quietly in a vehicle and reflect on life happenings? Anyway, the other thing that I like is that you get to see the  landscapes pass by. Flying is great because everything goes by quickly, but also- everything goes by quickly! (and you're 10,000 meters above most of the interesting stuff.)

View of this really pretty church in the middle of the páramo, outside of Riobamba in the Chimborazo province. Taken (duh) from a bus window.

Another bus photo. Patchwork quilt landscape on the way to Alausí.

If you have a window seat on a bus, you can watch the landscape change, which I always find fascinating. Especially because Quito is at altitude in the Sierra, (the Andes pass through the middle chunk of the country, so if you head north or south along the Andes, you remain more or less at altitude, but I think that the views in the páramo are some of the prettiest!) if you head west or east, you get to watch the flora become increasingly tropical and watch the patchwork quilted landscapes become banana plantations and african palm fields.

From the window on the way to the waterfall

So watching the landscapes change is pretty much amazing. In our four hour ride out to the waterfall a few weeks ago, my friend Emilie and I joked that we didn't even need to see the waterfall- just looking out the window is exciting enough tourism! But there are other amazing parts about riding buses in Ecuador, namely the people that periodically climb on board to sell you things.

I guess I've always been pretty fascinated by these bus vendors- so much that I even wrote my independent research project in Chile about the vendors who get on buses and walk around selling ice cream. I'm not sure why exactly I'm so intrigued, but I think it's because this is such a foreign concept in the US- first of all, fewer people take long distance buses, and second of all, public transport systems tend to be much more regulated. Also, aside from perhaps food trucks (those are popular outside of Portland, right?), street food isn't as popular, so the idea of buying food of unknown quality or hygiene isn't usually a popular one in the US.

Anyway, on long distance buses in Ecuador, these vendors are particularly common. Buses usually linger at popular area outside of the terminal, waiting for more passengers to climb aboard. Vendors can climb on there, shouting out what they're selling. They sell all kinds of food- toasted fava beans, bagged fruit salads, fried empanadas, hot yuca breads, french fries with a chopped up hot dog on top (salchipapas), any variety of bottled non-alcoholic beverages, potato chips or plantain chips, artisan ice cream...seriously, the list could go on and on. At the popular passenger boarding areas, these vendors wait around on the street, and then come on, walk up and down the aisle, and then get off quickly.

Other vendors have an entire speech prepared, and they jump on board and will ride the bus for 10-15 minutes, explaining their product and selling it, and then will hop off significantly further away from where they got on. These vendors are the ones that most fascinate me. They hop on board, and stand near the front of the bus. Their speech always starts with an apology for making us passengers feel so uncomfortable. I've mentioned before that Ecuadorians have an aversion to being direct, and these vendors are no exception. I'm not exaggerating when I say that they can spend up to five minutes apologizing for interrupting conversations, making us feel uncomfortable, etc. They usually explain why they've been forced to enter this unpleasant job- they had an accident, they recently immigrated from their home country, they or their child has a terrible illness, some thieves recently stole all of their belongings from their home, whatever- and then they launch into their explanation.

These people sell all kinds of things, but in the most successful ones seem to be the ones selling original products (not just small retail cookie packages or pirated DVDs), or selling something thinly veiled as a health product. An abbreviated example of their speeches could be this: "Do you suffer from headaches if you work too long? Are you occasionally sad when you're alone? If several hours have passed, do you sometimes feel hungry? Have you noticed that if you stay in the sun too long, your skin burns? This is because your body is lacking in Vitamin J! This powder that I'm offering is incredible- it has a unique compound of aloe vera, calcium, guinea pig toenails, urea, and pulverized rubber. If you mix it in hot water five times a day, you'll notice that all of your health ailments- ever-  disappear! And because I feel just so awful about disrupting your bus ride, I'm offering it at a great price- only $1 per powder packet".

From there, they walk up and down the bus, placing the product in everyone's hand. You can refuse, but I like to look at the crazy crap that they're selling, so I usually take it. They usually have another quick bit about why this is such a great deal and why they're in a particularly rough patch in their life and how much it would mean if we could please excuse their rudeness in interrupting us and possibly purchase their unique product. Then they go back, and you either hand them back their product or you hand them the money and keep the product. This seems totally normal now after a year and a half here, but with some friends earlier, we discussed how weird this actually is- if you purchase a food product, you're purchasing something that dozens of bus passengers have probably handled.

Some people have even more extreme attempts. On my way back from Quinindé, one guy passed out sheets of paper to everyone, explaining that he had a tongue malfunction, and that he was collecting money to have a special tongue surgery so that he could just be "normal, like every one of you" and be able to talk and listen (uncertain how his tongue issue affects his ability to listen- you'd think he'd be really great at listening!). This seemed like a bizarrely successful technique- almost everyone I saw returned their paper with some small change. In Riobamba, one guy got on to sell these homemade coconut energy bars. He spent an excessive amount of time apologizing for bothering us on the bus, but his product was unique and yummy (my friends and I bought it). We commented that it was even more annoying that he apologized so much- he should just own the fact that he's on the buses selling things, and promote the fact that he had an original, tasty product and that would have been enough.