Over the years I’ve gleaned snippets of information that have a habit of avoiding the short term memory trash-bin. One in particular had stuck; a comment to the effect that the narrator had been pleasantly surprised by their experiences in Guatemala. So as we left the confines of a border crossing, I was looking forward to watching, hoping for, the changes that a shift in coinage, history and brand of beer might throw up.
It didn’t take long. The road reared up in front of us. Percentage angles that we had last met and that had become a personal gradient measure-stick, in Ecuador. I knew that we would have to find ten thousand feet of elevation over the next three days, a fact that we were both more than happy with, for it would offer relief by lifting us out of the coastal, tropical, high-humidity heat. But what we didn’t know then, was that, that first climb would become the new norm and pushing around vertigous bends a regular event. This road is in a desperate haste to climb up to the altiplano. Or it would be if it didn’t lose concentration, dropping down into every river bed only to clamber back up again, before continuing from where it left off. Re-ascents are a psychological challenge, guaranteed to test the most resolute. I’m not sure how resolute I will be, especially as we’re passed by one younger cycling tourer, just as we’re in that most ignominious of positions, pushing a recalcitrant lump of steel around yet another bend. Transpires that he’s cycled from the north down through Mexico, much as we have, only he was sensible and repatriated all his northern winter kit. An idea that has been playing on my mind every time that I clamber off the bike and start to push.
I’m blogging this two weeks after the event, when the graft of effort has slipped into the past tense, when time effects it’s healing balm. Leaving a melange of moulded images: Rubber-tapped plantations, volcanoes erupting out of the jungle, finding the progenitors of a flowering Scottish herbaceous border, or being presented with cold water at the top of one hot climb. However, through out those few days, there’s one recurring constant picture. The Chicken Bus. The exuberantly decorated, fume-reeking, noise-belching, angst-ridden Chicken Bus.
Utterly iconic to two utterly different countries. They start life as the supremely, excessively engineered US county schools’ mode of transport. Driven with decorum, and in the main by ladies in the belief that the US student should always be safe in school. Their original life expectancy over, they travel south, to be reinvented as public transport in the Central Americas and in so doing acquiring the moniker; ‘Chicken Bus’.
Chicken Bus because of the colour; but really, I wonder if it doesn’t have more to do with the way that they are driven. Chicken, as in the dare-game of ‘chicken’. One is overtaking the other, the corner is approaching fast… who will give way first?
A market trader lady is waiting expectantly at the side of the road, her blanket bundle of goods wrapped up beside her, I can hear the tell-tale roar of an approaching bus, it’s horn blazing it’s intention to possibly stop. The conductor leaps out before the bus is stationary and clambers up to the roofrack with the lady’s bundle as she is barely afforded time to board before the bus accelerates off to the next stop. The conductor is still clambering along the roof, only the bus has now reached terminal velocity, the driver happy in the knowledge that a competitor was unable to overtake and so pilfer the next potential passenger. Said clambering conductor now climbs back down one of two rear ladders, crosses from one to the other and opens the rear door to get back into bus.
New life: New paint: New rules for jungle gym: just remember “you’re out if you touch the floor.”
It’s an entertainment that partially distracts from the next section of tar, that on turning a bend, inexplicably manages to get only steeper. There comes a point where climbing a mountain moves from pleasurable challenge to unremitting effort. When the gradient no longer allows the chance to watch what surrounds you, when stopping to gaze the view is out trumped by the effort of a re-start, such that the amazing circumstances are reduced to the narrow strip of macadam immediately to front of my wheel.
And yet I still want to like this country. I don’t need my memories to be occluded by this constant effort.
But of course I’ve neglected that aphorism: ‘every hill has two sides’….it’s going, got to go downhill at some point.