El Salvador’s suicidal bus service

I think it’s fair to say that I’m better qualified than many to know what dangerous public transport really is. I’ve been hurtled the wrong way down a motorway against the oncoming traffic, protected only by the driver blaring his horn. I’ve been flung around whilst overtaking on blind bends over a precipice while the driver talks on his phone. I’ve shot past the flashing lights and wailing siren of an ambulance speeding its way to an accident, because our driver deemed it to be a hindrance to his progress and I used buses for six weeks in Bangladesh in the middle of a firebombing campaign that had roasted numerous passengers into crispy cadavers. Through all this and more I remained cool and never felt the need to say, “I’d like to get off now”. Until El Salvador.

The first indication that the driver was a grade A1 fuckwit of the highest order was early in the journey downhill from the village of Perquin: overtaking another bus he slammed on the brakes and we drifted diagonally across the road in a cloud of burnt rubber, its acrid smoke billowing through the open windows. A questioning silence from the passengers was broken only by a nervous laugh or two. It soon became apparent that the sole reason for this cretinous behaviour was, that for some reason, the driver thought it was necessary to get to the bottom of the hill, 20km away before the other bus did. Now, suitably angled to block the entire width of the road, this was obviously regarded as a successful opening gambit in the ensuing dementia.

El Salvador’s entry for the latest Formula 1 motor racing championship

If you were strapped into the passenger seat of a relatively modern sports car, piloted by an experienced rally driver, the idea of racing against a nice new minibus down a hill would seem like a moderately harmless exhilaration. However, attempting the same operation in an aging chicken bus (so called because this is what they usually transport as well as humans)  packed with 70 uninsured El Salvadorean villagers, driven by a complete fucking idiot, replaces anything that could be described as fun with abject terror. This was a vehicle, that even when fresh off the production line was designed solely to transport American children to school over wide, flat, well maintained expanses of asphalt at speeds not exceeding 25mph. Not at over twice that speed down a narrow, winding hillside road, interspersed with potholes, particularly when the braking system had long passed the days of optimum factory settings.

Twice, during completely unnecessary overtaking manoeuvres, we narrowly avoided ploughing into the oncoming traffic. So, for the first time in my life, I got off a bus long before reaching the destination, to look for one with a driver who stood at least a 50-50 chance of ending his days through natural causes, rather than in a jam like consistency smeared over twisted metalwork, along with a few dozen of his fellow countrymen. As I did so, I used my limited Spanish skills to inform the aforementioned countrymen my opinion of their driver.

As my reward for this commonsensical approach I was treated to 15 minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from the village drunk before a less suicidal service appeared and I could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

One part of me almost wanted to see the mangled wreckage of the previous bus on the way home to validate my decision. However, bus drivers aside, El Salvadorans have proved themselves to be a welcoming, friendly people, so condemning a bus load to a premature death and horrific injuries might be seen as an unnecessarily high price to pay in the circumstances.