A Race to the End

Somehow with the excitement and adrenaline of freedom, The Man of Your Life carelessly forget to retie the multitude of goods on the roof of the bus with the rope that had been removed and unsuccessfully used in the attempts of the previous hour. It wasn´t long before woven baskets were rolling down the hillside and The Man of Your Life was obligated to stop and send passengers out in retrieval. Our bus, having cut in the long line of awaiting vehicles in attempt to pull The Man of Your Life free from his unfortunate position AND having successfully shot the bog in a single try was now barreling in at top speeds to overtake The Man of Your Life. Feeling thankful that we were simply in motion again, I was shocked by our drivers recklessness abandon for the highway ahead. What´s the rush...aren´t we all just thankful to be alive?

Within moments, the pieces started to fall together. The hours of being occupied by the mud meant that the roadside was ripe and brimming with potential passengers. Maintaining the lead on the road ahead translated into securing all those fares. The tension of the past two hours of waiting in mud-stuckiness quickly dissipated. It was a race, and we were clearly winning. With boyish glee, one passenger became the self-proclaimed scout and took to keeping a raucous, competitive eye on the road behind us. Another bus had also successfully shot the bog and was close on our tail. Between the driver, the ticket collector and this self proclaimed scout, ensued a ridiculous game of probability. Their coordinated effort consisted of the driver, driving with manic precision, his eyes on the road and his ears sharply in tune to the shouts of the scout and the ticket collector who were weighing the odds of picking up each passenger and reporting to him whether to full stop, slow down, or leave them in the dust. Picking up passengers depended on the distance of our lead and a quick determination of how rapidly the potential passenger can be shoveled into the bus. People with to many goods were simply left on the roadside. Better to forgo one fare but maintain the lead. Able bodied young men didn´t even get a full stop and were encouraged by the ticket collector to jump onto the moving bus as it rolled past.

The whole busload of felt hat wearing mountain people became entrapped by the fervor and excitement of the game and soon everyone was in cahoots shouting at the roadside waiters "Rapido, Rapido, Vamos, Vamos!" and extended arms helped literally pull stunned people from the side of the road safely onto the bus. We rolled into Saquisili moments later, with a busload full of fare-paying, ginning, passengers feeling as though we had just crossed the finishline, first. It was quite a well coordinated, it not slightly chaotic, undertaking. But, all said and done, I´d trust that driver to drive me and my first born around the world a hundred times over.