Just a Minute

The first thing to do that afternoon was decide which bus to take – there were five or six bus lines leaving Sucre bound for Santa Cruz that night, all between 5 or 6pm, all of their offices lined up in a row inside the terminal. How to choose? Dina and I had been on the road for months, yet this was the first time we’d felt stumped by all the choices. Did we pick the first bus to depart, or the first scheduled to arrive? Did we pick the cheapest ticket, or the relative luxury of the highest fare? We wandered back and forth along the line, then went out to the bays outside and looked at the buses. Finally we chose one; not the finest nor the most decrepit, not the first to leave nor the last.

By now we had a routine for long bus rides. We’d stow our big packs below in the luggage hold, boarding the bus with our overnight necessities: day packs, blankets, grocery sack of snacks and water. Finding our seats, we’d settle in, arrange our belongings around us and then look around to get the lay of the land. It felt important to see who was in charge. There was always a driver, sometimes a co-driver, and at least one ayudante – an assistant who handled everything from checking luggage to taking tickets, to acting as the driver’s spokesman. Sometimes the ayudante was an actual bus line employee, oftentimes he seemed to be a relative of the driver, his brother, son or cousin. On this trip we had a driver, co-driver, and two ayudantes – young boys, the older one no more than fourteen.

We pulled out of the terminal right on time, leaving the colonial center of town behind in just a couple of blocks. A few miles outside of town, the bus slowed and lumbered off the pavement onto the rutted dirt road we would follow all night as we descended from the Andes to the sweaty grasslands at the heart of the continent. Suddenly alongside the road there were dogs, first only one or two but soon a dozen or more. The drivers and ayudantes, along with a number of passengers, began to toss food out of the windows to them – the end of a sandwich, a few cookies, a roll. I could see food coming out of the window of the bus in front of us as well as we rounded a gentle bend. A moment more and the dogs were behind us. “What was that?” I asked the younger boy. “We feed the dogs for good luck – so our trip is safe” he replied as he passed by on his way toward the back of the bus.

After a few hours of switchbacks down the mountainside in the dark, we crossed over a bridge and began to follow a river through the valley. Presently we stopped at a roadside diner, a type of truck stop where we encountered the few buses that left Sucre before ours that evening. It was our dinner break – fifteen minutes of questionable food and a grim bathroom. By the time we boarded the bus and headed out again, the later buses were pulling in to take our place at the diner.

We rattled over the road for a few miles more and then the driver turned the bus to the left and crept down the river bank to the dry bed below. Surprisingly, the sandy bottom was smoother than the road and we picked up speed. The landscape appeared silvery out the window, illuminated by an enormous full moon hanging heavy in the sky. We slept; awoke when the bus climbed the bank out of the riverbed; slept again. We awoke with a start to a loud clunk and the bus shuddering to a stop at the side of the road. The drivers and ayudantes jumped off while the rest of us looked around – we were in the middle of nowhere. Rocky desert stretched out on both sides of the bus, while the dark suggestion of mountains rose in the distance. After a few minutes the driver climbed back onto the bus to grab something. From behind us a voice called “cuanto rato mas?” – how much longer? The reply: “un ratito, no mas” – just a minute more. With that, every other passenger on the bus got off, and I knew that “just a minute” would be anything but.

The moon was higher in the sky now, so bright I was able to read by it. The drivers got the bus jacked up in front and started banging away underneath. The passengers arranged themselves around the bus and up the hillside; some stood around watching the repairs, others sat on the ground or paced and smoked. I found a rock away from the action and sat down to take it all in – the sky, the desert, the night air and the feeling that I was a million miles away from anything familiar but oddly that I was exactly where I needed to be.

After awhile they sent one of the young ayudantes up a nearby footpath that led to a village, and he returned with a large pole and a number of the villagers in tow. They stood silently at a distance and just watched the scene. The drivers stuck the pole against some part of the undercarriage of the bus, and then set the boys on the other end with their feet dangling in the air, bouncing up and down while the driver pounded away underneath again. Suddenly, crack! The pole split, the boys tumbled to the ground, and after getting up and dusting themselves off, they trotted back up the path to the village and were back a few minutes later with another pole. The whole routine was repeated again, but this time the pole held and the repair was completed. I didn’t have a lot of hope that it would hold out the next 6 hours to Santa Cruz, but we didn’t have any other choice in the matter. As we sat by the side of the road with our broken down bus, every other Santa Cruz bound bus passed us in the desert night. A few stopped to say a few words, but none offered to pick up passengers, and we never asked.

After more than an hour, the bus was dropped off its jack, the driver gave a wave of his hand, and we all filed back onto the bus. I slept fitfully the rest of the night, and awoke in the morning on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, to a changed landscape of Lapacho trees, palms and parrots. I never have decided if feeding the dogs was just a useless superstition, since the bus did break down; or if by feeding them we got the good luck we needed to make it to our destination.