My Fun Experiences.

I don’t think I’m very good at writing stories and making them very interesting. Though, I was catching up with a friend and it reminded me of this story. At the time (and after), I was pretty amused even though the whole situation was for about 10 minutes or so.

So it’s Friday night and I’m riding in the Alajuela bus to go back to San Jose, it’s about a 30-45 minute bus ride. The airport is located in Alajuela for those who do not know and Alajuela also got hit by that 6.1 earthquake the strongest. People were mentioning that the Poas volcano had high risks it was going to erupt because of it.

Alajuela buses have been known to be robbed because, from what I believe, the majority of the bus ride is on the highway – you’re not hitting potholes, turning around curves, it’s hard for police to monitor the whole highway, people are coming back from the airport, the bus fare tends to be higher than other buses, and it’s just a very remote area to drive through. They can basically tell the bus driver to pull over on the side of the road for them to escape into woods, or ghetto neighborhoods/houses. It’s just overall convenient in the eyes of a criminal, especially at night when there’s low cop activity.

Anyway, since this knowledge is known, I tend to sit upfront where the driver is. When people rob, they tend to be at the way way back where the driver can’t see. Though, I dont’ believe the driver would be able to do anything if they choose to rob front or back and if you get a bunch of guys who rob the whole bus (it happens), you’re pretty much fucked anyway.

Let me explain the exterior/interior of the bus a bit. This is Costa Rica, it is a third world country, we get every other countries buses (mostly USA) who don’t want their outdated buses. Some of our public buses are the color of school buses from the states (they vary in height). Every bus is different to some degree (styling, interior sofas, where the buttons go), if you’re going to a different town or region in Costa Rica, it’ll probably be a different color and model.

Blue bird bus

Different Colors

Alajuela Red Buses (There are also Beige buses in a different terminal.)

The interior of the bus is just as fun. Some buses have the string to pull on, some buses have the button to push on every pole (or every other pole), or even both buttons and strings, some have buttons only on the ceiling, or at the side of your seat, and sometimes the string breaks or the buttons don’t even work so you gotta go, “Parada porfavor!” (Bus stop please!) to the bus driver. Costa Rica hasn’t quite gotten the concept of machines to do your bidding, like in Singapore you put your card through the machine when you get into the bus and you card it again when you leave, they still have the primitive system of you give coins to the bus driver and the bus driver sometimes, or purposely, forgets certain coins when giving back your change. They have a coin box, which is made out of foam so it adapts (aka jiggles) to the bus movements, to place all these coins in. They have holes to sort the different values of coins and also have slots in the middle to give out change that they’ve already counted.  The Alajuela buses have all these buttons (like four rows of buttons) in the very middle of the bus, these are used for turn signals, lights, radio, I dunno there’s probably an eject button some where too.

I went off a bit, I didn’t mean to write and describe so much about the look of buses. Point is, I was sitting in front seat and started smelling pancakes.

*Hmm, that smells good,* I thought. *I don’t think we past Dennys yet -they normally cook pancakes at odd hours-..but even then they don’t really smell This Good. Zumg I’m hungry…*

There was a man sitting next to me and two other men were on the right side. They were very friendly with the bus driver like they’ve known him for years, very chatty fellows who all seemed to know each other even when they got on the bus at  different times.

“Is it suppose to be doing that?” One of the men said in Spanish.

The bus driver was stopping at a bus stop at that point and said in Spanish, “This bloody bus keeps doing that, I looked every where man, everywhere, bloody thing does this randomly.”

Smokes starts coming up from the dashboard, where the rows of buttons were.

“Wires touching maybe?” Guy number 2 mentioned leaning over and out of his seat.

The driver lifts all the buttons up (apparently he didn’t even have the metal barrier/grate screwed down anymore because it happened so randomly.)  and the smell now turned into a faint burning plastic smell, flames included.

*Hmm..That’s..Really…Not suppose to happen..* I say to myself.

The radio was playing salsa music, very common among the crowd, started dying slowly to warped cha-cha music. The driver moved it out of the way and turned it off, his hand was stuttering in fear of getting burned.

“I thought it was wires touching, man, but man, I looked at it from up and down and nothing, nothing man.” Bus Driver said.

“Are you sure?” Guy number 3 said, getting kinda nervous.

“I even took it to the fucking mechanic at the airport and he couldn’t find anything.” As his hand was trying to find the fire extinguisher while  his eyes still on the burning wires.

Guy number 2 was seeing how the bus driver wasn’t looking where it was exactly so he got out of his seat to take it. This took a little while because they were ‘calmly’ talking at the same time doing this. Guy number 2 was trying to take that metal pin out while he was saying, “It started smoking when you turned on the lights. The lights probably triggered it”

*Wow, they have a fire extinguisher.…Wait, does…That fire extinguisher even work? Knowing how it works here, it’s probably expired.*

By this time the back of the bus and it’s containing passengers especially some females were getting really scared. Almost everyone was standing up and looking over their seats like busy-body neighbors. Some drunk men who came on wielding beer cans were like,

“Let us out through the back, let us out!!”

*Hmm, if it exploded I wonder how they’d find me. I have no ID on me. The ATM cards would probably be burned….*

“Hijueputa, Mae!! Vamos a morir” (Son of a bitch, man! We’re going to die).

“Open up! Shittt, open up.”

*…Wonder if dental records would even work in this country, I’m pretty sure they do, it can’t be that bad….*

I don’t know if the bus driver did open the back door, and if he did, I honestly don’t know how since all the wires were burning.

So as guy number 2 is about to blow the thing out, some guy from outside the bus stop takes a two liter coke bottle filled with water and pours it on the electrical.

The three guys in the front seat started screaming, “NOOO!!!” (expect me cause I was more like, wtf? did he just dump water?) And even then that didn’t completely take out the fire. So the, thankfully, full and loaded extinguisher worked and managed to take the fire out.

*What would my corpse look like? Probably have bits of glass implanted in my face and maybe have this dude’s lard (guy sitting next to me) all exploded on top of me.* I think about this further as I watch the fire go out completely

The bus driver was kinda pissed and was trying to get everything tidy when people were on the bus going, “Okay man, it’s out, let’s go, let’s get this thing moving, c’mon.” Like total jerks. We were 15-20 away from San Jose and some people briefly shouted, “Where did the music go man?!” “Play some music!!” “That music was everything, man”. The guy on the front made a joke and said, “Well, now you can just go steal another car radio…maybe that would  keep you better company.”

That was my first experience to say the least with a bus catching on fire. I think I remained calm and kind of laughing at the surreality of it all. It was one of those, I’m watching four men try to handle it in that, ‘kind of…not really way’ while the rest of the lot is freaking out and I’m calmly in my seat with legs crossed and hands laced thinking, *How likely would this thing blow up anyway?..Probably wouldn’t…Would be interesting that I’d be a statistic number in ‘people who get blown up in car related incidents’* and basically that’s how I was with a little more denial.

Signing out,

-Very much alive and not roasting Me.