Ode to Chicken Buses

The main transportation in Guatemala is the Chicken Bus. It's quite the cultural phenomenon that I will investigate in this post.


First, you take an old U.S. school bus. Then you repaint it lots of bright colors. It's a must to add lots of chrome to the sides and the front. The more the better.




If possible, you should also paint on curtains to the front and side windows. Each bus must also be named after a beautiful woman, a famous saint, or a town, making sure each bus has its own identity.








As for the inside, well, first you have to add racks along the top to store everyone's stuff. You also need bars to hang on to for all the people who have to stand and want to stay relatively upright as you whip around the mountainous curves.





Once those structures are in place, you need to plaster pictures slogans on every available surface. The sides work great for slogans, while the front and the roof work the best for cartoons, pictures, and Bible verses.




You then need to supplement the pictures with 3-D objects, the most popular being tassles and fringe, or stuffed animals. You can never have too much.





Now the bus is ready to be filled. And again, you can never have too many people. First, each seat must hold 3 adults. If you don't squeeze in tightly enough, they will shout back and ask you to collaborate with them and sit pegadito (literally, stuck together). Then you add at lease one child to the lap of someone in each seat. That makes 4. Once the seats are filled, people must fill in the aisle space, or the small space in between knees. Even after there is physically no more space, the bus attendants will request you to keep moving back and filling in, and the people oblige.

You may be wondering what happens when someone needs to get off. Good question. Everyone squeezes and maneuvers, and you jump off the back if you're closer to the back than the front. If you had stuff on top, the bus guy will climb up on top while the bus is still moving and then hurl it off the side (or slide it down the ramp they set up on the side of the bus) for you.





The last great feature of the chicken bus are the vendors. Vendors of everything imaginable come on and shout their speech, hoping you will be suckered into buying their product. We've seen candies, stickers, pencils, chicken tortillas, drinks, plantain chips, eyedrops, stencils, CDs, parasite pills, and Vitamin B pills twice! You also see lots of preachers who come on, preaching and seeking funds for their church. This one old man didn't seem too interested in money, but he sure did preach for the entire ride, even as people moved to available seats to avoid him!





Don't get me wrong. There are alternatives to the chicken bus. The most common is the microbus. While it avoids all the flair and the vendors, you don't fare much better in getting your own seat.








There is also the ride-on-top-of-any-vehicle option, as chosen by this man. He actually looks pretty comfortable!






For long-distance trips on which you have lots of luggage and you want to have your own seat, you can pay significantly more and ride in a pullman bus. Here you may even be lucky to get seat covers with pockets, handy for holding your drink!



But at the end of the day, we all know we love the chicken bus the best. After all, where else will you actually see chickens in the laps of ladies as you bounce along? Where else will you hear the blaring banda music accompanied by the constant chirping of a young chick? Nowhere but Guatemalan Chicken Buses.