Riding the Nicaraguan Chicken Bus

Here in Nicaragua, we spend an enormous amount of time riding buses. Last week we went on vacation to the southeastern corner of Nicaragua and all told, spent almost thirty hours on either buses or boats. Given all of this time with nothing else to do but ponder the mystery of why it takes so damn long to get anywhere in a country the size of New York state, we've stockpiled quite a lot of data on the Nicaraguan public transportation system.

The first thing you need to know about Nicaraguan public transportation is that almost everyone uses it. Even people wealthy enough to own their own cars – who are certainly the minority of Nicaraguans – usually take the bus when they're not transporting a large object or a lot of people. The reason, of course, is that taking the bus is cheap; to travel 25 kilometers by bus from San Nicolas to Esteli only costs 15 cordobas, or 55 cents. So with a huge percentage of the population dependent on a public transportation system highly subsidized by the government, it is possible to travel cheaply almost anywhere in Nicaragua.

To get from place to place, then, you don't have to have a lot of money, but you do need to have time. There are two types of buses traveling between most major Nicaraguan cities: express buses and “ruteado” buses. Express buses are usually big and shiny on the outside, like charter buses in the US, and they can get you where you're going relatively quickly, with not many stops along the way.

Ruteados, on the other hand, take foreeeeeeever. Ruteados, or “chicken buses,” as they've been dubbed by tourists surprised by the abundance of farm animals permitted on public buses, are really just souped-up American school buses. After a certain number of years of carrying American children to and from school, these buses are deemed unsafe and are shipped off to Central America, where they are painted bright colors, modified so that they can carry more people, and sent on treacherous routes through rivers and up and down steep dirt roads. Many of the buses still have the original school bus signs attached above the driver's seat: “Your child's safety is our business.” These are mixed in with Jesus stickers and Spanish religious truisms: “No soy el dueño del mundo, pero si soy el hijo del dueño.” The bus from Esteli to La Garnacha has the label of the year that it was made: 1978.

With ruteado buses, you don't get tickets or assigned seats. This means that once the bus pulls up to the bus terminal, everyone races to get on, shoving each other aside or running to the back door, in an effort to get a seat. The least aggressive passengers are left standing in the aisle. The weird thing is that after all of this survival-of-the-fittest clawing and pushing dies down and everyone is settled into their places, people go back to being downright chummy with each other. If there is a mother standing in the aisle and holding her baby, a seated passenger will offer to hold the baby, and the mother hands her baby over to a complete stranger.

Because the bus owners earn money not based on how many trips they take, but on how many passengers ride the bus, they never turn anyone down. Even if the bus is completely packed to the gills, the bus driver will stop to let more people on. When the bus is really full, people ride on top of the bus. On the most packed bus I've ever ridden on, at one point I realized that I was standing obliquely, with my head not directly above my feet.

Ruteado buses also don't have specific bus stops. You can flag the bus down from anywhere along its route and it will stop to let you on. This makes it especially slow going, since often people will stand 20 feet away from each other so that the bus has to stop twice instead of just once. Another reason that ruteados take so long to get anywhere is that often, the bus driver will stop the bus and, without any warning, get off the bus for 15 or 20 minutes to have breakfast.

Every time the buses near a substantially-sized town, a huge horde of vendors climb on the bus and ride it until the next town, pushing their way through the passengers and advertising their wares in their own unique singsongs. “Helote helote heloooooote!” or “Tajadas y papitas, tajadas y papitas.” But it's not just food that they sell; they also sell some really strange things – fingernail clippers, medicine, moralizing booklets – and somehow, amazingly, the passengers buy these things. Sometimes the vendors give long, 10-minute spiels about whatever it is they're selling, always beginning by saying, “I know that it's rude to interrupt your journey, but please just give me a moment of your time.”

There are three things we've found in our extensive research into the Nicaraguan public transportation system that were true on almost every bus we've ridden. One is that buses always smell like corn. You might think that with so many people packed into such a small space, the buses would absorb an unpleasant body odor, but usually the pervading odor is just corn. The second rule is that buses almost always blare loud music. In this way, we've become overly-familiar with the favorite bachata, reggaeton, ranchera, and Christian tunes popular among many Nicaraguans. Sometimes, on the buses lucky enough to be endowed with flat-screen TVs, these tunes are accompanied by lewd music videos of almost-naked women shaking it while ugly men sing at them.

The final constant of every single Nicaraguan bus I've ever been on is the general good nature of all of the passengers. It is stunning to me how well people put up with extremely uncomfortable circumstances. I consider myself a person with a fairly high tolerance for discomfort, but I am like a whiny baby compared with most Nicaraguan bus-riders. When buses are so crowded that people's bodies are forced into weird corners and contortions, when the bus driver inexplicably stops for half an hour, when the bus is so hot that a sheen of sweat pastes your clothes to your skin – when any of these things happen, you don't hear a complaining peep out of a single passenger. This, I think, is the biggest lesson that the Nicaraguan public transportation system has to teach us.