THE SAILOR AND THE AUTOBUS
By Debra McQueen

In the three months that I've been living aboard a sailboat anchored at Punta de Mita, I've taken the autobús to Puerto Vallarta more times than I can possibly count. That bus - ese camión - is essential to my very existence. It’s the best 18 pesos you can spend out here for an hour-and-a-half adventure that is not just transportation: it’s a culturally enriching experience.

Buses run from 5:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night, cada dia, cada quince minutos. There is an efficient system at work here, even though on the surface you can’t believe it because the buses hardly resemble each other. On the low end, there are the retired school buses, whose seats, sized for 10-year-olds, you must squeeze into by folding up your legs and bending at unnatural angles. The shock absorbers have long been distant memories, the windows are rusted shut or open, and the seats are sticky vinyl, graffitied and split with old yellow foam exposed like wounds. For the same price, if your timing is lucky, you'll ride a former luxury coach with plush velour seats, an overhead compartment for your packages, and windows that slide open and shut. And of course, there’s everything in between. Some buses have removable polyester covers on the seats that presumably get washed from time to time. Others, well, you just have to wonder.

For some drivers, this is a career and for others, a temporary stepping stone to el otro lado. How can you tell the difference? By the condition of el chofer’s bus and sometimes, himself. The temp driver sits in a bare, standard-issue seat with nothing but dust and coins on his dashboard. The career driver, in contrast, has taken pains to personalize his workspace. Often, there’s a colorful, fringed sconce across the top of the windshield. There can also be found any number of photographs, from wives and fathers and girlfriends and children to the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, Pamela Anderson and any other busty, bikini-clad female. One driver had all of these things, plus amber-encased custom Lexan knobs on a variety of levers and switches that accomplished heaven-only-knows what. He also wore black racing gloves, a natty white shirt, and had an elegant piece of buckskin laced around the gearshift as though it led to the transmission of his own personal race car.

The bus from Mita to Puerto Vallarta travels along a scenic highway dotted with orange and purple and burgundy bougainvilleas, lush greenery, garbage, incipient housing developments and billboards with political slogans and requests to keep the place clean. It tends to be cool and uncrowded on the morning trip in. If your timing is right, you'll have an older driver in no particular hurry and it will take a pleasant hour-and-a-half. But this cannot be predicted. More often, your driver will get you there at such breakneck speed you'll barely glimpse the countryside as it whips past your dusty window.

If you leave Puerto Vallarta to return in the late afternoon, it will be hot and crowded and a test of your sanity. The first time I caught the bus at 5:30, two young boys got on and sang so loudly it was impossible to carry on a conversation. When they hit us up for money I simply stared straight ahead. Then suddenly, there were so many people and parcels and objects and children (so many children!) crammed onto the bus that if all the windows hadn't been open we’d surely have run out of oxygen. At one point a campesino woman in a rayon dress was pushed so tightly next to me she was forced to sit on my knee.

In The People’s Guide to Mexico, Carl Franz wrote, “When the driver slides behind the wheel and puts the bus in gear, relax, he’s a professional with a large loving family and a strong desire to retire in one piece." This is what I reminded myself as we traveled back to Mita; this, I am certain, is the only way to mentally survive some bus rides on this road. Fortunately, I’d even seen our bus driver’s wife and kids; they’d ridden the bus part of the way, and I’d watched him watch them in his wide rearview mirror. I’d seen the young son kiss his father’s cheek when he got off the bus with his mother.

Coincidentally after his family had disembarked, our driver began attempting such speeds I was sure he intended to launch the bus into space. I clung to my parcels and pictured his round-cheeked son. And I wondered is that crucifix hanging above his head a symbol of his devotion to life, or of a suicidal fatalism? We passed everyone in our path, including other buses. We exceeded 80 miles per hour on the windy, hilly road. The wind whipped violently through open windows; I had to keep my eyes closed to avoid the gust’s sting. The seats shuddered beneath us as we roared along.

The crowd thinned out some as we got farther and farther from the city. As the sun set, we rounded a bend in the road on what felt like two wheels. That’s when something terrible happened. The combination of speed and turn and sudden decline caused a woman's five-gallon bucket to skid down the center aisle and tip over onto the steps of the bus’ entrance. This wouldn't have been a tragedy had the bus door been closed. But it was not - they never are. (I suspect the drivers keep the door open for two reasons: one, because if you close it, you never know if it will open up again and two, because to open and close it at every stop would be an inefficient use of time.) When the bucket tipped onto the steps as we bumped along, it was launched quite spectacularly from the bus. I watched it soar, heard it land with a crash as we flew by, spilling its contents all over the roadside.

While the bucket was making its getaway, its owner was chasing it down the aisle, but she stopped short of leaping out the speeding bus after it. She and the driver gasped. I gasped, too. Then the driver slowed down (this took quite a while), stopped (I cringed at how long it took with his foot pressing the brake to the floor), and backed the bus all the way up the road to where the accident had happened.

Several of us - the driver included - got off the bus and helped the woman gather up the more than 100 handmade tamales that had been flung all over the ditch. They were still warm. She clucked in disappointment and shook her head. We piled the split, dirty tamales into her bucket. "Voy a alimentarlos a mis cochinos," she told us. (I'll feed them to my pigs.) The bus driver was very apologetic. I noticed then he had a belly like Santa Claus and a thin face with large, green guero eyes. I thought I heard cicadas. I wanted to eat one of those still-warm tamales. I didn't care that they were dirty.

The driver drove no slower once we were back on the road. (Apparently he intended to make up the time lost gathering the tamales.) The woman tried to negotiate a settlement of some kind, but at that the driver balked. While I sat considering the absolute unique quality of the experience (pura Mexico), the stern-faced man in the tank top in front of me with a brand-new kid’s bike still wrapped in plastic turned around and said in English, "Bad luck."