Though muffled, cumbia was thumping through the closed door while the black light attached to the ceiling pulsed in time with the base from the music. The music was blaring out the old and frayed speakers attached to the walls with twisted coat hangers and looked like they could fall down with any bump of the bus. The cloth hung as a drape between me and the driver was pulled so tight it was torn and exposed what it was intended to hide, giving me fragments of the view from the front of the bus.

My intention had been to sleep on this Bolivian overnight bus ride from Cochabamba to Sucre but 10 minutes into this 10 hour ride I knew that it would be a sleepless night. I realized too late that this was the bus ride you were warned about and quickly decided not to tell my parents of this nights escapades and spare them lack of sleep that this ride was causing me.

The bus had seen better days and by its ragged appearance those days were 30 years ago. When I stepped out of the Sucre train station and on to the boarding platform I instantly knew why this trip was only costing me $3; though in more than a few ways it was costing me more than that. We had individual seats but that was where the luxury ended. The seats had long been worn away over thousands of trips and with no storage space under the bus, my 45L backpack was nestled between my legs. In a small measure of reprise it thankfully soon made its way to the isle giving me the leg room deemed suitable for an average Bolivian and not a 6’2″ gringo.

The mascot of the bus was a reasonably sized plush stuff rabbit hanging garroted from the drivers rear view mirror. Luckily it had been imbued with a blindfold saving it from the view that the driver and I shared.

The driver hurdled the bus down the cobblestone road at a pace that I would surely compact our estimated ten hour driving time by a couple of hours. Potholes littering the road cause the driver to swerve rampantly with such vigor that my messenger bag would have been thrown from my lap if I wasn’t clenching into it tightly.

The road was one lane each way and the driver frequently crossed the double yellow line into the oncoming lane to pass slow cars and blind corners posed no reason to stop.

Periodically, with no apparent rhyme or reason, the driver hit the horn which was in a similar state of disrepair to the rest of the bus and its loud aggressive blare quickly faded to nothing with a Doppler like efficiency only to be used again a few seconds later.

I was comforted solely by the fact that although I was the only gringo on the bus no one else seemed to be bothered by the driving. Bolivians of all ages had wrapped themselves in blankets and were sleeping the night away clearly unbothered by the bus leering back and forth as it sped precariously towards Sucre arriving two hours early after all.