In Colombia, long distance bus travel is part of life. But bus travel here is less greyhound and more grand prix than what people in the land of nascar would expect. It's kind of like the dreamcast game Crazy Taxi, only it's a bus full of people, and it's in the andes, you die if you lose, and all you get if you win is 10 minutes at a truck stop with confusing bathrooms.

The major highways are only two lanes wide, and have buildings right up alongside. They cling to cliffsides of the andes and are flanked by tiny barriers that would definitely not stop a bus. In spite of the high cost of going off the road, the bus drivers are wildly determined to pass every truck that gets in their way by passing on the other side of the road, against opposing traffic. They do this even on blind turns. I believe that if a plague of blindness swept the world, colombian buses would carry on business as usual, since sight was never a big factor anyway.

Inside the bus, although the reading lights don't work, there is a blinking meter that lets the passengers know how fast we are going. I wodner why it's there. It just scares everyone. Possibly, a human calculator could figure how far you've gone by multiplying the time spent at each velocity by the velocity. Or, you could telephone police whenever the bus driver goes to fast, and tell them to pull over your own bus. Really, though, the meter is obviously there for fun. Just like you want to know how fast your roller coaster moves, you want to know how fast this crazy bus is flying up and down these mountains. It's especially dramatic for us, though, since we always assume right away that the bus is going 90 miles per hour, instead of kilometers per hour. It is a thrill sadly lost on the metric-saavy colombians.

I really like these bus rides. Soon we have a 20 hour ride to cartajena.

Tonight we played poker in the hostel. I lost to a pair of girls from england and australia named The Kates who we keep running into in our travels.

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