Goodbye, red double-deckers

Last Friday was the last day of service for London’s famous red double-decker buses. They have long been the backbone of London’s transit system, but are now being retired in favor of buses are more accessible to people with disabilities. Even though the double-decker buses have only been in London for the last fifty years or so, they have become as much a symbol of London as Big Ben or Buckingham Palace. I have to admit, I never rode on a red double-decker bus in London and now I wish I had. I did, however, ride the London Underground subway system which I thought was impressive, but a little anti-climatic. Maybe I watch too much TV, but I expected the Underground to be filled with angry London youths with mohawks, snooty aristocratic types, football hooligans and chimney sweeps shouting “’ello, Guv’nah!” Instead, Londoners I found Londoners to be normal people, just riding the subway in an orderly fashion.

I’ve always thought that the best way to absorb the culture of a city is to ride the public transportation that the locals use rather than going with a tour group or renting a car. You can see so much about the culture of the city you are visiting simply by sitting on a bus, train or subway with the people that live there. It goes without saying that I would prefer to do this when I’m in a foreign county, but it is even more true for traveling in America. America is vastly underrated among Americans that like to travel, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. If I had a choice between spending a year traveling the United States or a year traveling one other continent in the world, I tell you, it would be a real toss-up. The United States – especially the fly-over states -- is so geographically and culturally diverse that you could spend a lifetime seeing it all. Furthermore, the best way to see these areas is riding the local transportation.

Chicago’s L trains give more than their money’s worth when visiting the city. A ride from O’Hare to downtown can give you a real look at what a major US city looks like from the inside out. My favorite route is the Red Line, getting on at the terminal at Howard Street. From there, the train runs on an elevated track between buildings. You can look out the train window into backyard porches and windows that are facing the tracks. If the train wasn’t moving so fast, you could tell the color of someone’s eyes who happened to be sitting on a porch at the time. Once, a train stopped for a few minutes and an elderly lady noticed that the whole car seemed to be peering down at her on her patio. She indignantly folded her newspaper and stomped off inside, slamming her door behind her. She reappeared a few moments later to give us the evil eye, let her dog in and slam the door once again. The Red Line goes underground at the Near North Side and reemerges at Roosevelt. During the ride, you pass by landmarks such as Wrigley Field, Michigan Ave, Loyola… and Cabrini -Green. Cabrini-Green, perhaps one of the most infamous housing projects in the United States, and it looked like Fallujah. As the L passed between the buildings, they got increasingly more dilapidated. Soon, I was looking out the window into burned out buildings, buildings that had sides demolished but were still standing, and piles of rubble. One building had been burned out, almost perfectly, in half. It looked like a real life cross-section of a building you see diagrams of in architectural digests. From the L, I could see a twelve story building with people living inside the apartments, one wall completely exposed. Once man had a BBQ going in there; another room looked like a crack den. I live in San Francisco and gentrification has become contentious topic. When urban redesign is done correctly, like in the inner city of Atlanta, a good mixture of low and medium-income housing in the same neighborhood can drastically improve the condition of schools and other factors that contribute to poverty. Seeing at the problems first-hand that dense pockets of sheer poverty in areas like Chicago and New Orleans cause make me think that the old paradigm of grouping people together in socio-economic areas, in the long run, hurts everyone. Even the rich people.

Riding New York City’s subway and San Francisco’s MUNI are very similar in the sense everyone rides them, regardless of their background, and if you are observant enough you start to recognize the cultural microcosm inside the cars themselves. The fascinating thing I find about riding the subway or MUNI is that something strange, funny or scary can happen to you almost every single time you ride if you’re observant enough. In San Francisco, for example, I have seen the weirdest things riding MUNI that really should warrant its own story rather than including it here. San Francisco is famous for its locals that have a penchant for public nudity, masturbation and urination. If you are visitor and want a primer to this weird and often disturbing phenomenon, MUNI is a good place to start.

One of the absolute best experiences I have ever had riding buses around a country is in El Salvador and Guatemala. It is a phenomenonal experience that, in itself, is worth the price of a plane ticket. Spending a full day traveling was no chore because of the diverse and amazing scenery you see, people you meet and food you eat. The public buses in El Salvador are old American Blue Bird buses (the old yellow ones used to ferry kids around) that were purchased by the government and converted into transit buses. When I say “convert” I really mean “pimped out.” The safety mechanisms that prevent the front door and rear emergency exit from opening while moving have been removed. A stereo is usually installed next the driver, with speakers drilled into the side walls playing local El Salvadoran music or Reggaeton. The drivers’ area is as ornate as it is cluttered; Virgin Mary of Guadalupe statues and trading cards of different saints adorn the huge dashboard. Beads and fuzzy balls hang from the ceiling and front windows.

The outsides of the buses are painted in a style that is both practical and a collage of many different styles. Every single bus is unique and hand painted. Some have murals on the sides of oceans, forests or Nativity scenes. Others are two-tone paint jobs with simple designs or stickers. I was in a small town called Tazumal in northwestern El Salvador, and I saw a bus that had “METALLICA” written on the front, in the bands lettering. It was prefect too, like I was looking at the album cover of Master of Puppets! I chased after it to get a picture but couldn’t catch up. I can’t express how diverse and colorful these buses are; the outsides are adorned with everything from silver ladies, clasped hands praying, heavy metal band names, pictures of animals, etc. The front and back of the buses always have the number of the bus route and the starting and destination cities. These numbers and letters are always different as well. Some are block letters, some are written in the Iron Maiden style of lettering (Central Americans LOVE heavy metal), dripping blood, Gothic or a cursive style. The buses are a real source of pride for the El Salvadoran people. After being wrecked by over a decade of bloody civil war, the country doesn’t have a much by the way of infrastructure. Even though the machines themselves are old, they are well maintained and deeply loved by everyone that works on or rides in them. The system is extensive, reliable and respected. The bus drivers themselves sincerely care about the bus, the riders and the route. The buses in El Salvador are a symbol of achievement and civic pride. It is their way of standing tall and proud after the civil war and building something that benefits the whole country.

I always enjoyed the bus rides. There are way too many potholes to read a book, so I usually looked out the window, talked to someone in Spanglish or just watched the locals interact. In the bigger cities, there was a revolving door of religious preachers and food vendors that enter the bus, give a lecture on morals or sell caramelized peanuts or purses and then get off a few stops up. I watched them and they usually crossed the street and waited for the bus approaching from the opposite direction. I am sure they did this all day; catching a bus in one direction, selling something or preaching something, then getting off, only to repeat it over and over again. In Guatemala City, a boy stepped on the bus wearing a bear costume and red paint on his face. Once the bus starting moving, he broke out in his routine or singing and dancing. I wish I could tell you what it was, but I didn’t understand a word of it. It seemed funny and the bus was roaring with laughter. He came by collecting money and I have him a few quetzals for making me laugh even though I didn’t know why I was laughing.

I don’t want to paint so rosy of a picture so that you all quit your jobs and live out the rest of your days riding the buses in El Salvador. Believe you me, they are not without their drawbacks. Being old school buses, they are very uncomfortable for anyone over 5’5”. I’m 6’2”, so I had to do some creative positioning with my legs in a packed bus. As I mentioned before, the emergency door in the back is usually unlocked, if not flapping open. One of the first long distance buses I took was from the capital city, San Salvador, to Santa Ana. The bus was totally packed; standing room only. When we reached the highway, the driver punched it to about 60mph and all of a sudden the rear emergency door opened and was flapping in the wind. I expected panic to ensue: women clutching their kids in horror and the driver gingerly pulling over to the side, evacuating and radioing in for a replacement bus. That would happen in America, undoubtedly, along with the stream of lawsuits suing over the mental trauma of having a bus door open on up on the freeway.

Not in El Salvador.

A small heroic boy climbed over some groceries and hung out the back of the bus while his brother held onto his belt to keep him from falling out. After a couple of lunges, he finally caught the door and pulled it shut. I was amazed at the bravado of this kid, but after spending two weeks in Central America, his performance was pretty run of the mill. People do things all the time in most other countries that seem dangerous or foolish to Americans. I witnessed all sorts of things that, at first glance made you gasp, but after some thought you realize that necessity is the mother of invention and sometimes necessity makes you hang out of a bus to get something because no one else is going to do it for you.

One particularly humorous experience happened at about 7 in the morning in Antigua, Guatemala. I walked to the main bus terminal to catch a bus to Guatemala City. A boy, no older than 10, was standing on the hood shouting “GUATE, GUATE, GUATE.” The bus driver or the money collector will usually stand somewhere conspicuous and shout the destination of the bus to passerbys. I suspect that the zeal in which they try to get riders might be motivated by my theory that they either get a commission for each rider, or they pocket a portion of the fare. I missed a bus before because I didn’t know “Guate” is what locals call Guatemala City, but I didn’t let it trip me up again. I got onto the bus, stowed my bag and waited. I was one of the first people on the bus and in the course of 20 minutes, the bus was packed like a can of sardines. There was a body, bag or animal in every conceivable nook in that bus. I gave my seat to an old, decrepit lady and was quickly squished into a corner by a mass of bodies. My chin was touching my chest and legs bent at a 30 degree angle like an Abu Ghraib stress position just to keep my head from slamming into the roof when we hit a pothole. Four hours of this lay in front of me, so I tried to relax and just go with it. The ten year old money collector entered the bus and muttered something under his breath, probably something about the overcrowded bus. Flashbacks of my Santa Ana trip played though my mind and I hoped that the back emergency exit didn’t fly open this time. It seemed way too crowded and I knew, if it did, someone would fly out and eat shit on the pavement below. The boy, determined to collect his money, climbed on top of a seat and made his way to the back of the bus and all the way forward again, stepping on the backs of the seats, over peoples heads. I watched him for as long as I could, and sure enough, he collected fare from every single person in that bus. I made it to Guate in one piece but I felt like I spent four hours locked in the trunk of a taxi cab.

Another particularly harrowing set of bus rides I took was around Jerusalem and the long distance Israeli buses between major cities. In November of 2003, right in the middle of the second Intifada, I landed in Tel Aviv and immediately hit the streets. Clutching my phrase book, I asked the driver in poor Hebrew if he could let me off near the U.S. Embassy, which is where all the hotels are on the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv. He answered me in English and I walked to the back of the bus. I was about one or two civilians in a packed bus – everyone else were Israeli soldiers. I sat at the back of the bus, and as I looked up over the seats, I saw rows of M-16 rifle barrels sticking up over the seats that ran the length of the bus. I sat across from a guy from Minnesota. His parents are Israeli born and emigrated to the United States before he was born. After September 11th, he moved to Israel to live with his aunt and joined the Israeli Defense Force. He told me that the IDF uses public buses as their main mode of transport and that I shouldn’t be afraid because no suicide bomber would ever walk into a bus with 50 armed 18 and 19 year olds that had itchy trigger fingers.

Jerusalem was different. I took the city bus twice around town, but started walking everywhere after a bus bombing took place one night in the old section of Jerusalem. I didn’t see or hear the explosion, but I saw the twisted green hulk of the bus burning on CNN. When I went outside I saw the same green buses packed with people and just decided to walk. I saw a lot of the city that way too, but nothing beats riding in a bus.

News stories and blogs are filled with people over the last few days lamenting the loss of the double-deckers in London. For me, it’s bittersweet. I don’t get too sentimental when a legacy dies because a new one is just around the corner. Travel is more about the journey itself, whatever method that may be, than the destination.