Colombian Cola

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Yesterday I came home from a week-long vacation including a 5-day trek to and from a Lost (but now Found) City in the coastal mountains of Colombia. Of course I'll tell you more about that, but another time. Today I'll return to one of my favourite blog topics since coming to Colombia: Crazy Transportation Stories.

Because of Easter and the extreme Catholocism of Colombia (extreme as in extremely-high-levels-of, not extreme as in orthodox-to-the-point-of-existing-solely-on-a-diet-of-mass-wafers-and-baptism-water), many people had the whole week off, while everybody else had Thursday and Friday off. This meant the bus station was pure chaos when Karen and I tried to return from Santa Marta to Barranquilla last night. The bus station has multiple desks for different companies, so we checked a couple of near-deserted ones before resigning ourselves to the extremely long line emanating from the only bus company that seemed to be operating. We soon discovered that in addition to its length, the ticket line for "Brasilia" buses was one of the slower moving lines I've seen.

On a couple of occasions, there appeared to be some sort of announcement that caused people to rush outside to the bus area. Of course, these were not official announcements, and if I were to guess I would venture that most were caused by some idiot screaming "OH MY GOD THERE'S A BUS BUT IN SPANISH!!!" In Canada, people would be like "WTF?", but things are just a little different here, so people who had been patiently waiting in line were willing to lose their place at the drop of a hat just in case this crazy proclamation was somehow true.

(A brief diversion: I wonder if this mis-match of behaviours is indicative of a transition period in the Colombian way of life. One of the things that is said about Colombia, as with many non-Western countries, is that there are no lines, and you just have to force your way to the front to do whatever you're trying to do. Well, in some cases that's true here, but then in some cases it's totally the opposite, so I wonder if it's only relatively recently that bus companies have made people stand in line to buy tickets.)

Anyway, I usually wandered out to see what the deal was while leaving Karen to guard the bags, but the mad rush never seemed to be based in fact, so once again we resigned ourselves to standing in what now looked like about an hour's wait.

At some point I headed to the bathroom, but stopped when I noticed a still-small-but-a-little-bigger-than-before crowd around the ticket window of a different bus company which had previously told us their next bus would be at 4AM. It seemed like the regular dude talking to the bus company dude was getting the same story we had already heard, but he seemed to be more persistent, and maybe because of the ever-growing crowd, the bus company dude got on the phone, presumably to find out if they could in fact scratch together another bus. As the rumour of the possibility of another bus bubbled and swirled through the station, another deluge of hopefuls descended on the scene, and fairly quickly the torrent had formed into a half-circle pressing up against the ticket window with three distinct queues emanating from it in different directions. As one of the early arrivals, and also as a Master of Sneakiness, I had got myself near the front of what I believed would eventually be the champion of the Great Battle of the Three Queues.

After about 10 minutes consulting on the phone, the bus dude announced that there would be more buses, at which point there was a great cheer from the crowd and even more re-shuffling of bodies than there had constantly been for the previous 10 minutes. Even though there were no station officials present to regulate the process, it eventually became clear that the line was self-regulating: first, as the longest and most centrally located, my line was, in fact, selected as the line of choice, after which point anyone who tried to beat the system was given the Crowd Treatment: a densely-packed mob of loud, impatient Colombians yelling "La cola, la cola!" (the line, the line!) It was so loud that I'm not exaggerating when I say it sounded like every single person was yelling during these moments. The guy behind me was one of the most active proponents, which I was grateful for, because he was likely one of the reasons our line eventually became the golden standard. Even I got into it eventually.

Then there were those who, rather than stubbornly going for it and drawing the crowd's ire, tried the sneakier tactic of paying someone in the line to buy tickets for them. In the situation's formative minutes, while things were still somewhat chaotic, I saw this tactic work on a couple of occasions including, hilariously, with the guy behind me, previously mentioned as one of the crowd's most active policemen. But after the queue had firmly established itself, these people were treated with just as much if not more derision from the crowd.

I got the tickets, and even though we had to wait more than an hour, at least we knew we would make it home that night, and playing Crazy Eight Countdown was more fun than waiting in a line not sure if there even would be buses when we finally got to the front.

This has been another installment of Crazy Colombian Bus Adventures!