A Colon bus tale

The land crumbles, the vehicle runs off the road, the traffic grinds to a halt, the neighbors come out to gawk, either in that order or some other --- it’s everyday life on Panama’s second most important drag. The Trans-Isthmian Highway (Transistmica) was built by US troops during the Second World War and when it became open to postwar personal and commercial traffic it became a major fact of the nation’s economic life. But that was then, and since then it was neglected in favor of a Panama-Colon freeway that never happened, to point that the over-used Transistmica, which had its dangerous curves and intersections in the best of times, seems to be crumbling away at the edges.

That doesn’t stop the Colon-Panama buses. I was coming back from the Atlantic side on a late morning bus, sitting towards the rear. The guava tart was a big doughey but other than that everything was going well and on schedule down at the bus terminal. The rear TV screen and speakers weren’t working, so I could barely make out the American space opera via its Spanish subtitles, whenever I cared to look.

11:35 - Traffic stopped, about a mile or two before Rio Gatun, about 15 minutes ago. Is my mind going quickly? A hearse has just passed by on the right, driving on the road’s shoulder. How’s that old song go --- “Never laugh when a hearse goes by...”?

I laugh. No use getting upset about it. This is Panama. I have no pressing appointments this day. Why shouldn’t I laugh?

11:55 - This bus has moved about 100 feet in the past 20 minutes. An Electoral Tribunal pickup whizzes by on the shoulder. Up on the screen, the space aliens just about have the earthlings on the run. It’s a horrible gory massacre.

12:10 - Haven’t moved at all in 15 minutes.

12:15 - Traffic is starting to move in the opposite direction!

Meanwhile, the tide of the on-screen battle has turned. There are bits of burning metallic space alien everywhere, our hero got the foxy lady, but this bus ain’t movin’ and it’s 12:21.

12:26 - Up ahead around the bend, our lanes start to creep to life. A couple of babies are crying, one of them putting up a major squall.

12:38 - We start to crawl.

12:42 - We cross the Gatun River, upon which a bunch of kids out of school for vacation are casually paddling their cayucos.

OK, there it is --- so did the accident cause the little landslide, or was it the other way around, or just a coincidence? Seems like the whole community is out here to gawk, and off on the other side of the road is this horribly mangled big billboard.

Note that not too long ago residents of this area staged a series of protests about what they claim are dangerous conditions along the Transistmica in Colon.

But let me not purport to assign fault or even demonstrate causality on the basis of what I have seen from bus windows. It’s just another Panamanian traffic jam.

And at 12:49, traffic starts moving at normal speed again.

I’ll get to Perejil about an hour and half later than I had expected. That’s well after the threat of malicious brain-eating metallic space aliens was repulsed by the good guys.

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travel

A Colon bus story