The Bus

So to get to the interior you either have to take a one hour chartered flight or a 12 hour bus ride... guess which one we opted for.

So we ordered out bus tickets in advance but that didn't really seem to matter at all. I was a little curious about why the bus left at 9 p.m. but boarded at 7:30... upon arrival at the "bus station" which was really a corner of a kareoke bar, it became clear that it was actually going to take an hour and a half to load this sucker. Except it actually took over two hours.

So let's set the scene: Imagine a really cramped bar with lots of sweaty people and then add heaps of baggage and really loud kareoke sung really badly. There seems to be movement of people into different areas but nothing resembling a line or any sort of order is apparent. We walked back and forth between two people who seemed to be in charge, each one telling us to go to the other. Ticket man (which we eventually figure out) told us that he wants to do our tickets last, so we should just "relax" for a while (I think by relax he meant stand in a very tight area and go deaf from kareoke).

Most of the baggage was crumpled cardboard boxes held together with packing tape except for one notable exception... the machete suitcase. How did I know the suitcase was filled with machetes you might ask? Well, because they didn't really fit inside so the dangerous, pointy parts were sticking out and sort of wrapped in rags in a cursory fashion. Nothing more comforting than getting on a bus with enough machetes to have a little massacre.

The bus was surprisingly comfortable considering there was no air conditioning. We both promptly fell asleep (and only half because of the dramamine). Except the fun part about traveling in Guyana is a) the paved road only lasts for the first hour of the trip and b) at every town there are lazy security check points.

So the efficient way to do a middle of the night security checkpoint on a bus would be for a police officer to board the bus and go seat to seat and look at each person's passport. Instead the bus just sort of stopped and no one gave any instructions but one by one as people woke up, they mosied off the bus and when a critical mass had done so, Shaan and I decided to follow. We walked through some poorly lit areas and eventually found a man at a desk with a checklist written in 6 point font with every person's name on it and he painstakingly tried to match names to passports.

Sleep, and repeat.