Really cool. To get there we took a train from Santiago to Talca, 3 hours south of Santiago, then a bus to Molina, some dinky town an hour east of Talca. Here is where things got fun - the 2 1/2 hour bus ride from Molina to Siete Tazas on a bus that looked like this:
Anyways, that's all fine and good, looks aren't everything, right? Who needs paint or a working engine or anything like that? I mean it IS a Benz ... Maybe we should have shopped around at the bus stop in Molina, instead of going with the first people who came up to us. Because before we got on this lady who worked for another company told us that our company crashed one of their buses the day before, and that her company, which costs the same, was much safer. And they had really nice buses, made post-WWII.
So we board the bus and go to the back where our luxury seats awaited us (at least we didn't have to stand, like a few of the Chileans on the bus). Suddenly, a pungent smell hit me - GASOLINE - flammable, highly toxic gasoline. Luckily, the floor of our bus had a nice layer of gasoline on it - the entire bus. Part of it was being soaked up using an advanced cleaning method consisting of newspapers.
Surprisingly no one decided to light a match, or rub some wool together or something like that, which would have easily killed all of us on board, especially with the joke of an "emergency exit" they called an escape hatch (it was welded shut). All I suffered was some dead brain cells, and the drunk Chilean dude who gave us a beer and the mildly-hallucinogenic dreams made it all worth it.
There's nothing like the constant fear of going up in flames to make things a little interesting...
TRAVEL LOG #1, featuring Franklin & really awful videography.
No comments:
Post a Comment