Transportation in Peru

Transportation can be full of surprises in Peru, like seeing that bag on the floor of the bus start crawling around or realizing there was a little old lady in the back of the station wagon taxi with the spare tire for your entire ride. Once the bus broke down so they just waited for another company’s bus to go by and had us trade our tickets for ones from the other company (presumably reimbursing the company at a later date).

To get to my regional capital, Huaraz, from Huallanca I typically have a 3 ½-4 hour bus ride. During the rainy season its not uncommon for the weather to impact travel on some of the roads that are in worse condition but the road to Huallanca is in pretty good shape because it’s a mining town and they have the money to make sure that transportation is as good as it needs to be for them. We had one little mishap though when a bridge went out about half way between Huaraz and Huallanca.

At first I thought there was a traffic accident when our bus stopped behind a long line of traffic. But after asking around I found out that there was a bridge out and no way for the bus to get through.

This is an exact profile of the gap that used to be a bridge so it’s a bit difficult to make it out, but heck you get to see the mountains at least.

It sounded like I might have to go back to Huaraz and be stuck outside of my site for a while, but then the driver told us that the bus coming from Huallanca was stuck on the other side of the no-longer-existent bridge. Problem solved. Walk to the other side of the river (crossing an old bridge that wasn’t washed out) and both buses would return in the direction they came from. Unfortunately the police had stopped traffic a couple miles away from the bridge so we’d have to walk all the way and pray that the bus on the other side didn’t take off without us.  But for some reason the police let a few cars past that charged us a couple sols to drive us to the missing bridge.

Obviously they couldn’t drive us across a bridge that wasn’t there, though, so after a 20 minute hike out to an old bridge (through a muddy field) we made it across. And lo and behold, at the end of the line of backed up traffic was my bus waiting to go back to Huallanca.

My boots got really dirty, but you can’t really see that here. But if the blog post was all words and no pictures, it would also be no fun.

Bridges going out aren’t the only problem you can run into in Peruvian transportation. Another day on a bus we got a flat tire.

I’ve had a few flat tires in my life, so I figured it wasn’t a big deal.

But when you don’t have a jack, its time for creativity. So you use what you can find…

Rocks. I don’t even remember how they got the tire changed now, but my experience sure couldn’t offer any ideas to help them.