I was thinking about writing about the buses - the long ones that make up the main form of non-personal transportation around South America. Not trains, not planes. Buses. 10-hour buses from Buenos Aires to Cordoba, 18-hour buses from Salta to Mendoza, 24-hour buses from Santiago to the north of Chile.

Even the cheapest long-distance buses in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay are nicer than any bus I’ve seen in the US - but I’ve also never been on a bus for longer than seven hours in the US. Here there’s moreleg room, the chairs lean back farther and there’s food (and sometimes even free alcohol). At stations passengers get off to buy drinks and food or use the bathroom while vendors get on to hawk packaged or homemade foods. Sometimes the vendors actually just hop on from the side of the road, sell while the bus is moving, and get off when they’re done.

I wrote the start to this post in my notebook during what was supposed to be a 28-hour busride from Valparaiso to Arica, the most northern (small) city in Chile on the border with Peru. After 26 1/2 hours, we pulled into a small bus station in a mountains-meet-desert-meets-ocean town (these are bountiful in Chile), and everyone stood up to get off. This was the first total exodus from the bus I had seen, so I asked my Chilean seatmate where we were. I thought he said Inica, which sounded like Arica to me (I attributed the discrepancy to the name being Quechua, an indigenous tongue, not Spanish).

Cue to me 15 minutes later, wandering down the street, wondering why the hostel was not where it claimed to be. I looked around a bit, still carrying my giant green backpack and an ever heavier shoulder bag, and began to realize that this town appeared to be called Iquique. That actually sounded more like what my seatmate had said, once I thought about it.

But what can you do? A quick trip to a kiosk with internet access, and I found out Arica was five more hours north - a busride I had aboslutely no interest in getting on at 11 a.m. on a sunny, warm day. I had even already spotted the long, sandy beach…

Fuck plans.