Bus Transportation

Inter-departmental bus transportation in Nicaragua is not that different from long-distance bus transportation in the US; there is a set bus schedule, and buses are usually fairly on time. The main differences are 1) in the US you typically buy a ticket days or weeks in advance, but in Nicaragua you pay for the ticket once you’re already on the bus and it has left the terminal, or at the bus terminal just before boarding, and 2) in Nicaragua if there aren’t enough seats for everyone, some people just stand. There are large buses which are broken into two categories: expreso buses, which will drop people off anywhere along the route but will only pick people up at designated bus stops, and ruteado buses, which will pick people up and drop them off anywhere along the route. There are also smaller buses, which are about the size of 16-passenger vans, and are called microbuses. Microbuses generally fill up entirely at their departure city, and go all the way to their destination city with very few stops. You can get off anywhere along the route, but people generally don't. The ruteado buses generally cost about $0.75-1.00/hour, the expreso buses generally cost about $1.00-1.25/hour, and the microbuses generally cost about $1.25-1.50/hour.

Intra-departmental bus transportation, however, is very different from short-distance bus transportation in the US, mostly in the fact that it actually exists. It seriously blows my mind that there is, to the best of my knowledge, only one bus that goes between Jefferson and Frederick every day. One trip to Frederick in the morning, and one trip back to Jefferson in the evening; if that doesn’t fit your schedule, you have to have a car. We’ve actively designed a system where it’s nearly impossible to live in the US, outside of a handful of densely-populated cities, without owning a car. In Nicaragua, you could easily live without one (I've been doing that for over two years). To get from my small training town to one of the nearby cities, I either walked all the way (it was only about 30 minutes to each of them from my house), or I started walking down the road to one of them, and held my hand out when I saw a bus going in the same direction; there was almost always a bus within about five minutes. To get to the nearby city now, I usually bike, because money.

The large buses are called chicken buses in English. Chicken buses are former school buses from the US that I assume became cost-prohibitive to fix after not passing an emissions test or after breaking down too many times. And this isn’t just conjecture, I occasionally see chicken buses that still have their old US school district or county written on the side of them. They’re usually (though not always) painted rather flamboyantly, and some also have extra unnecessary lights on the outside for no apparent reason. I seriously wish school buses in the US could be decked out this fantastically. Sometimes they even have flat-screen TVs which play movies or music videos (at full volume, of course). You can also get on and off the buses from the door at the front or the one at the back, which is convenient. Also, they're never really "full", per se. Seriously, it’s rare for a ruteado bus to pass you by because it's completely full. There have been times when I’ve been on a bus that I thought must be completely full, but then it pulls over to pick up more people, and somehow more room just magically appears. In physics, it's a law that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, but Nicaraguans regularly try to prove that wrong.

Oh yeah, and one more thing, bus drivers all drivers here are batshit insane. They frequently get within a couple inches of other vehicles, even motorcycles, while driving. They use both sides of curvy roads when nobody’s coming the other direction, and sometimes even when other vehicles are coming. Sometimes I’ll think that the road I’m on only has two lanes, but then a driver just decides that this section of the road now has three lanes. For a while, I actively tried to not sit near the front of buses, because I really didn’t want to be able to see out of the front window, but now I’ve honestly gotten used to it. They also don’t always come to a complete stop to let me on and off. That’s not a joke, by the way, I’ve seriously had to get on and off buses while they were still moving. It’s not frequent, but it happens. It’s quite fun.