Sorry it has been a while since I posted but we have had very limited access to WiFi. This month we are living about an hour away from decent Wifi, on a farm in Pasman, Argentina. Pasman is a town of about 200 people and it is about 8 hours north of Buenos Aries. Honestly I am loving it here. The pace of life is slow and I love that. I also have loved being disconnected from all my technology. There is something so beautiful about slowing down, working with your hands, and connecting to the people and animals around you. Anyways, on with the blog!
Over the last five months I have had the pleasure of bussing from country to country in South America. Here are the things I learned from our 10-40 hour long bus rides.
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What you see in pictures only tells about half the story. This applies to countries and busses. Getting the pleasure of spending hours driving across countries has shown me that each country has more in it than what you have seen on the travel channel or National Geographic. Colombia was far greener than I was expecting. Ecuador is way bigger than you think when you see it on a map. Not all of Peru is green and mountain filled; there is a giant desert at the top of it. There is a lot of water in Bolivia; rivers are as wide as some small lakes; Argentina is way bigger than I imagined and so biodiverse. The difference of pictures and reality also applies to busses because when you are looking up bus companies they will show you a picture of the bus and you think oh this looks nice. You book a seat with that company, then your bus actually arrives and tape is holding it together or it sounds like a plane is taking off as it idles in the loading space.
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Bus people are generally nice and helpful. From what I can tell bussing is one of the popular forms of public transportation in South America. There has only been one bus we rode on that was not full. But the people you encounter who take the bus are generally really genuine, sweet people. They want to help you and will give you good tips on food and the cities they are from.
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10 hours feels like nothing. After having to take on average 24 hour bus rides. Anything under 15 hours feels like a breeze. The longest bus we took was from Santa Cruz, Bolivia to Mendoza, Argentina and it lasted 40 hours. That was a doozy. But I now know that I can endure traveling for almost two days straight without getting off a bus with ease.
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Tall people are not made for South American busses. I am only 5’10” and my long legs did not bode well on many of these busses. Often times the person in front of me would be trying to jam their seat flatter and would crush my legs or I just could not get comfortable because there was nowhere for my legs to go.
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Sleeping on busses takes skill. When the drivers of these busses are whipping around curves in the middle of the night it would sometimes feel like a roller coaster. We encountered many busses that asked you to keep you seat belt on to keep you from falling out of your seat. Also see #4 for why sleeping would be hard.
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Travel time is not always on our schedule. One of the biggest lessons I have learned from bussing is that there are not always busses available when we think we need them. We have had to push back our plans to get to ministry in a different city because busses to that city only run once a week. This often times looks like us learning to be flexible and go with the flow. This is a great lesson to learn for many things happening in South America, time is always flexible and typically no one is on time.
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I do not get to be in the driver’s seat. Something the lord has been teaching me a lot about lately is dependence. The Lord has shown me that to be dependent on him is how he created us to live. So my need to be in control only gets in the way of his plans. He is often reminding me to move out of the driver’s seat of my life so that I can follow his good plan instead of mine.
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The grass is always greener on the other side. On many busses it is either extremely hot and sweaty, or it is freezing. When in those circumstances I am always wishing for the opposite issue because to have a taste of air conditioning when you are hot sounds like the best thing in the world. Or to have a heater on you when you are so cold sounds like it would help you sleep. What the lord reminds me of in those moments is when he told me that I was not made to live in the comfortable. The Lord asks me to live a radically extreme life for him so that means enduring hard circumstances and living in a way that looks different than what the people’s lives around me looks like.
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The journey is long but there is beauty in it. On those long bus rides the lord has shown me that just like my life the countryside can look wildly different two hours later than it did two hours before. Change is always happening, so when we are moving forward on the bus of this life He is only asking us to see the change and to roll with it. To revel in the growth and to watch and wait to see what he has as he unfolds his plan.
