Safe In The Arms Of Our Little Bus

You have to give our humble Sicchez bus company some credit – they try. Yes, our knees are crammed up our noses as we bump along for eight hours with cumbia turned up to ear-shattering levels (Peruvians think we’re so lame for not loving that). And yes, they stop every three minutes to load and unload. But for goodness sakes, they get you where no one else wants to go and are the lifeline to our humble town.
In this spirit of service, one day our bus company decided to try complying with security regulations. For such a tiny company it’s easy to pass under the inspection radar, since the ride has seen only a couple of low-level security incidents: once a few punks tried to beat up and steal money from the guy who collects the money and works the door, only to have a local riding the bus pull a gun from his pants and shoot at them; and once some drugs were found stashed in someone’s suitcase on top of the bus after police were tipped off (none of which Brian and I have witnessed). But by and large, our ride is pretty tranqulio.

Somewhat of a surprise then, when upon boarding the bus in Piura for Sicchez one random day, we encounter a guy at the door with a metal detector wand. After watching him for a few minutes, it was clear he was the token security guy for the day – given a new toy and a quick ¨Check them out¨ before being posted at the bus door. Every single person that walked by him beeped like mad yet he never paused to check anything. His only preoccupation was passing the wand over everything as people got on. Wand passed over handbag…done. Wand passed over pocket of guy…done. Looking out the window a few minutes later Brian and I saw people boarding the bus while the ¨security officer¨ was finding sweet relief while using the wand as a backscratcher. It was soon time to go, and our intrepid security officer couldn’t figure how to turn the wand back on (accidentally turned off while scratching back??). No worries, the guy performing magic tricks on the bus eventually showed him how. Maybe next time he’ll get it right…or not, since we’ve never seen him since.