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Prague Again, and a San Fran Chicken Bus

While Ari was spending May Day being smoke bombed in Prague, I spent Cinco de Mayo wandering around San Francisco and coincidentally found myself at a café called Prague. I was touring the town with my English friend Kim, who was passing through on her way to Oz via Cuba. I’d met Kim in Guatemala, where her humor made her a favorite among my friends. Accompanying us were Steve, who I have traveled with many times to places like Mexico and Portugal, and Dan, who was the impetus behind my Iceland trip, and whose antics are detailed in the posts Flags of Our Soccer Hooligans, Part 1 & Part 2. Dan flew to Guatemala for two of my three birthday fortnights there, and, being a stuntman, generally raised hell. He’s also Ari’s cousin, and we met working together at South Park, before he got his stunt career going. Hope you got all that.

So it was Cinco de Mayo, and Kim, Dan, Steve and I were all in San Francisco sitting in a café called Prague. Kim had never been to the Bay and had suggested a walking tour. The tour morphed into a pub crawl—everything morphs into a pub crawl with me because, truly, I like to get to know a city through its watering holes. Our crawl started at Prague (sedate, relaxing), moved to a place in Chinatown called the Buddha Bar (dingy, suspect), and thence downtown to the famous Irish Bank Bar. The Bank Bar is a lively place, with the wooden décor typical of its ilk, and an outdoor section set up in an alley between two tall brick buildings. The crowd was businessclones and financiers all the way, with a few local hipsters mixed in. Around 5 p.m. all this changed when a chicken bus pulled up in the mouth of the alley.

As most Central American travelers can explain, a chicken bus is an American school bus converted for use as intramunicipal transport. Because it is more cost-effective for poor countries than buying and operating modern buses, nations like Guatemala and El Salvador buy old U.S. school buses and use them as the backbone of their transportation system. Individual owners pimp the buses and what results is something that wouldn’t look out of place at your local drag strip. In Guatemala
these transformations are taken to the nth degree. We’re talking muscled-out engines, glitter paint jobs, chrome exhausts, crazy lighting systems, stereos that could drive a house party, and—always—a beloved's name emblazoned on the sides. The “chicken bus” moniker is derived from the myth that if you ride one, there will invariably be chickens running in the aisles. In truth, these buses get so packed that any animal would quickly be crushed. I’ve never seen animals or any other commercial cargo ride anywhere but on top, in crates or cages lashed to the luggage rack.

Anyway, like an apparition conjured from my memory, this chicken bus appeared at the Irish Bank Bar. Out tumbled about twenty Mexicans, along with a five-piece mariachi band, and some model types dressed in black tops and miniskirts. This crowd poured into the alley and began singing and dancing, as the model types distributed maracas and sombreros. Pretty soon there was a real party going on, and quite a few members of the suit-and-tie army were trying to make time with the freespirited models. I finally asked one of the girls what was going on, and she explained that this was the latest stop for them on an all day Cinco de Mayo pub crawl. I’m not sure if I knew it was Cinco de Mayo until that moment. I’ve sort of lost track of American holidays over the years (yes, I’m calling Cinco de Mayo an American holiday, just like St. Patrick’s Day).

After perhaps an hour the partiers gathered to head on to the next destination. I asked one of the model types if we could join them. She said, “Hell yeah, absolutely.” Not long afterward we were on the chicken bus. What I liked most about this part is that other people tried to crash the party and were turned away. I guess the Cinco de Mayo crazies could tell we were cool folk, useful at a party. Actually, while part of my motivation for joining the crowd was that I knew wherever they were going would be fun, I also wanted to see what it felt like to ride on a chicken bus in San Francisco. So much of my life has revolved around these things. I still remember my first chicken bus ride, into the wilds of El Salvador in search of the Tortuga Surf Lodge, only to end up lost at a coastal crossroads.

Inside, the San Fran bus was exactly as I remembered—too many people packed into seats meant for grade-schoolers, and a loud sound system blasting ranchero music. Where this bus beat those in Central America is that there was a giant tub of Tecates on ice, shots of tequila being poured, and mariachis playing in between bumps. It was a great nostalgia trip. In Guatemala I eventually boycotted the chicken buses, mainly because gringos always have to fight not to be cheated on the fares. It was draining after a while. No matter how good my Spanish was, nor how savvy I was about the local customs, my black skin told the cobrador—the fare collector—that I was a foreigner ripe for cheating. Whites have to deal with this too, of course—cobradores are equal opportunity cheaters. Eventually I learned to simply give the correct fare and ignore anything else that was said to me. Sometimes this worked fine, but other times the cobrador threatened to toss me off the bus if I didn't pony up more quetzales. My answer was always something along the lines of: “Go ahead, if you can.” I never got tossed off a bus. But even winning these battles felt like losing somehow, and after a year of this I finally went totally bougie and simply chartered a car whenever I had to travel.

But this particular day in San Fran, riding a chicken bus was about the coolest thing I could imagine. After a twenty minute journey we were deposited at another bar and more mariachi was played, more dances danced, more shots knocked back, until around sunset the party petered out. Everyone was headed home to get refreshed for the real partying later that night. We walked out into the San Francisco dusk with no idea where we were. Not only had the bus taken a circuitous route, its windows had been covered with banners and placards, making it impossible to see where we were going. We stood on a corner to hail a cab and a guy in a Lincoln town car stopped at the light and gave us the eye. After a moment he yelled that he’d give us a ride wherever we needed to go. Turns out he was the owner of a limousine service—FG Limo—and a hell of a nice guy. If you’re ever in the Bay and need a sweet ride, Rufus J. Fields is the man. For the price of a comparable cab ride he took us in luxury back to where we’d started—Prague.

Labels: chicken bus, cinco de mayo, guatemala, prague café

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 1:59 PM