Getting around

After almost three years here I'm almost used to the wild and various means of transportation in El Salvador.  Any truck comes with at least two muchachos riding - and often sleeping - on top of the load.  Sometimes the muchachos really have to work, as in the bottom photo of a refrigerator being perilously delivered.  Pickups fill in all the holes in the transportation system, packing in crowds of standing-room-only passengers.  And the buses are many and various, often dangerous - bus drivers and cobradores (the guys who cram yet two more people into overcrowded buses) are often the targets of shootings when the owners of a bus line are late in paying the renta.  Still, they are inescapable, the only way most people here have to get to work or to school or to the doctor. 

I love the names and mottos and icons on our buses.  There's one called "Love and Jope" which doesn't quite work in Spanish or English, but you get the idea.  I recently drove behind a bus that proclaimed in big type, No es culpa mia, it's not my fault.  Decided to pass him quickly before he could live up to the slogan.  And my all-time favorite is a bus with Jesus on the back mirror, in his crown of thorns, like the 2nd photo here.  Underneath a motto: Salí con tu mujer, I went out with your woman.  That reverence and cheeky irreverence, cheerfully combined - muy Salvadoreño.