As part of of our ongoing economics immersion project in Argentina and Bolivia, we went to the WTTC Conference where we were able to sit down with Kali Kucera, the highly regarded land travel expert on Latin American routes and President of AndesTransit. Following is the transcript of our interview.
————Andra Moore and Celeste Miller, proMerica proGress
South America is home to a plethora of beautiful locations but not all of them get the attention they deserve. Imagine this – lost cities buried under your feet as you casually walk over the ruins of an abandoned temple, going about your day.
If you’ve ever traveled and explored the depths of Latin America, chances are that it was thanks to his helpful and systematic bus route network that he has spent many years researching and documenting.
In an age where technology seems to increasingly remove the mystique of travel, Kucera has managed to find an overlooked way to revive the thrill of adventure. He wants people to explore beyond what’s accessible via flight, and to venture to places that are lesser known but accessible to travelers who want to get there “the slow way.”
Kali Kucera: Like many travelers, in early 2007 I came to Latin America with naïve expectations that getting around would be easy. I thought that the government would have robust information systems about “their” transportation network (fact: there is no “their”, bus transportation is largely privately owned), or that a fallback plan would be I could just rent a car relatively cheaply using my own insurance as collateral. I thought that there would be just one or two choices of a bus, and I could just swipe my card at some terminal and get a bus pass that would just deduct from my balance when I got on any bus or train. I thought that stops for buses would be easy to spot and have nice little uniformly designed shelters and schedules hanging on the stop telling me when the next bus was scheduled to be there at that stop.
All of that was not only flat out wrong, it just reflected my sense of entitlement coming from a wealthy industrialized country as well as the cultural values I bring with me.
Latin American countries do not have anywhere near the cash to support my expectations, and even if they did, my expectations do not align with their cultural approaches to transportation which are more socially driven rather than institutionally driven.
So, standing on the side of a road in the mountains of Ecuador one day, it dawned on me: I don’t have to change Latin America, but everything is sitting in front of me to help foreign travelers adapt to the Latin American transportation culture in a win-win situation. In other words, I could see this as a solvable problem using information technology to give travelers a tool to translate the system into something more familiar to them.
Kali Kucera: Ah! The hard way is the best way. I travel back roads to far-flung little towns out in the bush, the places where life really happens; the places where the indigenous people or rural campesinos actually live, and that largely don’t get visited by tourists.
For all the talk I give about getting “on” the bus, I don’t emphasize enough the importance of getting “off” the bus and doing so frequently. You’ll be amazed at what you see.
So, once I’m there in some little town, I snoop around and find the little private bus offices and agencies. Even in a small village, it’s common that there will be at least two competing bus companies, and often three or four. A bus company is as common a vocation as your mom and pop’s tow truck business in a car-based culture.
I walk in and there will be this glorious antique chalkboard or a piece of paper that has been taped to the window some fifteen years ago that’s yellowed from dust and sunlight. These are the little flecks of gold that I love to find as a treasure hunter. This is information that’s only located right there on that particular spot. Of course, I check with the bus company agent if it’s still accurate, and most of the time it is. On top of the schedules, there are also routes published right there. These go to other little villages that are not even on the map, so I document all of that, get some phone numbers, and then do the geography of plotting out the route for the AndesTransit system.
A second way my team of geographers now help me discover new routes is from other travelers. I’m not the only traveler in Latin America. We have a whole community of independent explorers who tell us about their experiences of both common and uncommon routes, and I adore them! We incorporate their knowledge into our system to share it with everyone else and that is how AndesTransit is different in that we are a socially driven network.
The remaining way is that bus companies themselves publish their schedules, but they do so on obscure websites that they don’t maintain. So, you have to – ahem – be social! Contact them frequently to ask what’s changing, and then we update our system in kind. Again, it’s all about growing your sociability, because, in Latin America, information is not data, it’s the currency of a social relationship.
Kali Kucera: Well, that’s just my point. The “system” pre-dates AndesTransit. We did not invent bus routes, nor do we. We only socialize for foreigners what has always been there for eons. We’re translating into a digital platform a valuable social treasure of what Latinas and Latinos do and know naturally. They show us the way, and we as gringos are compelled to document it because that’s how we process information and grow our experience.
Kali Kucera: Oh, certainly. In fact, most travelers do. You need to expect it. I would go so far to say, in fact, that this is why people travel: because their routine at home has gotten so boringly safe that they desire some exotic experiences that flirt with danger, so they can have some story to share when they got back home how they triumphed – which may be more a subjective triumph, a growth of their worldview, some lesson learned. That’s all good, part of broadening your experience.
Now, this is not to say we promote running into danger or, god forbid, knowingly put you in danger. In fact, we have tips and blogs we give everyone, to add on to what your parents have taught you, to avoid danger. But like your parents, we know at some point we need to not shelter you anymore, and this not sheltering you is a core tenet of our business, to nudge the traveler to be a little more independent so they can learn something from their experience that grows them individually. The best way to do that is to take a bus trip.
Kali Kucera: Sure, how about a lost city! There are vastly more ancient artifacts than there are archaeologists to find them. In fact, you would be surprised that you just drive by them every day and mistake ancient pyramids for mere hills. So much is buried just a few inches under our feet, and we don’t even know it.
Such was the case when I was in the southeastern Ecuadorean jungle one time, just looking for bus routes that only local miners know about. A local guide invited me to go with him about an hour on dirt roads into the rugged mountains west of Gualaquiza. While I didn’t wear proper clothing and ended up getting my legs bitten by some strange grass bugs that left me terribly ill, we arrived at a nondescript farmhouse by the side of the road that looked like it was starting to fall off the side of a cliff. The family didn’t mind, they were busy feeding chickens and goats and chopping wood.
After a brief conversation, the head of the family emerged with his machete! No, he wasn’t going to butcher me, he just needed it to forage a trail, and he proceeded to lead us down the mountainside into the cloud forest.
Wherever he was taking us was spectacular enough, with wild-growing avocado and lime trees, neon-colored hummingbirds dancing around my head, and of course the aroma of mature eucalyptus every time I caught a breeze.
But then, the landowner started hacking in a new side trail for about 50 meters to open us up to small clearing underneath the canopy of trees. With just the edge of his machete, he pulled up some ground cover and tossed it aside, and then some more, until finally from underneath the brush emerged a stone wall so old it was black and smelled of the underworld.
He kept ahead of me, hacking around, and removing more overgrowth, exposing to the light more walls and old foundations. I cannot find the words to describe the emotions that came over me at that moment, watching this simple farmer nonchalantly unveil a pre-Columbian city right in front of my own eyes.
Now if you think I’m confusing a city with a village, let me tell you, it wasn’t over. I was led through one thicket after another for the next hour, seeing the ruins of more dwellings and ancient adobe structures, and then we came out of the forest to a small meadow. The farmer pointed down to my feet and told me to give the ground a little kick. There too was a stone foundation, but I wasn’t immediately impressed as it was small in height. He shook his head and waved his machete to draw my attention to the whole meadow. Looking closer, the small foundation extended into an exceptionally large rectangle, for this was the foundation of an entire temple!
What was so amazing about that experience is that by the next day, the forest would reclaim everything we uncovered. The remains of Pre-Columbian civilizations are less over there, and more right in the back yards of common residents, and no one has the resources or time to keep them in clear and open view, so they just remain like ancient ghosts hovering over and around us as we go about contemporary life.
Also near the top of my list is an island of Iguanas in Panama, and a rarely used but still operational antique train route in Central Chile, a true time warp.
Kali Kucera: Too many to count. Most are astonished as to why I am there; they don’t see their environment as worth visiting. Others want to get busy cooking me a meal to share with me their local ingredients. But the interactions I remember and appreciate the most are those folks that take an interest the nut I’m trying to crack, the next place I’m trying to find. There’s always someone local, a bus driver, an innkeeper, or even someone just sitting in the town park, who loves a challenge and takes special pride in the stories of their local area. They show some restlessness, eager to not just point the way but take me there. I love meeting those people.
Kali Kucera: In general, breaking the routine of what you see and know is a magnificent way to kindle the fire of a storyteller’s imagination. Traveling, by its very nature, is exposing you to encounter that which is different from you, and it makes you want to understand the stories that are playing out in front of you. A regular traveler may just remember what they see and forget it, but a storyteller slows down and writes it down, and maybe pushes into the story a little deeper to see the story behind the story.
But yes, I can name a specific instance. In ‘Unawqi, Hunter of the Sun’, I write about the main character, Unawqi, flying on the back of a condor and landing on the surface of the Sun. The Sun is the prey Unawqi is hunting and he intends to slay it. But when he lands – even before he lands – he is surprised that the landscape of the Sun isn’t what he imagined it would be. He was raised in the wilderness, and he is experiencing what is, in fact, a city and not the surface of the Sun. A city from a different era, for sure, but it has recognizable elements of a city, like concrete and cars and tall buildings.
I never say this in the book, but it was Bogotá, Colombia that I had in mind while writing that chapter, down to specific parks and street corners. Given Unawqi launches his flight from a very specific place I know on the banks of the Meta river in eastern Colombia, this is not far from Bogotá, which is a dramatically disruptive modern place compared to everything that surrounds it, that I had to find a way of describing it in a way of writing lore!
South America Buses (SAB) is the luxury channel of AndesTransit, the land travel transportation schedule and reservation hub preferred most by travelers to Latin America. SAB has a select team of distinguished travel experts who have dedicated themselves to research, document, and curate routes and carriers in South America that meet nothing short of the highest quality standards in land travel.
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