I awoke on my overnight bus to Oaxaca last night to armed soldiers in full camoflage storming the bus with machine guns. Fortunately I had read about random checks on buses on the internet a few months ago, so already knew that this is a fairly standard occurrance in Mexico. It's only when the men with the guns getting on your bus don´t have uniforms that you really need to start to worry.
The soldiers took a random selection of passengers off the bus to search them, but fortunately I was not amongst them, so my illicit cache of Cuban cigars bound for Las Vegas remains intact. Then some more soldiers got on and started ripping panels off the toilet cubicle at the back of the bus. The bus driver started complaining. Sniffer dogs under the bus started barking. Two indigenous Mexicans at the back of the bus sat like rabbits in headlights, but perhaps I also looked like that at two oclock in the morning.
Then all off a sudden, a woman with a child sitting opposite me that also hadn´t been picked out for the random searches stands up, grabs her bag and walks off the bus. The soldiers hadn't asked her to do so, and don't think they even noticed her going.
I think no more about this until the soldiers thank us for our patience and get off the bus, and the passengers that had been searched get back on. All the passengers except the woman and the child sitting opposite.
I didn´t sleep on my first overnight bus because of the freezing cold air-conditioning. I didn´t sleep on my second overnight bus because of an overweight girl playing loud goth music. This time I am wearing my GBP 5.00 woolen poncho and sitting next to a pencil thin man with a pencil thinner moustache who isn´t listening to any music, but I still won´t get any more sleep on by third overnight bus I am travellng on because of the excitement of the bus search and the disappearing woman.
