Antigua has a pretty well developed bus system that caters to individual riders in a way that just wouldn’t happen in the US. The buses are small, seating around 27 passengers. My first bus trip was a short one, to the village next to where I live. I walked about 5 minutes or so to the bus stop, and the bus arrived within minutes. Instead of going straight to the school, however, the bus skirted around the village, leaving passengers at places of work and home before turning onto the school road. The fare was quite reasonable…an inexpensive way to travel.
My next trip was longer…I needed to get to the state college. For this trip I needed to take the bus all the way to St. John’s and then walk across town to another terminal to get the bus to Golden Grove. Easy as pie! I thought maybe this is the way to travel. Then I realized that I would need to walk up hilly driveways, across town, the bus would not always be there and ready to take me when I wanted to go places, and that the journey, as with most public transportation, took almost triple the time to drive.
The informality of life is one of the things that makes Antigua a wonderful place to be. Today I was riding from a nearby village to St.John’s and the driver stopped at his home, yelled to someone inside and then on his way back down the road, a women (his mother, I suspect) was there with a sandwich for him. As I was the only rider left when we got to St. John’s we had a chat about my work and what brought me to his village. He was very friendly.
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