A bus in Mexicali, the capital city of the Mexican state of Baja California.
A bus in Mexicali, the capital city of the Mexican state of Baja California.
Nick Stanley gets a rude awakening on a bus journey through the dark, isolated backroads of Mexico.
I was in a state of half-sleep, that drowsy drifting from consciousness you get while travelling on long-haul bus rides or flights; when you're not comfortable enough to sleep but too tirednot to try.
The overnight bus travelling north to Puerto Vallarta was quite empty so at least I had a couple of seats to myself and could rest my legs against the row in front and my head against the bus window. A rolled towel served as a pillow.
I was close enough to the front to be aware of the bus driver's conversation with another passenger and my fledgling knowledge of Spanish was enough to understand they were both from Manzanillo, where I'd boarded just before midnight.
At first, I thought the bullets hitting the windscreen were stones. A tensile crack and shatter.
But I knew stones couldn't do that; there wouldn't be that many, that fast. Shards of glass sprayed into the unoccupied seats ahead of me.
I was suddenly wide awake and my brother, who was in the row over from me, was standing, yelling at the driver not to stop. We sped on and I got up as we rounded a corner. There were two figures in the moonlit shadows of the side of the road, my brother told me later, their guns pointed at the bus.
There were no more shots, thankfully, but the guy who'd been talking to the driver was slumped over, then fell from the chilly bin he'd been sitting on (the bus was one of the more high-end coaches that cover Mexico's main routes; they give you soft drinks and simple snacks).
We quickly laid him out in the aisle and I held his head while my brother talked to him, asked him questions, told him to hang on.
There was no blood we could see, no wound, but we knew he was in trouble; one of his eyes flickered and he had difficulty speaking. That area, south of Vallarta, is called Costalegre - Happy Coast - but it used to go by the name of the Virgin Coast, because of the number of isolated bays, largely untouched by the all-embracing tourism of the resort towns that bookend it.
The highway touches the coast in only a few spots, mostly winding inland through empty, bush-clad hills dotted with the occasional tiny town. Right then, it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere.
Nick Stanley at Colima Airport, in Mexico.
There was a police outpost a little further on - a concrete bunker with two officers in it.
They were most concerned with the bullet holes in the front of the bus and what sort of gun might have caused the clean, neat punctures in the windscreen.
The bus driver kept repeating: "They wanted to kill me. They wanted to kill me." None of this was reassuring, and we had to call out to get their attention back on the guy lying in the aisle.
One of the officers escorted us in the police truck, with red and blue lights flashing.
In one of the small towns we found some sort of medical clinic and woke the duty doctor.
He was only an intern.
We sat the wounded guy up and he vomited a stream of blood but the intern couldn't find the cause. The best he could do was hook up a saline drip and send us further north. At this point, the policeman decided he'd done his bit and went back to his post.
It took nearly an hour to reach a proper hospital, in Tomatlan. I held the saline bag the whole way, watching it slowly empty, hoping it would last.
We helped carry the guy inside and on to a stretcher bed. He disappeared into the hospital and we went back outside to sit with the other passengers, waiting for another bus to take us to Vallarta.
Local police came and asked us about what had happened.
The story we told them was pretty basic. The bullet holes and the crimson trail from the bus to the hospital doors told most of it.
The replacement bus turned up and we joined the passengers already on it.
It was a surreal feeling as we made our way north in the dawn, thinking about what had happened and wondering if the injured man would be okay.
The screens in the bus played a Naked Gun movie, overdubbed in Spanish.
I never found out the fate of the guy sitting on the chilly bin. There was an article in the local paper the next day that said he'd been hit by shrapnel and after an initial operation, flown to Guadalajara in a critical condition, for brain surgery.
I wish I had kept that article.
My brother and I were mentioned as having helped out. It said it was the fourth bus assault in two months on that stretch of highway, always around full moon. Although it was the first time they'd tried to stop the bus by shooting the driver. There was talk of a crackdown.
He was 19, the injured man, four years younger than I was at the time.
