Travelling by chicken bus in Central America, the adventure is within the adventure!

Matteo, my travel mate and I got on another bus, from Escuintla, right after the Guatemala border, to Antigua, our first stop in this new country. The vehicle was an ex USA school-bus: a gorgeous rectangular tin painted of a shining red in the background with lighter flaming stripes along the sides, and a track front; like just coming out from an American movie of other times. Getting inside, you couldn’t miss the long series of exotics, and not, peluches animals swinging in a random order from the roof: giraffes, monkeys, bees… then, there were the most various stickers, posts and posters untidily stuck everywhere in the internal body.
We were going to sit at the end of the bus. Immediately, it took off vigorously. Luckily, we clumsily managed to grab a seat. Along the way, it was stopping repeatedly to let new people on. When, soon, the 2 rows of triple seats got full, the passengers started to stand on the corridor of about 50 centimeters between the seats. They kept getting on and fulfilling this tiny line. It seemed an endless process. People were continuing to get on and squeeze, keeping standing because holding each other with their body; but nobody was left behind. In this, they are not very different from the central line in the London underground during rush hour.
When the bus was so full that I was wondering how anyone in the middle could possibly get off, the guy in charge of the tickets collection came to do diligently his job. He was a middle-age Guatemalan man wearing jeans and an orange stripe t-shirt. He crossed the overcrowded bus from the front to the back and vice-versa in the only possible remained way: he walked on the seat backs with surprising nonchalance. He repeated his unusual stroll for several times: all the necessary ones because no passenger was forgotten.
Everyone was busy doing their own things, chatting or simply doing nothing. We were the only foreigners in the bus and the only ones to be amused to see the tickets checker passing above us and from there asking kindly the ticket fee.
We were in the famous Central America “chicken bus”, the public buses, used by locals to travel within cities or to connect different cities. But if you ask their usual users what a “chicken bus” is: they don’t know for sure. To them they are simple buses. There are buses where everything is possible from people walking on the seat backs to chickens getting on too.