Rebekah Logan: How (Not) to Take Public Transportation
I was lost. No internet connection. Alone. In a strange city. On a different continent. Unable to understand the local language. With virtually no money. And, to top it all off, no one would be looking for me for hours. I had to get back to the rental house in a neighboring city--preferably in less than 18 hours before the group of people I was traveling with left the area for good.
How did I get into this mess? This situation was the result of a problem I have struggled with for some time: my stubborn unwillingness to rely on others.
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I tend to be a fiercely independent person. I have always struggled with the belief that it is a weakness to ask for help, especially for things that I believe I should be able to handle by myself. Years of group projects in school have also solidified the belief that I can’t trust others to help me when I need it. Yes, I’m well aware that I need to ask for help and not everyone will abandon me just when I need help the most, but often, I forget this fact.
However, this experience strongly reminded me that while independence in some situations can be good, it’s not a weakness to depend on others for help. In fact, it is impossible to get through life without depending on other people in some way or other. Or, in this particular case, it’s impossible to even travel from one city to another.
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It all started this summer when I participated in a study abroad program to Santiago, Chile. About two weeks after I arrived, the other students from the U.S. and I decided to travel to a famous pair of cities in Chile: Viña del Mar and Valparaiso. These cities are extremely close together and busses run frequently between them, so a few other people and I decided to take a day trip to Valparaiso from the house we were staying at in Viña del Mar.
It was getting later in the day, so the group had all decided to take Ubers back to Viña del Mar. However, I, lacking money for an Uber, told them I would just take the bus back.
Unfortunately, I was under the impression that all the buses in the city would return to the same location on a singular bus route. Having grown up in a small American town, I had no concept of the mysterious workings of public transportation (such as having more than one bus route for an entire city). I also had no internet service, and no idea how to get back to Viña del Mar from Valparaiso.
It was at this point where I was forced to begin confronting the fact that being independent from everyone is unsustainable. There was no way I could figure out how to get back by myself.
Eventually, after spending quite some time staring uneasily at the large variety of passing busses, I asked some of the random people at the bus stop how to get back to Viña del Mar.
At that time, I could express myself in simple Spanish, but I still had difficulty understanding the natural accent and speed of natively spoken Spanish. I was able to ask questions, but couldn’t understand more than a few words in the response. And nobody I interacted with during my trip back to Viña del Mar could speak or understand English.
So, when I asked the people at the bus stop how to get to Viña del Mar, the conversation went something like this:
Me: “Excuse me, how do I go to Beach Street xxx Viña del Mar”
People: “xxx take xxxxxxx xxxx bus xxxxx.”
Me: “Sorry, I don’t know. Repeat please?”
People: “xxxxxx xxxx xx xxx take xxxxxxx xxxx bus xxxxx.”
Although I couldn’t understand what they were saying, some communication must have occurred because when the next bus came by, about five people stuck their hands out to signal it and as soon as the doors opened, I was all but catapulted onto it by the group at the bus stop.
The bus didn’t even stop for me; as I stumbled after being shoved onto a moving vehicle, the bus driver accelerated violently and I was thrown into one of the aisle seats. Terrified, I scrunched into a little ball on the hard plastic seat as the bus bumped along.
Due to a fun quirk of Google Maps, I was able to see my location on my phone from satellite imaging, although I was able to do absolutely nothing else. I watched as my little blue dot moved from the location labeled Valparaiso to the location labeled Viña del Mar. And then my stomach dropped. My destination was near the beach on one side of the city. My little blue dot was heading directly away from the beach into the mountainous outskirts of the city on the opposite side.
At this point, I still wasn’t clued in to the fact that there were different busses that ran different routes through the city. Naively, I still figured that there was one bus line that ran the length of the city and if I just stayed on the bus long enough, the bus route would take me back to my stop.
My blue dot on Google Maps drew farther into the mountains away from my destination, and one by one, everyone exited the bus. Finally, it was just me and the driver. The scenery had changed drastically as well. Instead of paved roads with neat houses lining the way, we were now driving down deserted dirt streets surrounded by dilapidated houses. Thick black bars covered the doors on nearly every house, broken windows surrounded by glass yawned darkly at me, and beer bottles and other miscellaneous trash lined the sides of the road.
After a few minutes of just the two of us bumping along in the empty bus, the driver looked back at me doubtfully and said something. I couldn’t understand him, but it was pretty clear he was asking me why I was still on his bus. Panicking, I gabbled out in extremely broken Spanish that I was lost, handed him my phone, and pointed to where I needed to go. He laughed at me and said something that sounded vaguely reassuring, so I huddled back into my seat, still nervous, but hopeful that someone knew what was happening.
Here again is a demonstration of my reluctance to depend on others for even something so trivial as directional assistance. It took the bus driver asking me what I was still doing on his bus for me to admit that I needed help. Without that prompting, I probably would have stayed on that bus for another few hours before asking for help. My tendency towards independence had not yet been completely eliminated.
As the sun slid lower in the sky, we met another bus traveling on the dirt road in the opposite direction. My driver flagged the other bus’s driver and they stopped and had a quick conversation with much laughter. My driver gestured to me to go to the other bus, and thanking him profusely, I sprinted over to the other bus and got on. The new bus driver tried talking to me, but I couldn’t understand him either. The gist I got was that I needed to switch buses at least one more time, and he would take care of me.
After about 45 minutes of bumping around in this bus, one of the men sitting close to me got up, told me to follow him, and hopped off the bus. Nervously, I glanced at the bus driver, who nodded and made a shooing motion with his hand, so I followed the strange man off the bus and into the darkening city streets. We walked for some time in silence, him striding confidently ahead, me timidly trotting along behind. Finally, just at the point where I was wondering if I was going to die, he stopped, pointed down a street, told me to take the 507 bus, and disappeared. I walked down the indicated street until I came to a bus stop, where I sat and waited. After about 25 minutes with no bus coming by, I asked a nice lady who sat down next to me if the 507 stopped here and she pointed down the street. So, I kept walking down the street.
Note that here, I have finally accepted that I must rely on others. I had to depend on the bus driver to steer me in the right direction, and the random man who led me to the next bus stop to direct me to the correct location. I also realized I needed to rely on the people around me to help me get to my destination, so I began to willingly ask for help.
Finally, as the sun touched the horizon, I came to a park and saw a bus with the number 507 on it. I sprinted after it, waving frantically, and it grudgingly slowed down enough for me to jump on and collapse into a seat. At last my blue dot on Google Maps was starting to approach its destination.
I watched my phone happily as my destination got closer and closer, but just as we were just about to reach it, we swerved away and began driving exactly in the opposite direction. That’s when the real panic set in. At this point, I was around 2 miles away from our house, being quickly carried away. The sun was setting. My phone was at 5%. There were no bus routes on any of the busses, so I had no idea where we were going. All I knew, was that we were not going in the direction that would get me back to my group.
I tried asking the person next to me about the bus route, but they only shrugged, either not knowing the answer or not understanding my broken Spanish.
Finally, I decided my best option was to trust the man who told me to get on this bus. I was confident I was on the bus number that I was told, so I sat with a sinking feeling in my stomach as we drove away from my destination. I turned my phone screen off and just waited. For an hour. The sun disappeared below the edge of the horizon and red streaks lit up the sky as we bumped along in the growing gloom. I resigned myself to being lost in a foreign country for good.
I had given up all hope of ever getting back to the house when the bus slowly turned a corner and began driving directly back towards our house. With that torturous return of hope, I couldn’t help it anymore. I jumped up and ran to the front of the bus. I waited there, clinging to the pole at the entrance to the bus for the next half hour as we bounced back in the direction I needed to go. It was fully dark now, but I was still able to recognize the stop I had departed from over 7 hours ago. Almost panicking, I pounded the button to get off and stared at the driver with pleading eyes. Grudgingly, he slowed down at the stop and the doors creaked gradually open. Flinging myself through the opening doors, I landed at the stop. I had made it!
This entire trip from one city to the other, I was reminded of the importance of being able to be humble enough to ask for help. By trying to be independent and refusing to ask for help, I managed to get myself incredibly lost for over five hours, and in the end, I still needed the help of others to make it to where I needed to go. Independence is great in some situations, but it is impossible to live your life completely independent of others. My adventure on public transport reminded me strongly of that point.
Valparaiso, Chile
Rebekah Logan is a double major in Biology and Music at Lander University. She completed her breakaway by studying abroad in Santiago, Chile for two months. After her graduation in Spring 2025, she plans to pursue a career in dentistry.