Gulliver's Travel - Vol 5. The Maple Leaf Story

italian world rally bus championships

alrite-o, as promised here comes the next installment of my tour de swiss. i'll start the ball rolling with my encounter with the italian bus driver...

so, i booked myself in for the Bernina Express train trip down south towards the italian border a few days ago. really quite a lovely train ride with the best of what switzerland landscape and bridge/aquaduct engineering feats had to offer. some of those bridges that spand across massive gorges is sth that just blows my mind and amazes me...anyway the end of the train trip brought me to a tiny italian town by the name of Tirano, fence sitting between the swiss and italian border, but as expected they only spoke italian there, and with my extended italian vocab of knowing how to count up to 5, my communication skills were once again reduced to playing charades...but hey, i finally found the toilet.

so from tirano there's a bus connection back to the swiss town of Lugano. unwittingly, i enrolled myself for a hell of a bus trip to get me back onto swiss ground. the bus drivers name was so stereotypical it almost made me laugh...Mario. I even tried cracking a joke and asked him...hey where's luigi? He didn't laugh. i got on the bus.

from the moment you put the bus into first gear, there was no going back. Italians have a reputation of being maniac drivers...this guy was no exception. He drove the 10 tonne? tour bus as if it was a rally car. now just to get u up to speed, i'll give u a little bit of background to northern italy town setups....their roads are narrow, windy and B-grade - pot hole infested. but this didnt deter Mario or his big mama of a bus one little bit. He would scream down the narrow town streets moving into 3rd and 4th as if it was a time trial, only literally cms from scraping the sides of the bus off against the adjacent buildings. Then moving out of the towns, and onto the winding roads up the mountain, he took hair pin turns at unbelievable speeds...i didn't even know a bus could do a hair pin turn on such a small turning circle, but he managed, ableit taking up the whole road in doing so. I'm sure he would've even done a few hand brake turns and gotten into a bit of drifting...tokyo drifting style, if he had the chance to. This guy was insane!!! he must've thought he was colin mcrae or sth...cos he was driving like the king of the mountain. he'll give a quick toot of his horn to let the other cars know that he was coming round a blind hair pin before he rocketed round the turn. i was almost surprised we didnt have an accident. There's a fine line between adventurous driving and insanity...this guy was flirting with it. Even with his affirmation that he'd driven this road a million times, it had little effect in instilling confidence in me.

Having said all that, we safely arrived back onto swiss ground within 2hrs...apparantly off his P.B by a 15mins or so. i laughed...nervously. I quickly walked back to the train station with both feet firmly planted on ground. its good to be alive.

But, all credit to the bus driver at the same time. I don't know whether to call him amazing or insane. he definitely had driving skills that were deadly accurate because his bus didn't even have a dent or scratch on it despite the way he drove. so i guess, 2 thumbs up to him.

posted by Lemdog @ 6:30 PM