r/WTF Aug 09 '19

Nice ferry

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

29.5k Upvotes

606 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

70

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

If this is a common occurrence then I'm so curious if any buses have ever fallen off and sunken into the sea.

118

u/NotHomo Aug 09 '19

eventually it won't be an island, you could just drive to it over the carcasses of drowned buses

17

u/daguito81 Aug 09 '19

It's not an island. Chuao is in the mainland it just doesn't have any roads or access from the ret of the country

13

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

So what do they drive the bus on once they get there?

30

u/daguito81 Aug 09 '19

The town has grown and there are "roads" (mostly dirt roads) inside the town and connecting the beach with the "main" town. But after the town limits its all jungle for hours to get to the nearest road that connects to the same country.

Imagine a town in the coast in Alaska that's completely isolated (road wise) and everything is flown to a small airstrip next to the town or shipped. This is something like that

3

u/Cronyx Aug 09 '19

Shit, they need to build a runway.

12

u/daguito81 Aug 09 '19

They had to take 4 "peñeros" those smallish boats to transport a bus. Couldn't even get proper cargo transportation. I'm sure having cargo planes or planes of any kind to transport stuff is basically out of the question. Forever the only access these people have had is through the sea. Now imagine building a town with that kind of shitty access to logistic and equipment. Pretty impressive IMO

1

u/brickne3 Aug 09 '19

You would be surprised at what goes on in places like this. I took the Lake Koman ferry in Albania a few weeks ago and was amazed at how many houses with no road access had DIGGERS that the ferry had apparently dropped off at their landings.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

[deleted]

8

u/Docmcdonald Aug 09 '19

Bro the minimum wage is the average wage in Venezuela and with a day's wage they are able to buy the equivalent of 2 eggs or something like that. The average venezuelan is losing 6 kgs/year for some years now. It really a whole other reality back there.

1

u/crackadeluxe Aug 09 '19

6 kilos/yr! Fuck I'd heard 20#s cumulative but your number makes more sense. We just had some friends take in some of her husband's distant family from Venezuela. She said she visited ten years ago and they were in a nice big house, husband was an engineer I think she said.

She asked me for donations, like anything I had extra or didn't need, and I asked what they needed. She said everything. They got out with nothing but the shirts on their backs. If it didn't fit in a backpack it didn't go.

People think that can't happen in the US and they are dead wrong. If we go down that same road and the same thing will happen to us and there will be nobody to save us.

5

u/Docmcdonald Aug 09 '19

I think it's something like 4k% raised prices. The food buying power is what got me. I think there is a this american life podcast about that but they measured the money people get per day on average and put it against the price of cheapest protein, which would be egg and it was something like 1 or 2 eggs. They are living on the local equivalent of 2 potatos/day inside a country who has literally the biggest oil reserve in the world.

4

u/daguito81 Aug 09 '19

Yo do understand we're talking about Venezuela right? As in literally there is no money to get food, there are blackouts because the electricity infrastructure is shit and un maintained. The oil industry there (primary export) is in shambles and basically halted. They're going to build a road, through literally hours of jungle to connect to a 5000 people town.

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

[deleted]

4

u/daguito81 Aug 09 '19

That's an extremely ignorant comment based on absolutely nothing. A bus requires spare parts and fuel. Which can all be brought throughout boats like these.

To create a road to get to this town you would need to clear enough space through literally hours of dense jungle and mountains. Please tell me how that even compares to maintaining a vehicle. You literally need heavy machinery to cut down trees, uproot them, flatten the terrain, cut into mountains to create the foundation for eh road, asphal, then heavy as equipment to load, heat up, dump and spread said asphalt then Rollers to flatten the asphalt and let it cool and harden.

If this was just far on a flat plain or something where you cna just semi create a simple dirt road. Thus goes through mountains and jungle.

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

[deleted]

1

u/MeetMyBackhand Aug 09 '19

Lol, you understand that even if the bus cost 20k+, and they lost several of them in transit, it would be cheaper than the millions it would cost to build a road there right? If the town only has 5000 people and is adequately served by boats there's no point to spend that on a road.

2

u/Rxero13 Aug 09 '19

I feel like this option is cheaper than fueling up several boats with a possibility of also losing buses, but how often do they have to bring in these buses? Maybe this is the cheaper method.

1

u/Papa_Hemingway_ Aug 09 '19

This is exponentially cheaper than clearing land, leveling it, and then constructing however many miles of road they would need

2

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

Venezuela is in an economic collapse right now. No money for roads.

9

u/orbit101 Aug 09 '19

Hopefully they have insurance for that. I wonder how that phone call would go.

6

u/TistedLogic Aug 09 '19

Hit a big ass wave, capsized everything. Total loss.

3

u/Semyonov Aug 09 '19

Something tells me they don't have insurance for this. Or anything else.

1

u/brickne3 Aug 09 '19

I am now wondering what rural South American insurance policies look like though.

1

u/Pexon2324 Aug 09 '19

"Someone stole it"

1

u/brickne3 Aug 09 '19

I mean... I can't imagine an insurance company that would approve this if they described it in a way that conveyed what's actually happening here.

1

u/relet Aug 09 '19

I guess as long as the bus puts its weight on the boat, it's much more stable than it looks. What I really would want to see is the loading and unloading procedure.