The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes by Carl Hoffman

At $2, the 1.5 hour bus ride from Quito up to the mountain town of Otvalo, Ecuador sounded like one of the world's best travel bargains.  The seats were comfortable enough. The bus was clean. But before the bus pulled out of the terminal, the driver turned on the trip's entertainment: Black Hawk Down (at top volume).  First, a slow crawl through Quito—the heavy smell of emissions made a fine companion to the movie—and, then, we raced up the mountain roads.  The bus driver swerved into the other lane to pass slower buses--those that were only going two times the speed limit.  I got off the bus a stop early, badly in need of the headache-fighting powers of a Coke.

A month after I returned home, an Ecuadorian bus that had been chartered for a family vacation tumbled over a cliff.  Forty-seven people died.

So, as I started Carl Hoffman's The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes , I felt I had, at least, had a taste of what Hoffman experienced (or, it's fair to say, put himself through) for five months.  I felt I could, at least, stand in the bus ticket line with him.  Wrong wrong wrong.

Hoffman went full throttle on this one—it's back to back (to back to…) harsh trips. Though South American buses rated their own section of the book, their discomfort and potential danger level went engine to engine with the third most dangerous airline in Latin America, a ferry that replaced a ferry that had sunk in Indonesia, and, well, a whole lot of others. Hoffman collected a life's worth of transportation tales.  And, lucky us, he's a damned good storyteller.

Now, a warning: If you have any transportation angst, it's probably best that you leave Lunatic on the bookstore shelf.  I have no transportation angst.  I'm one of those oddball types who loves an airplane trip itself—no matter what I say on Twitter during delays.  I think most of it is good comedy.  I kvell over the WiFi on the cheap buses that run between NYC and Boston.  Give me a car and I'm gone.  But, post-Lunatic, I'm fairly certain that, as Hoffman writes, I will feel "the tinge of anxiety we all feel on every ship passage, on every airplane flight."

But I won't hold it against him.  He served up one hell of a read.

A writer used to long weeks away for stories, Hoffman's five-month journey kicked off with a snap.  But not the good kind.  "My life suddenly didn't seem to fit anymore. I was middle-aged, with a wife and three children whom I loved but hadn't been living with for almost a year.  A long journey seemed the best course of action."

The really good news: Hoffman, who could probably sell a book about pretty much anything thanks to his beautiful writing, didn't go all boring crisis on us.  Instead, he decided to explore the way people around the world travel when they don't have other options, when they need to take the world's crappiest boat to go find work or a 28-hour bus ride—every few days—to visit family.

Along the way, Hoffman learns what it means to be American traveling through the world in a far less comfortable way than people expect of us.  (You get a big thumbs-up.)  And he forms those most fleeting—but incredibly strong—bonds: the kind you develop with other people on the road.  You find ways to comfort and take care of each other.  It's instant family, with the understanding that you'll probably never see one another again once you pick up your luggage and head off the boat.  In the midst of all that potential danger, there was so much good.

OK, one grumble.  There are times when the transportation death toll—and this is going to sound cold—got to be a bit too much.  Each chapter opens with an excerpt from a news report about an accident concerning that chapter's form of transportation.  He didn't need to do that.  Hoffman made the dangers clear in the chapters themselves.  The one that will stay with me the longest comes out of Senegal: it's the story of Pierre Colly, one of the 61 people who survived the sinking of the Joola.  More than 1800 people were killed.  "Colly was freezing. His raftmates were losing strength.  'Don't give up,' he said.  But one by one they slipped away and Colly was talking to no one, just hanging on to the floats telling himself over and over again not to give up."  In Hoffman's hands, Colly's story was far more powerful than any snippet of a news report.