The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Ecuadorian Buses

• The Good:  Buses in Ecuador are cheap.  It costs about as much to take the eight hour trip from Quito to Cuenca as it did to take the five minute taxi ride in NYC from my apartment to work.
  
• The Bad:  Terrible music is blasted at 105 decibels on all the bus speakers.  There is some good music down here, but they sure don´t play it on the bus, and playing it at full blast doesn't make it sound any better.  Latin pop music is even worse than US pop music.  I've tried listening to my iPod, but my earphones get overpowered.  When the bus isn't busy playing the same ten terrible songs on loop, they play even worse B-movies on a small TV screen at the front of the bus at an equally eardrum-shattering volume.  Check out this gem that played on the trip from Quito to Baños (in Spanish without English subtitles).  Magge and I were actually watching it when they turned it off with fifteen minutes left, just so they could go back to their awful latin pop mix tape.
  
• The Ugly:  The nasty gringo couple to my left that made out continuously for two hours on my bus ride today from Alausi to Cuenca.  I couldn't look across the aisle without wanting to retch.  They were probably French.