They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are fat, others have really protruding bellies. Some have decayed a bit with age and are crumbling around the edges. Still others are double-breasted. A few are quite bright but most tend to be quite grey and blend in with the surrounding. Central America, and Guatemala especially, seems to be obsessed with sleeping policemen. They appear everywhere, whether it’s on a dirt road or on a highway. Sometimes they appear from nowhere, other times they prefer to stay in groups and slow your progress every 100 meters. Their most common characteristic is that they are insanely annoying.
A sleeping policeman is what we affectionately call a speed bump in Poland. I am used to them in parking lots or school zones, but on highways and dirt roads? Travel through most of these countries is slow enough as is, but if you are passing through a town every 10 km, and each town has a gigantic speed bump every 100 meters, it truly takes every ounce of willpower not to go crazy. And these aren’t the kind of speed bumps we have at home, where you can slow down just a little bit and make it over them. No, here if you go over the bump at anything more than 10kph you will do great injury either to yourself or to your car. Go over one at the insane speed of 40kph and you will send all your passengers flying (speaking from personal experience thanks to Colin’s driving abilities).
I do not know what road statics are like in these countries. I assume that speeding through urban areas was a big problem. I sure hope it was, because anything short of staggering death rates would not be enough to justify the speed bump mania that is present here.
No comments:
Post a Comment