A few weeks ago, I picked up a slim book of poetry by Gioconda Belli, which I'd spotted, hidden in the shelves of a tiny news stand, whilst I was roaming the small shopping area of Managua airport's departure lounge.

Nicaragua relishes poetry; as much as it can be said to be the Land of Volcanoes - pockmarked with flooded extinct craters, and those that still froth and smoke, and occasionally vomit - it is a nation that celebrates the sensuous imagery and the exquisite concision of meaning that only poetry is capable of.

The nation's politics are complicated (and never free from interference); it's landscape apt to writhe and wriggle; but poets are it's life force, able to sketch the struggles, the joys, the complex human comedy we find ourselves in, with the passion and intensity that Life in all it's ragged glory requires.

There is a line from one Gioconda Belli's poems (the anthology, incidentally is called From Eve's Rib) that stops me in my tracks, nine simple words: "God carved into me a workshop for human beings".

I love that image of a womb as a workshop for new humans. And I see a sadness in there too; there are women I know who have dreamed of forging new lifes in the crucible of their bodies, except that circumstance has not allowed the work to start.

As a man, I thank poetry for this insight wrapped in a metaphor that is unforgettable.

The longest, arrow straight, bend free road I've ever been on was one I travelled a few days ago between Managua and Leon, in Nicaragua. A highway without the hint of a kink or a curve, just perfectly straight, with a heat haze forever shimmering in the distance.

It is a numbing experience to be sat on a bus that seems to make no distance on a never ending line of a road, nonetheless, it is a strangely enchanting one, simply sitting for hours taking it in as Nicaragua's plays it's rhythms before you.

Solitary labourers, carrying small backpacks, and a machete in one hand, walking in the dust of the road's margins; the occasional, riotously liveried, 'Chicken bus', steaming past; then the convoys of second hand American Mack trucks rolling by with unknown cargoes' and always a joyous invocation to Jesus slapped on the windscreen; along with Central America's other workhorse, the Toyota 4 x 4 pick-up, weaving between the trucks and the buses. Nicaragua at work.

Off-stage, but never completely out of sight, were the countless spirals of soaring, patrolling vultures, tasting the air with the extraordinary sense of smell. Below them, small, scattered groups of thin cattle, nosing through the fields. And, always, a single dog trotting somewhere.

I never thought a simple journey on a bus could be so fascinating.

At the heart of Boris's mayoral campaign was the pledge to clear London's streets of the Bendibus, an articulated public transport juggernaut, but something I've always enjoyed seeing, winding and bending from the hips as it clunkers through London. I'm sure it will be replaced (I know it will - it's one of the very few BoJo pledges that might actually happen) by something sanitised and clean.

Clean, schmeen; I think our streets need pepper, they need spicing up, buses ought to have character, so I say to TFL: be bold, take a leap of faith and add a real dash of strap hanging exuberance and near psychedelia - order a fleet of 'Chicken Buses', those second hand US school buses that smoke through Central America at speeds that are obviously out of kilter to the condition of the bus and definitely unsurvivable in the event of a burst tyre or collision.

God, they are an experience. I've been on several this month, and watched in awe, hundreds more hammer around the tiniest bends with the doors flapping open, or shave past one another, at the same distance a man applies a razor to his stubble, and always in the manner of Formula one drivers duking it out round the toughest Grand Prix course.

These are buttock busting contraptions. Six hours or more bouncing on a ruined chassis along rutted, pot-holed roads, overtaking on the inside and outside, around blind corners, and the crests of every hill turned my rump into two sandbags.

Somehow I always had a seat, and for that I'm grateful, I saw two women sitting on two up-turned buckets once, their faces pressed against the spokes of someone else's bike. That was the journey where I was squeezed like a near empty toothpaste tube might be in the hands of a fervent recycler against the window by a truly enormous woman. Gargantuan does not meet the grade, this was something beyond.

Often I would wake up, to the sound of chicken buses shudder along the nearby streets, belching and wheezing, audibly clanking up and down the gears, or if they had a few yards free space in front, roar like a squadron of tanks crossing the invasion line.

There's nothing they can't accommodate or carry; the squawking chicken, obviously, after all that's why they are called what they're called, or a couple of squealing pigs darting between the seats, sometimes the bedstead strapped on the roof along with several sheets of glass, and always my rucksack lashed to the top.

Nor is there anything mute about the colour scheme; it's brash, eye-poppingly raucous, and more often than not there's a reference to Jesus spray-painted in screaming hues. There's some modesty, however; not every chicken bus is near dayglo, many remain in their original deep yellow US School bus tan with their old school district name still visible. The irony could n't be starker; probably being sat on a bus marked Topeka School District or Clark County Education Board will be the nearest most Central Americans will ever get to the US.

You can buy models of these buses, but where's the all action version, the one that spews out a cloud of black smoke the way the real ones do. The air is chewy when they pass. I've taken in lungfuls of burning diesel and smoking brake fumes as the Chicken buses have rolled past me.

By God, I miss them. There's a romance and a frisson they have that dear old London Transport will never have. Just think though if TFL did take that leap of faith and a fleet of madly painted, horn blasting chicken buses starts to stream through London's streets.

Sixteen hours of solid travelling including a hair-raising mini bus gallop through Guatemala City and then two planes. Can I get a seat other than the middle of a row of three ? My eyes are cinders. That's it. To bed.