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.