Eurolines

If you are wandering through a biggish town or city at silly o’clock and on some dark, unmaintained, half-abandoned parking place in the seedier areas around the central station you see members from one or more minority groups waiting with suitcases and a resigned look on their faces, you have probably found your local Eurolines bus stop.

Eurolines is the only option for the penniless traveller to get around Europe if that penniless traveller, for whichever reason, chooses not to fly, and has not been able to find somebody going the same way by car on the wonderful www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de or one of its non-German variations.

Last weekend I was a penniless traveler needing to get to Geneva for an expat wedding (he’s British, she’s Canadian, the guests were from just about everywhere imaginable; I think one or two of them may even have been Swiss!) and I found myself, not the first time in my life, on a Eurolines’ bus.

The buses are always late, uncomfortable and invariably have one or more things wrong with them inside: the chairs won’t recline, the air conditioning will be broken, the loo will smell like vomit and have a door that refuses to close or some other thing will be broken or malfunctioning so that your trip will be just that much more uncomfortable.

They also take ages and ages to get from A to B, because they go via the town centres of C, D and E and stop there, engines running, for stupid amounts of time waiting for latecomers or (more likely) for the driver to go to the loo. There are no movies to help you bide the time, all you have is you, your non-reclining seat, any foodstuffs you have been able to procure at one of the haphazardly timed stops at a tank-station and the guessing-game: what languages does the driver speak? (The solution probably being Polish and Italian, or any other combination of languages that have nothing to do with the departure or arrival point of the bus.)

Eurolines is also, to add to the joy, and through no fault of Eurolines itself, like a children’s breakfast cereal box to customs: almost every box comes with a prize. Finding either drugs or criminals or illegal immigrants is almost guaranteed and you, the passenger, will therefore find yourself being herded out of the bus at 4 a.m. so that your luggage can be searched and your passport checked by French speaking men in uniforms with dogs. On my way to Geneva last Thursday there was a man behind me who had got on the bus in Paris who didn’t have a passport with him, and only spoke enough English to explain that the reason for not having a passport with him was because “he was going to Italy.” No other reason. Just that. This seemed to baffle even the Swiss border police who probably have their fair share of fake passports and out-of-date visas but had to have a little meeting about what to do with the, apparently Indian, guy who seemed to believe that one did not need a passport as long as one was travelling to Italy. In the end he got carted off the bus and taken to the police, together with two other passengers who had commited I-don’t-know-what offences.

Sounds spectacular but it’s pretty normal, I’ve never been on a stopped Eurolines bus where people haven’t been carted off the bus. If you are anything like me, Eurolines is the closest you are ever going to get to the crominal underbelly of rich, boring old Europe…

Ah, Eurolines. The travel might not be as comfortable or timely or quick as a flight, but it is (usually) cheaper, a lot better for the environment and it gets you straight to the (admittedly seedy part of the) town centre, and when you get there, you will always have a story to tell. Beat that, RyanAir.

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