The first of many busses
I asked for another exciting bus ride and I got my wish. The bus depot was a mad house with no order or organization. Busses would pull up, wait a few minutes and then pull away. If you miss your bus it is your problem, figure it out. The number of buses that used the station was tremendous and it was impossible to stand in one place and see all of the busses because they just parked wherever they wanted and were misaligned. The only reasonable way to truly assure that you didn’t miss your bus was to stand in the road in front where the busses come from and look at the number of each bus as it arrives. Unfortunately I didn’t think of this at the time so instead I took a less reasonable approach of running around and looking at all the bus numbers. We asked several gentlemen who were selling bus tickets where our bus would be and they pointed to a spot for us to stand. Our loading time was 7:15 and when that came and went and our bus still wasn’t there I got anxious and did another lap of the bus yard. Then at 7:30 I looked around again, still no bus and we were supposed to be gone by this time. Finally around 8pm our bus did show up and it was where the guys had told us it would be.
There are many different classes of busses to choose from, seats, slumber and sleeper. These three options are subdivided again into a/c and non a/c. Seats are just that, a bus full of seats. A Slumber bus has seats that recline to a 45 degree angle. A sleeper bus has births for each passenger where they can lie down and sleep, with privacy curtains.
Convincing Prajwal to take anything besides a personally chauffeured a/c car or an airplane was difficult enough, so we compromised and took an a/c sleeper bus.
When the bus came we rushed to it and quickly hopped on board, we didn’t want to miss it. We were the second and third passengers on the bus and then waited at the station for half an hour for other people to board. Every passenger is provided with one very tiny quilt to use to keep warm and being the first people on an empty bus, Praj also procured the quilt of his absent neighbor. Later as the bus filled Praj’s neighbor complained that his blanket was missing and a quick search revealed that Praj had one not belonging to him. All of the quilts are numbered according to their corresponding seat number.
I finally had an upset stomach for the first time in India on a 12 hour bus ride with no toilets. I don’t know why they don’t simply have a place in the back of the bus with a curtain and a hole to the street cut in the floor for people to use. It would basically be a mobile squatting toilet and it’s not like there aren’t lots of other foul smelling things all over the place anyway. I was dealing with that as best as I could by drinking water and only eating bread type foods, to keep my stomach in check. Praj and I talked about diapers but I decided against it. I hoped I would not regret this decision.
The births on the bus are cut about 5’8”, four inches too short for me to lay with my feet flat and plenty too short for me to lay with my feet extended. The bus kept constantly stopping and no one seemed to know how long it was stopping, or when it would stop again. Sometimes it would stop for 10 seconds other times it would stop for nearly an hour. After the long stops the bus would do something I named the “Indian Bus Shuffle”. This is where when the driver is ready to go, first he starts the engine and then honks and waits, then he moves the bus a few feet and waits and repeats this until all passengers are on board. I think it’s a “we are going to leave you” fake out but I wasn’t brave enough to find out how much of a fake out it was and was always on the bus before he honked. When we were driving people’s phones were ringing, phones were used as boom boxes and people shouted while wandering the aisle hitting me behind my privacy curtain with their elbows as they walked. Then there was the driving; floor it, HONK HONK HONK, slam on the breaks, swerve, floor it and so on, over and over again as the driver sped down the two lane highway. There were two vertical bars on the bed to prevent passengers from falling out and they saved me on many occasions. I laid there in the fetal position trying to sleep and to not fall off my top bunk or soil my pants.
I was awoken at 8am, thirty minutes after we were supposed to be in Mombai, and looked out the window and did not see a city, like I had expected, but instead a field and another bus. Our fancy sleeper a/c bus had broken down, I’m sure it had nothing to do with the way the driver treated the bus. We were moving to a very old non a/c seat bus and we still had 4 hours to go. “Quick, Quick” the driver and other workers shouted, so everyone on our bus woke up grabbed their stuff and ran to the other bus. Then the driver and other workers stood around outside the bus and talked with each other and then went to a nearby shop and bought some snacks, while the rest of us sat in the bus waiting for them.
We are now successfully in Mumbai, formally Bombay, with no accidents, of any kind, and are looking forward to the further adventures we will encounter here.
helpful step
Sleeper Bus
Bus Depot
I paid 1 INR to use this
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