The Tale of the Night Bus from Hell
This tale all starts with two girls making a very big mistake. The two girls, of course, were me and my friend Mary. And the mistake? While planning a three-week European travel journey, we decided it would be worth it to save money on expensive train or airplane tickets, plus another night at the hostel, by taking the night bus from Edinburgh to London.
Here are the facts: the night bus we took was operated by National Express, which is a perfectly fine bus company to use (and that I have used) on normal journeys throughout the UK. We left around 9:30 p.m. from the Edinburgh bus station and arrived around 7 a.m. at London Victoria. The bus was the standard kind used for all bus journeys, and there were only a handful of scheduled stops.
Photo credit: eastleighbusman via Foter.com / CC BY-ND
Now, here is where the story takes a turn from fact to nightmare: while we'd expected to be in the minority of people crazy enough to take a night bus, we arrived at the Edinburgh bus station to find a long queue already forming outside the doors to our bus terminal. Rather foolishly, we did not embrace our American brashness to push to the front of this queue, either.
So, by the time Mary and I boarded the bus, there was only one row with two open seats, which we quickly claimed. I'd thought we were lucky. Stragglers after us were forced to choose between a meek selection of strangers for this long journey—one man pretended to be violently ill, hacking into his hand and wrapping his jacket tighter around himself, as these seatless prospects longingly peered at the empty seat next to his. He miraculously recovered as soon as the bus started moving.
As the bus started moving and a slow processional of weary strangers began to march up the lighted pathway towards us, Mary and I quickly discovered why our seats had been left vacant until the last unfortunate pair were forced to pick them. With each slam of that port-o-potty-airplane-lavatory hybrid's door, the stench grew stronger and lingered longer. We resorted to dousing our wrists in perfume and stuffing them under our noses each time the door was opened. It became a tick, a routine like clockwork: feel a person slam into our seats as the bus jolted down the motorway, hear the bathroom door fly open and closed, then wait for the telltale reopening of the door to set your senses awash with disgust, and desperately press your nostrils into the sweet scent of Victoria's Secret, hoping beyond hope that the smell would be gone by the time you needed to come up for air.
But when we came up for air, we were assaulted by a different stench. All around us, too many bodies were pressed into too tight a space, and the UK was hit by a heat wave this summer. Sweat permeated the armpits of the bus' passengers, mingling with the overpowering scent of urine from the overused bathroom. Directly in front of us, a man and his daughter had made the rather inconsiderate decision of having curry right before boarding—or maybe they had stuffed some in their pockets for later, considering the degree of pungency—and every time one of them shifted in their seats, the smell ripened anew, as if they had overturned a vat of the spice-filled dish that had been sitting outside in the baking sun for ten hours.
Despite the dizzying array of assailants to our olfactory senses, Mary and I were determined to sleep so that we could enjoy the sights of London the next day. However, if it wasn't the slamming of the bathroom door waking us, it was the people in the seats around us. The man in front of us seemed to have a thousand phone calls to make, even at 2 o'clock in the morning. Just as I'd begin to fall asleep, I would be pulled from rest by rapid-fire Hindi (I think).
Or it would be the woman behind us complaining in a loud voice to prevent us from sleep. At one of the few extra stops we made outside Edinburgh early on in the journey, this woman and her daughter boarded the bus and took the only two remaining seats. The daughter opted for the seat next to the man who'd miraculously recovered from a serious illness in five minutes, while the woman took the seat in the row behind ours beside a man who spoke little English. I was awoken around 3 a.m. to the sound of arguing.
"It's rude and inconsiderate," the woman behind us said in a raised voice. "It's light pollution, that's what it is. Light pollution."
The man had apparently, according to her, been watching a movie on his laptop with the brightness all the way up, the screen pointed towards her, while she was trying to sleep. Which, yes, would make me angry, but not enough to make a scene. And, to make matters more annoying, the man had put the laptop away when she complained originally, so she was yelling about light pollution for no reason. Even the man in front of our row got involved, imploring the woman to switch seats with her daughter to resolve the issue—and he was right: the woman was preventing all of the people around her from doing the very same thing she had been trying to do by being inconsiderate herself.
Mary and I also had the pleasure of being woken up by people hitting us on the way to the bathroom. On the second half of the trip, I had the immense joy of sitting in the aisle seat after Mary had done her time, and I remember almost yelling out when the first person knocked into my head. I didn't know what had happened at first, only knew that I'd been asleep, felt a slap to the face, then shot wide awake as the bathroom door closed and I caught just a glimpse of my assailant. It turned out that people on that bus apparently thought it was acceptable to whack their side into our little bubble of space as they headed to relieve themselves, maybe assuming we would blame the intrusion on the rocking of the bus. There was one woman who hit us awake the entire trip, each time she went to the bathroom—and she went every five to ten minutes; we timed her. We think she had some kind of medical condition, but here's a PSA: *Do not take a 10-hour overnight bus ride if you have a severe medical condition that prevents you from sitting in a seat for more than ten minutes at a time.*
Then, of course, the final barrier to seeking comfort in the peace of unconsciousness was the accommodations offered to us. I'm perfectly able to sleep on public transportation, but it's usually for short chunks of time—which works out well when you fall asleep on a Dublin city bus and waking up every five minutes or so prevents you from missing your stop. But anyone who has taken a Greyhound or National Express or its equivalent knows that the seats are far less comfortable than an airplane's and there's even less room than budget airlines' seats (if that's possible). A bus seat generally has a rigid back, too plush cushions, and no good place to put your legs. I would wake up with my legs completely numb, stinging with pins and needles, every couple of hours as I was forced to change positions to seek out a tiny piece of transient comfort.
We emerged at the end of that hellish night as changed individuals. We had experienced things no human being should ever have to. We had seen the eternal abyss and survived.
We staggered to the hostel as returning soldiers. We flinched at each time the doors to the Tube opened and closed, the sound of the bathroom door echoing in our minds. We couldn't go near public toilets. Every Indian restaurant made us sweat, the smell of curry enough to make us gag.
Suffice it to say: never take the night bus.* You will never be the same.
*Unless it's the night bus from Harry Potter with full beds to sleep on because that would be awesome.
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