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End of an 84-day trip

Sydney: It was billed as the longest coach trip. But the 39 exhausted passengers who trundled off the OzBus outside a gleaming, rain-rinsed Sydney Opera House at 5-38 on Sunday evening had been forced to rely on one or two other modes of transportation during the course of their 84-day odyssey from London to Australia. Planes, ferries, rickshaws, elephants, ponies and even the humble human foot were pressed into service when the bus broke down, roads proved impassable, or the travellers simply could not take it any more.

Since leaving the Embankment in London on September 16 the bus has rolled through Iran during Ramzan, Pakistan the week before Benazir Bhutto arrived and Bali just before the U.N. climate summit, before pulling up in Australia on the first day of the new Kevin Rudd administration. While the bus made it on to TV in Indonesia, it has also had more than its share of onboard dramas.

“It’s been a pretty big undertaking to get everyone to Sydney alive,” said tour leader Janelle Connor. The 26-year-old has had the pleasure of shepherding the sometimes irate, sometimes jubilant passengers through dangerous border crossings and bandit country and arranging accommodation in tents, bunkers and swags in the Australian heat.

“I’m so relieved to be finished,” she said. Ms. Connor’s five years working as a wilderness guide with difficult children had prepared her well for the complaints, fallouts and endless childish games during the long hours onboard. And it was the longest trip she had undertaken. There is indeed a price to be paid for being a pioneer which goes beyond the £3,750 cost of the trip. Trial runs of adventure trips, Connor said, were crucial because of the need to “go to every single place you are going to go to, as you have to find a pharmacy, police, doctor, so you can know everything and be prepared if anything goes wrong.” But this trip set off “on a wing and a prayer”; drives that had been predicted to take 10 hours took 23.

Much to the passengers’ annoyance, the itinerary was modified, bypassing Shiraz, the Mount Everest Base Camp, Laos and Tibet.

The bus had not had a trial run either, and it soon became apparent that it was a vehicle more suited to a day trip to the zoo than an epic, cross-continental marathon. As well as leaving behind a trail of diesel, shedding its exhaust pipe, and having its side mirror swiped off, it managed to plough into road signs.

The honeymoon declared itself over the day the garish OzBus sign was stripped from the bus at the Dogubayasit border town between Turkey and Iran to conceal the fact that it was a tourist coach as it entered perilous terrain.

The bus finally spluttered to a halt in Tehran and the new coach struggled to make up lost time, stopping in an unspecified town one night and dumping passengers in the dark to find dinner.

During the long fraught drive from Tehran, there were two things on most people’s minds: rugby and beer. Days without alcohol after nightly binge drinking were taking their toll. And despite pleadings with hotel staff, there was neither beer nor rugby for the punters.

Petitions to the organisers were drawn up by angry passengers. One woman, returning home to Australia, spent a year living in a London hostel on pasta to fund the trip.

Friendships budded, withered or died. “Human beings are very complex animals and that is shown in group situations,” said Mark Rayne from Adventure Tours.

Then there are those who developed ‘bus phobia’ and left the trip. “There were extreme emotions. The purgatory of long drives,” said Kevin, a 50-something ceramics worker from Leek, Staffordshire. “The most wonderful experience of arriving at the Taj, Varanasi, the Tiger Temple. Kurdistan was the first time I saw a man waving an AK-47 at me.”

“It’s all been about getting home,” said James, a 31-year-old carpenter, originally from Melbourne. “I watched people falter, fall out, get frazzled and freak out but all the hiccups have washed over me.”

But, as Mr. Connor pointed out, group travel is never easy. “You have no support coming from anywhere else. You think you get to know people so well. But no one’s ever seen you in any other context so you can’t really know what people are like as parents or children or workmates.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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End of an 84-day trip

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