Altea is quite far south on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, about 500 kilometres below Barcelona, so to go anywhere else in Europe you usually take the plane. I did take the bus once though, to Paris. A friend had come to see us on a bus and painted an appealing picture of the experience, with views of the sea and the countryside, comfortable seats, movies on big TV screens, toilets, and, importantly, a much cheaper ticket.
I have to say that the trip did not start off well. My wife dropped me off in Benidorm near the bus stop with a little piece of paper headed Bono de servicio on which the travel agent had scribbled that since the computer wasn't working I had, not exactly a reservation to go to Paris, but a return that was open. Go figure. The words 28,000 pesetas were also written on the bottom of the sheet, and that was indeed what we had paid the previous day, but I wasn't sure it actually proved I had paid for a ticket. It could have been the price I should have paid. Anyway, my wife was now on the road to Madrid with the kids and I was alone waiting by the side of the road for a bus that was supposed to arrive "around noon".
In fact, the bus did arrive at noon. The driver, a small slim young man, dapper in a dowdy French sort of way, jumped down and addressed me without hesitation in French. "C'est vous Fernandez?" he said, without a bonjour or a monsieur or anything. He obviously thought I was Spanish. No, I said, and I held up my Bono de servicio. "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" he said, then, peering carefully and deciphering the Spanish: "B o n o d e s e r v i s i o" He looked up. "C'est quoi votre nom?" I pointed to it on the paper and read it out. "Et Fernandez alors, où est-ce qu'il est?" As if I was somehow responsible. We both went into the little ticket office and he asked again for his Fernandez, his Spanish strongly accented, hardly understandable, but showing the woman a printed sheet he was holding. He seemed quite angry. The woman said nothing but looked at my piece of paper as well as his, picked up the phone and explained the problem to someone. Maybe when the computer had started to work, the agent had made the reservation under a different name? (Dream on...) There was a very long silence as the woman listened carefully to the person on the other end of the phone, then she hung up. "Fernandez no sé", she said, "but this gentleman needs a ticket. Do you have tickets on the bus?" "No, we don't carry tickets. We'll have to see in Valencia. Bon, d'accord, c'est bien." He looked at me with just the slightest hint of a smile, though still angry, and said: "Bon, eh bien, je vous prends à la place de Fernandez alors." He'd take me instead of Fernandez. I boarded the bus, feeling slightly guilty.
The bus was almost empty, so I chose a seat conveniently situated in front of the TV screen, which, smaller than I had imagined, was not yet switched on. The bus pulled away and after a few minutes the TV started suddenly, part way through a video. It was a bullfight, and after a while I realized it was going to be a complete bullfight, six bulls and long periods of waiting and looking at the bloodstained sand and sweaty spectators with white handkerchiefs. When the bullfighters were in action, there was excited commentary in Spanish on technical aspects of the passes and other matters that were difficult to appreciate on a small screen in a moving bus, especially for a non-expert whose tauromachian vocabulary in Spanish is limited. On top of that, the image was in purple and white. I hoped this might be just a problem with the bullfight documentary, which I wasn't really interested in, but no, the set in its present state obviously couldn't display any other colours. So I watched in purple and white both the two Kung-Fu movies and a long French film about how two surprisingly taciturn climbers get to the top of a peak near Chamonix. The whole video part of the bus trip was something of a disappointment.
It turned out a few more disappointments were in store: the individual seat lights didn't work ("Eh non!" shrugged the driver when asked, as if it was something I should have expected), the toilet continuously overflowed, leaving the bathroom floor covered in two inches of water. Where all the water came from I couldn't figure. Then there was the poor old man who, as his wife explained loudly to all of us who were interested, had just had his leg operated on, and who fell headlong in the central aisle, banging his head painfully on a metallic seat arm, as the bus braked hard in a street in Valencia. His wife, who seemed unusually talkative for someone whose husband obviously never listened to her, had kept saying "Eh oui, c'est ça les autobus, c'est ça les autobus" (Oh yes, there's buses for you), over and over again, as if to herself, ever since she got on, though it wasn't at all clear what aspects of the buses she was referring to. She repeated it again, not inappropriately now, after her initial cry of horror, while helpful passengers were trying to get the poor man back on his feet, "Eh oui, c'est ça les autobus."
I wouldn't like to give the impression that the trip was a complete disaster. Some things definitely went well: I got my ticket in Valencia, finally throwing off the spectre of Fernandez; I ate quite well at the restaurant we stopped at, and had time to buy a newspaper. It's true that the first Kung-Fu movie was put on immediately after the meal, which had been somewhat oily, and my stomach became a tad unsettled. Gore and violence, even when the gore is purple, sometimes do that to me, and the knowledge that the toilet was unusable probably didn't help.
But the rest of the trip wasn't bad, once I'd become used to things. The driver got completely lost in Barcelona, twice even, according to the woman in front of me who spent a good part of her time complaining to George, her husband, about this bus company and the various strands of its incompetence. In any case, it took us an hour and a half to get out of Barcelona, which meant that we didn't stop for dinner, near Gerona, until half past ten. It's true that one advantage of buses over trains, I thought at the time, is that you get to stop in real restaurants and eat in relative comfort, instead of in a rattling dining car where things move around and the food is expensive and not at all good. Of course, with trains, there's not the problem of hearing your driver, at his little table close by, ask for a second bottle of wine. The lady who sat in front of me in the bus really took exception to that, and George almost had to intervene. I had a coffee and brandy, still affordable in Spain, and slept most of the night.
Crossing the border between Spain and France was a welcome distraction. There were several black men on the bus, each one taller and blacker than the next, and the lady in front of me had already told George in the restaurant that we'd lose a lot of time at the border because of them. She hadn't mentioned them explicitly, but had made several very obvious jerks of her head in their direction while she was explaining. In fact, the customs officials only kept us long enough so they could watch through the window of the warm bus as four swarthy-looking men were pulled from a little car and a dog was sent in to sniff around. But this dog was definitely not interested in sniffing. His handler would get him into the car and he'd jump out right away. He'd put him back in, encourage him with words and gestures, and he'd jump right back out. Then he actually ran away and both we and our bus's customs officials laughed at their colleagues as they ran around incongruously after him. In the end, the men were allowed back into the car and they left at the same time as us.
In Lyons, at five-thirty in the morning, we didn't manage to find the Perrache bus station where we were supposed to leave some of the passengers. The driver did his best. He asked several people - there weren't many around at that time in the morning - but no one seemed to know where it was. In the end he just left the passengers at the train station, which had the same name, which was something.
I slept some more, and around eight-thirty I was feeling a bit peckish. It was an hour or so before we finally stopped at one of the motorway service areas. The lady in front of me leaned back to confide that the driver hadn't even planned to stop for breakfast - "Vous imaginez!" - and so George had had to go and talk to him. We got lost only once in Paris, but were able to do quite a successful U-turn in heavy traffic on a wide boulevard, and we arrived just an hour late at the bus station after a twenty-four hour journey.
I don't know if I'll try the train next time. I still have an open return ticket from Paris to Benidorm, which I'll probably end up using in a week or so, maybe on a different bus with a different driver. I wonder what that will be like.
