Our First (and Last!) Night Bus in India

When you’re a tourist, there are always people eager to sell you an expensive alternative to the much cheaper version available to natives, especially if you are a visitor from a wealthy country. For instance, we are often discouraged from taking local transportation in favour of a significantly more expensive option. This means is usually a taxi or a hired car. It’s not that we’re cheap, although we do watch our pennies. It’s that travel is about experiences and people, and being in an air-conditioned car can be isolating. And that is how we came to take a night bus in India, to Pondicherry. (Also how Laurel took that other bus in Senegal.)

Having spent a lovely couple of days in Madurai at the temple and had some clothing made, we were headed to Puducherry. There was no space on the trains, for days. (One of our regular mistakes in India was underestimating the number of people who would be doing any given thing right when we wanted to be doing it. This includes trying to book train tickets as the train station, but that’s another story!) So we decided to take the bus. The buses were mostly full, but there was one sleeper, leaving Madurai at about 1 in the morning and arriving in Puducherry at about 8 in the morning. As veteran travellers, this did not worry us overmuch.

To the Bus Station!

We left our hotel at about 23:30 and took a tuk-tuk to the bus station on the outskirts of town. At that hour, we saw only a few people and a few cows wandering about. After about 45 minutes (tuk-tuks are not super-fast), we saw the lights of the bus station in the distance. But our driver went past that station and pulled in next door. This was an abandoned-looking set of buildings, dark and quiet. He left us in front of one building, saying that was where the Pondicherry bus departed from. We disembarked and, to our surprise, a few guys came out, asked why we were there, and set out plastic chairs. They too assured us that this was the departure point for the bus, although there was literally nobody else around. Also no buses. Soon they went inside too. We waited, and when it reached the scheduled departure time for the bus, we got concerned. We asked our plastic-chair friends if they were sure this was the right place and they confirmed.

At the Other Bus Station

Sometimes when you travel you are not suspicious enough. But our experience has been that we are more often too suspicious. We knew that Indians are often extremely agreeable, prone to give you whatever answer you want. So we worried that the bus would never come. And then we’d have to get back to town, find a place to sleep, make new travel arrangements, etc. In hindsight it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but we had begun to fret. Sitting at that nearly abandoned set of buildings while there was a bright bus station right next door (which had the additional advantage of buses), we could not help wondering if our informants were wrong. So off we went, with backpacks, to the bus-bedecked station. After seven or eight minutes frantically asking about our bus, we came to the conclusion that it might also not be the right bus station.

Meanwhile, …

As we were leaving the big bright bus station, dispirited, what should we see pulling out of the deserted area next door? That’s right: a bus marked ‘Puducherry’ which had obviously arrived right after we left, seen no passengers, and merrily gone on its way! We were about 500 feet away and immediately began yelling and gesticulating for the bus to stop mid-street and mid-turn. The bus driver could probably neither see nor hear us. But fortunately the men whose superior knowledge we had spurned, seeing us running like crazy people, stopped the bus and waited till we arrived. We thanked them profusely (and with great embarrassment) and boarded the bus. There was the usual examination of tickets by a group of employees and passengers, some one or two of whom possibly could read them, and then we were on our way.

But That’s Not The Funny Part: On the Night Bus in India

Sweaty and fueled by adrenaline, we examined our new home for the next several hours. No actual seats, but flat beds on both sides, with curtains for privacy. It was a double-decker with beds on the bottom and the top, two beds per side, about 32 total. There was certainly no toilet, but we were beyond worrying about that. In an ideal world, we might have avoided the axle since we imagined it would be less comfortable, but as the last two passengers on the bus that’s just where we ended up. No matter, we thought: a little discomfort, perhaps a bit more noise than in the other parts of the bus. Think of it as our penance for not trusting people. Besides, we were exhausted from our self-imposed anxieties. Within about five minutes of lying down to enjoy our first night bus in India, we were brutally reminded that the roads of India are not the smoothest. Nor are the motorized vehicles of India the best-suspended. As the driver hit the first pothole, we were lifted up out of the bed and then bounced back down. Not far, mind you. But there we were, for the next six hours.

We won’t go into the remainder of the trip, how in fact the bus did not go all the way to Puducherry but left us off at an intersection in the middle of nowhere with three other people in the pre-dawn. Nor about how we finished the ninety-minute trip in a car packed to the gills and arrived bleary eyed at the Puducherry bus station. What we will say is that when you are travelling, sometimes you should trust the locals!