The distance from Cologne, Germany to London, England is about 600 kilometres, and any travel itinerary will usually recommend flying as the most convenient mode of transportation. A flight between the two cities lasts about an hour and a half, but that’s just pure air-time, there is airport wait, security check-in, yada yada. And once you land you then have to wait to taxi, then de-board and then pass through security and passport checks again, before picking up your bag at the carousel, if it comes. When it’s all said and done that hour and half flight might end being five or six hours, and who has time for that?
In early January I wanted to go from Cologne to London. I took out my computer and checked flights: 150ish euros, the flight aggregator website said. I was determined to get across the European continent as cheaply as possible and even though 150 euros wasn’t that expensive at the time, I thought I could do better. I checked the trains next. Some rail companies only cover specific zones, so a provider like Eurostar, Europe’s premier long-distance train service, is actually pretty limited in its destinations. Travelling from country to country often requires you to catch a connecting train in some station along your journey, and unlike a connecting flight, which can sometimes be separated by hours, a train connection is separated by minutes.
Train travel is also more expensive than flying, on the whole. If you plan to cross the continent, which I was, then you might as well just pay for a flight, which is about the same cost and several hours faster. But trains are also unreliable, and the trains in Germany are some of the most unreliable pieces of garbage in recent locomotive history. But reliability didn’t really factor into my decision making. I wanted, above all else, a cheap travel experience. It didn’t matter in what form it came, I just wanted to get from Point A to Point B without issue or financial stress.
So I decided to take a bus.
Now, buses are slower than both trains and planes, much slower. In fact it takes eight to ten hours for a bus to get from Cologne to London. Buses can also be uncomfortable, the no legroom, perhaps an unpleasant smell. There are also, let's face it, some weird people on buses, generally speaking.
However, a bus from here to there costs something like 30 euros–significantly cheaper than a plane or train–and if I could swing it and book an overnight bus ride, all the better. Who cares how long a ride is if you’re sleeping the whole time?
At 4:30 pm my bus arrived outside the front entrance of the Cologne airport. It was a double decker lime green Flixbus, named so for the company that owns it. As I picked up my bags and began to wheel my suitcase the door opened and out came a handful of eastern European looking men practically climbing over one another to get out the bus to light up a cigarette. My stop was not the first and who knows how long these men had been shut away without a delicious cigarette. They hacked and spat at the ground and inhaled their cigarettes in a single breath before dropping their butts and grinding them into the pavement with the heel of their shoes. Almost as fast as they came flying out of the bus they had climbed back aboard.
I had paid for two bags to go underneath the bus in the storage compartments. The driver, an Irishman who had exited the bus to help me and others onboard, was finishing up his own cigarette and asked how many bags I had to put away.
Two, I said.
He took my suitcase with one hand then eyed me up and down and spoke in a whisper out of the corner of his mouth. You can bring that other one on board, he said, just don’t tell anyone.
No worries, sir. You are the person who I wouldn’t want to know anyway.
The bus stopped in Dusseldorf and Essen, picking up and dropping riders off at both stops, and then proceeded to Amsterdam, which was the final destination of that particular bus. In Amsterdam I was to get a connecting bus that would take me across the channel and into England where we were scheduled to arrive in London around 10:00 am the next morning.
From Cologne to Essen I sat uncomfortably in my seat, tossing and turning trying to find the Right Spot and began to sweat. The bus stopped in Dusseldorf to pick up and drop off no one, then got stuck in traffic in the heart of downtown for an hour and half. The next five or so hours to Amsterdam passed very uneventfully, and by 9:00 pm I was in the Dutch capital.
The picture that pops into one's head when they think of Amsterdam is usually something along the lines of this: beautiful multi-coloured tulips and green trees lining the boulevards that wind along canals that bisect the city. Amsterdam is one of the most visited and enjoyable cities in all of Europe, but I cannot say that the rose tinted view of the city was what I saw and experienced on January 6.
The bus dropped me off at the Sloterdijk Train Station, in the west and presumably industrial part of the city. I crossed a gigantic empty parking lot and lugged my suitcase across a railway track and up a flight of stairs to the station. Inside I found a Starbucks and took off my coat and sat down. Just then I got an email from Flixbus, which told me that, unfortunately, my connecting bus that was scheduled to leave at 11:58 pm, had just been cancelled.
Almost as soon as I finish reading the email the baristas told everyone waiting in Starbucks to get out because they were closing. I started to panic. I collected my things, put my coat back on and found the helpline on the Flixbus website.
The “helpline” does not have a phone number attached to it, but it does have an automated texting service that connects any weary customer to an actual person–presumably–who will then help you.
First I get Gretchen. I tell her that my bus had been cancelled, but on my app, the bus is still scheduled to arrive on time. Which is it, Gretchen? She tells me to sit tight and she’ll look into the issue, so I wait. She texts me that, yes the bus has indeed been cancelled, but offers to find another one that can get me to London. Great, I tell her, do that. Then she says this new bus–the only other bus leaving Amsterdam for London within a reasonable time frame–is scheduled to leave in eight hours.
I close the app. Maybe she’s wrong, I think, maybe my bus hasn’t been cancelled. After all, it says on the app that it’s still coming. I found the bus pick up spot, which turned out to be little more than a single concrete picnic table under a graffiti ridden overpass just outside the station. A collection of other bus travellers were waiting quietly in the cold, huddled in pairs or groups that they were travelling with. A giant overflowing garbage can gives off a pungent aroma of rotting refuse and occasionally draws a single person who creeps from out of the shadows to pick at the heap before retreating down an alleyway.
I sat and waited, holding my phone and hoping that my bus was still coming, hoping that it wasn’t cancelled. An hour goes by, and then another one. Buses come and go and more and more people get picked up. I want to ask someone standing near me if they were also planning to get to London and if they think the bus is cancelled or not, but I don’t.
Then it was 11:30 and I decided to try the app again. I text the same prompt and a new guy—Duane—answers. I filled him in and said that waiting until 8:00 am for a new bus was not possible, I had nowhere to stay and needed to leave. Could he help me, I asked.
Three little grey dots appeared on the screen, signalling he had read and received my message and that he was preparing to write back. Then the dots disappear and the read-received notification goes away. Duane, that bastard, ignored me. I was out of options and running out of time. One bus after another came and went. I opened the app again and found the first bus out of Amsterdam that was going to London. It left in twelve minutes. I bought a ticket, fighting off my numb fingers as I did so, and downloaded the ticket onto my phone as the bus itself pulled up in front of me. I slid my bags in the underneath compartment and collapsed into my seat. A handful of minutes later the bus, the last one that would be coming through Amsterdam for several hours, pulled out of Sloterdijk.
The bus I had just got on was not a direct journey to London, in fact it was to take me to Paris where I would arrive around 4:30 am and catch another bus for 6:30 am that would take me the rest of the way to London. The estimated time of arrival for the second bus was about 4:00 pm.
When the body is deprived of sleep it makes you feel a certain way. Your muscles don’t feel right and your eyes feel dry and they sting. You feel dirty and covered in a layer of film. That's how I felt as the new bus arrived at the Paris Bercy station–
–A quick note on Paris and the French. In my experience, the stereotype of the smoking European, which is most often applied to the French, more so applied to the Germans than to the French. However, the Paris Bercy bus station at 4:00 to 6:00 am might as well have been the floor of a tobacco plant. Nearly every single human being with a mouth and a working set of fingers was smoking a cigarette, and because the station was underground, they were doing so inside. The entire station, which was large enough to fit twenty to thirty coach buses, was filled with a layer of smoke. It hung in the air like a fog and coated the lenses of my glasses and burrowed its way into my nostrils–
Paris Bercy was busy at 4:00 am. Dozens of people lined wooden benches on both sides of the station hall. Some covered themselves with dirty blankets and slept. Others desperately plugged in their phones at wall outlets. Some just stood and stared off into space, gripping their suitcases so tight their hands turned white.
At 6:30 am my bus arrived. The driver, a tall African man with a thick accent, dutifully inspected every passenger's passport and ticket and debated at length with a few people over their luggage allowance. Still, we left Paris Bercy at exactly the time we were supposed to. By 10:00 am we were in Calais, along the coast, waiting to board a ferry that would take us across the channel.
An hour and a half later the bus embarked from Dover, after having been screened by British border security, and started on the last leg towards London. I sat in my window seat and watched traffic pass by on the wrong side of the road and watched the sun gently set over English fields. By 3:00, the farthest reaches of London suburbs started to creep past the window.
I had made it. It only took twenty-four hours, about 150 euros (the same cost as a flight from Cologne to London), and entailed the most stressful experience of my life so far.
If there is anything to learn from this, it’s this: just buy the goddamn plane ticket.
Thanks for reading Features! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
