One very long bus ride
September 15th, 2007 by Tim Uden
Today the first Oz-Bus service departed from London en route to Sydney.
It’s not exactly cheap at GBP £3750 London-Sydney or AUD $9000 Sydney-London, but you do get to travel through some amazing places for 12 weeks and accommodation is included. I am sure it will be a fantastic trip and an experience of a lifetime.
Oz-Bus claim to be the first London-Sydney regular bus service but let’s set one thing straight; this is not a scheduled bus service. It’s a tour! Accommodation is provided in tents en route and in Iran and Pakistan you are provided accommodation in hotels. It’s not a service for independent travellers because there is nothing independent about being told where to go and where to stay.
I’m not saying that it won’t be a great trip. Of course it will, but it would be much more of an adventure doing the same route on your own and it will be a lot cheaper to do it yourself.
Travelling on the Oz Bus will cost over GBP £312 or AUD $750 a week and that is going through some of the cheapest countries in the world and sleeping in a tent. You can spend less that that travelling in Scandinavia with a 1st class rail pass and sleeping in very nice hostels! For a tour it is a reasonable price but for a bus ticket it is overpriced. Overland travel through Asia on local buses should be a lot cheaper than this.
What I would really like to see is a proper overland bus service for independent travellers where you can choose where to stay en route and hop on and off the bus as you feel like it knowing that you can hop on another bus the next day. Something like a trans-Asian bus version of a Eurail or Interrail pass. It wouldn’t be too difficult for a travel company to work out a deal with bus companies in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Thailand and Malaysia and create a proper Asian bus pass.
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