Why is it that most bus terminals are designed like concrete intestines? They have a distinctive colon-like appearance, and are tucked into the centre of a city and covered by the skin of a decrepit shopping centre, or simply an ugly wall. You find the mouth of the terminal after much circling and confusion, entering through a concrete pipe that goes around and around and around – deep into the centre of something, until finally you locate your bay. All going well, you come out the other end, transformed!, as a bus passenger.
I have a lot of time to think about such things, because of the sheer amount of hours I am spending on the bus.
The trip from Sydney to Cairns takes 47 hours nonstop, but I’m breaking it into what I hope will be manageable chunks of 9 to 14 hours, hopping on and off over a two-week period.
After resting at a hotel in Brisbane (three stars, no ventilation, and when I wake up I see someone – not me! – has hurled a partially gnawed beef kebab on to the 14 storey-roof by my window) it’s time to keep moving.
On the way to the bus, I ponder the word “Terminal”: it means to die, no hope, no cure. It also means “bus station.”
This leg is long. Terminally long. I’ll be on it for almost 13 hours until I get to Miriam Vale in central Queensland at about 1:10am, where my friend Brendan will be waiting to collect me.
There are only six passengers on the bus when we leave Brisbane. As if in tacit agreement we all spread out across the bus, giving each other maximum space.
The driver warns us that this will not last: “I have 25 getting on at Airlie Beach.” So the backpackers are back.
As we clear the city the driver introduces himself, “I’ll take you through to Hervey Bay, then Barry will take over.”
The bus drivers on my trip are without exception older, male and lovely. They call all the passengers “mate” but without the edge that you sometimes hear when a stranger calls you “mate”. They talk about masks (“I don’t see anyone wearing one back there but the law is you got to wear them”), seatbelts, toilets, rest stops, and meal breaks. It’s the script of the long distance bus driver and I will hear it on every leg. But each driver has a different take, his own emphasis. Some will talk a lot about masks (“police could get on, and fine the lot of you for not wearing masks!”), others go hard on seatbelts (“kangaroos jump all over the road and if we swerve and you’re not wearing a seatbelt, you’re in strife”), while others will talk – excessively I think – about toilets (“you might think the door is closed, but you need to check because it can swing open anytime!”).
Over the course of the trip I will get annoyed at the Spanish guy who FaceTimes everyone in his village over a painful four-hour period, I will be angry at the girl who listens to TikTok with the volume up, I will be irritated by the man who brings a bag of dim sims on to the bus – but I will never mind the bus driver making an announcement. Listening to them is the difference between being stranded at an Ampol on the outskirts of Hervey Bay or arriving at your destination.
After Brisbane, it’s still light, which means there’s something to look at out the bus window. This is Leisure country – where Australians go to retire or take a break. It’s nice; the clouds above Maroochydore looking like a doona exploded in perfect white puffs, kite surfers on Marcus beach – for a while keeping pace with the bus – as they are blown along the shore, sunshowers before dusk as we pull into Noosa with the mountain’s nearby glowing gold and purple, looming like an Aztec temple. My phone is on 43% and we have eight hours to go.
We pick a couple more people up at these stops – and the other people on the bus are without exception young backpackers. At the “rest stops” many of the passengers get off to smoke and I hear the tentative first words of smokers making friends: “Got a light?” “Where you off to?” “Oh me too!” “Where you staying? The Nomads? Yeah.” Ciggies – bringing people together since the 16th century!
I had thought no one smoked any more. But the bus travellers do. They’re not even bothering with vaping – they’re going full old school, filtered, filthy ciggies. I stand behind them at the BP and they complain in Irish and English accents about paying $50 for a pack. Welcome to Australia! Wait until they see the packaging. I wonder if they’ll get the distended eyeball, the dying man, the diseased lung or the blackened tombstone teeth?
The sun is going down. We drive on a bit further until we arrive at the roadhouse just south of Gympie – the Golden Nugget. Built like a log cabin, it’s a delight, and feels like it’s from a different era.
I had brought my own dinner. My friend Sarah had biked to the farmers market in Brisbane early that morning – and packed a brown bag full of healthy snacks and fruit for me. But how can it compete with lamb chops and mash? Or fried chicken with gravy and chips, or a full roast dinner?
I love this roadhouse immediately – perhaps because of its contrast to the other “rest stops.” They are big, ugly boxes – harshly lit and plastic, on the side of the road containing a cluster of food franchise counters, and toilets that you “rate,” that have distressingly noisy Dyson hand dryers. No one looks good under the lights. No one feels rested after stopping in these places, eating fast food from a box with a bamboo fork, sitting on plastic moulds that look like offcuts from a children’s indoor play centre.
But the Golden Nugget – dimly lit, wood panelled, warm and cosy, is designed for comfort and actual rest. The news is on low on a TV in the corner, the food is served on real china, and the cutlery reassuringly solid stainless steel. The man behind the counter, who looks like Harry Dean Stanton, greets all the truckies by name and calls the women he doesn’t know “love” and the men “mate”.
Outside the roadhouse the sunset is mauve and pink. The youth finish their ciggies. I contemplate my uneaten bag of organic fruit. We all linger outside just a bit longer to watch the colours burn then fade.
Then it’s time to get back on the bus.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
