Taking the red eye coach from the Czech Republic
If there is one transport option that I swore that I would never again repeat in my life it is the all night coach trip back to England. This is the real red eye option with the trip taking around 15 hours. This probably sounds pretty wimpish to those who cross continents or semi-continents on the likes of Greyhound buses, but my world is made up of much shorter horizons.
I think it is around a decade since I last made a similar bus trip and that time I miscalculated the arrival time in England. I got there about three in the morning at a 24-hour supermarket car park in Folkestone and with no public transport available I paid more for the taxi the around 20 miles home outside Canterbury than for the previous 900 miles.
This time round there was a big plus that there were not too many people booked on board. The coach was around a quarter full and I wondered a bit how the company could make much money at all.
Maybe it’s not politically proper to comment, but most of the travelers were Roma and most seemed to be habitual travelers on the route. One or two were starting afresh in Britain with the news passed on by the veterans that once you got an address over there it was fairly easy to start earning and becoming officially established. Apart from Prague, there were pick ups in Plzeň, Nuremburg and Heidelberg and then it was straight through.
I don’t sleep anyway on long journeys, but I did grab some snatched sleep on the trip. The overhead lights are put out as a matter of course after eleven at night and since I had not brought my own reading light, there was not much else to do.
The trip was pretty uneventful until we came to the customs and police checks on the French side of the Channel Tunnel. Understandably, the French asked to see passports and other identification but were clearly not too concerned who they let through to Britain. Not so, their British counterparts. One Czech clearly got on the wrong side of the rules when his plastified ID card was revealed to have been torn in one place and he had apparently carried out some do-it-yourself repair.
‘Under the rules you can send him back,’ the British border force officials agreed between them. They kept the Czech for around a quarter of an hour before releasing him to get on the bus again. ‘The British are awful,’ was the comment of one of the waiting coach party. Actually, it was far from clear what the option were for the temporarily detained Czech. The next bus back was in two days’ time and it seemed unlikely that the British would be keeping him locked up on the French side of the channel until then.
A few of the coach passengers got off along with me in Dover and got into waiting cars. I headed for the coach station and another onward bus that would dump me in the Kent countryside. Dover itself is a strange mix, a town that has clearly seen better times but still seems undecided whether it is heading for revival or towards terminal decline.
A footnote perhaps is that a shop selling Czech and Slovak specialities is now nestled in one part of the down at heel bits of town. Its future looked a bit uncertain and I will keep you posted on the progress the next time the red eye trip comes round.
