On the road to God knows where – by bus

We’re on the road to God knows where


Daniel Carey

“WELL, I wouldn’t start from here!”
The age-old response when being asked for directions came to mind a few weeks back the day I boarded the Galway-Ballina bus, asked for a single ticket to Castlebar, and was asked by the driver: “Do you know the way?”
I was taken aback, but didn’t object – bus driver need holidays as much as (or probably more than) the rest of us, and passengers can’t expect their replacements to be intimately au fait with the route. This is particularly the case on a marathon trip like Galway-Ballina, where the route changes by the day.
The Saturday morning run is a particularly spectacular example of ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’. Any vehicle that goes from Ballinrobe to Castlebar via Sheridan’s Cross, Roundfort, Hollymount, Ballyglass and Belcarra may offer a vital service to the people in those localities, but it sure as hell ain’t as-the-crow-flies route planning.
One passenger put it more bluntly: “This is a big detour – 15 miles from nowhere”. Throw in the lack of people looking for a lift, and some on board were to left to wonder. “You wouldn’t mind if you were picking up people,” offered the driver as those of us without compasses tried to figure out if we were going north, south, east or west. “Make a left here and go back in towards civilization,” one townie said with a smile.
We thought we had gone wrong at one stage – halfway between the Mayo equivalent of Puckane and Nenagh, as Christy Moore might have put it. But, as our relieved navigator noted when a sign for Ballyglass flashed up and it became clear we were still on course: “Even when I was wrong, I was right”.
We looked up a side road which, apparently, is part of the route the bus takes on Wednesday. “You have to back up a mile if you meet a car on that road,” one veteran suggested. “And wait until you get to North Mayo,” a man added. “They have thousand-foot cliffs and no roads up there.”
Discussion turned to other drivers, including one who was described as ‘a rock star to all the old women’. Many bus drivers seem to be social workers, conversationalists and Age Action Ireland advocates as well as able to ‘keep her between the ditches’. They also need the patience of Job, not least to deal with would-be customers who are liable to ask ‘You’re not going to Claremorris?’ no fewer than six times, as I witnessed last week.
Among passengers, every topic under the sun is liable to be discussed on bus journeys. On a trip I took last Sunday week, property tax (‘I’d rather go inside for a week than pay it’), the changing Ireland reflected in baby names (‘They have a Shania, you know’), botox (‘Tell us, what’s it like?’), overweight men (‘They must have joined two aeroplanes to fly him home’) and the declining quality of cuisine (‘Ham and bacon are gone to hell’) were all covered. Truly, all human life is here.