How to…travel by public transport around the USA

The USA is an enormous country where the car is king. Travelling around by public transport is not the norm and even most guidebooks assume you are driving everywhere. Gathering information about public transport has been time consuming, so to save you the hassle here‘s what we found out.

Buses
It is possible to get around most of the US on the bus, although in comparison to Mexico the bus system is far behind. Greyhound has elicited groans for years, and yes it is grim, but thankfully some better buses, such as Megabus, are starting to challenge their stranglehold.

If you’re first in the queue for the bright blue double-decker Megabus you can secure a table and four chairs in front of a video screen, and if you’re lucky they will be playing films. The seats are comfy with leg room and the onboard toilet is useable. Despite the better quality the prices are often cheaper than Greyhound. We met a woman who had bought a return from Chicago to Detroit (a five and a half hour journey) for $2.50. Buy in advance and you can get a real bargain. They keep their prices low by offering a no-frills service; you can only buy tickets on-line (you get a reservation code that you show upon boarding), you have to put your bags in the hold yourself and they have no bus stations (only bus stops by the side of the road). The only disadvantages that we found are that the service only serves the north/northeast of the country and if the weather is bad you have to wait for the bus in the rain.

The Megabus drivers are great entertainment, each seemingly running their bus in the manner they seem fit. Our Chicago to Minneapolis driver made the rules of the journey clear to its mainly springbreak passengers,
“No chewing gum loudly - no smacking or cracking. Gentlemen please raise the toilet seat and put it down again. Don’t play music loudly - that’s what headphones are for.”

On the other hand Durrl (spelt Darryl on his name badge), our Minneapolis to Chicago driver, was a one man entertainment machine. He was playing his personal collection of DVDs (“I thought the kids might like Iron Man”) and was genuinely sorry when the DVD kept skipping over the rutted roads of the Mid-West. He grinned back over his shoulder, while battling to keep the bus upright in strong winds and rain, until he got the thumbs up from us that the volume was fine. As Blades of Glory skipped itself to the end Darryl changed tack and got on the PA system,
“Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time ever in Megabus history this is your chance to come down to the front and make an announcement over the microphone. Come on down!” No-one budged so Darryl continued,
“We got a beautiful girl upstairs on her way to become America’s Next Top Model and we got some world travellers sitting here right behind me on the lower deck.” A shout-out on the Megabus - it doesn’t get much classier than that! And on he whittered congratulating people for the size of their phone or the food they were eating until finally some passengers came down the stairs and grabbed the mike,
“I’d like to say thank you to the driver for getting us here safely and to say happy birthday to my nieces for Thursday.” A round of applause. Durrl liked that and came back with an Eddie Murphy style,
“O, o, oooh! We’re gliding like Egyptian silk!” This man clearly enjoys his job and made the eight hour bus journey so much shorter. Public transport has never been such fun.

There are, apparently, a few bus companies travelling between one city’s Chinatown to the next (various websites, just google ‘Chinabus‘), but again only serves the northeast at present. The buses are, apparently, of about the same standard as the Greyhound, but are cheaper. Boston bus station has a particularly good array of bus companies serving different destinations.

When all else fails there is the Greyhound. It does connect to most cities in the US and is often cheaper than taking the train. We didn’t find it a dangerous experience, just a depressing one, with some of the worst customer service we’ve encountered on our trip. However, it works and we used it extensively between Texas and Ohio. Check for deals online and, if you can, book ahead because when you book more than three days in advance your travel partner gets a half-price ticket. You need to arrive at the Greyhound station an hour before departure to pick-up tickets (you just get a reservation code online) or to purchase tickets. They never seem to sell out, and if a bus is full they just put on another one for the same journey.

When you’ve bought your ticket put your bags in the queue by the departure gate - you want to be one of the first on the bus so you can pick good seats (we prefer near the front and as far away from smelly people as possible). You and your hand luggage may be subject to an airport style security check and frisk, as was the case in Memphis, so keep penknives, scissors, nail files etc. in your backpack for the hold and not in your hand luggage. Greyhound buses are fairly standard coaches but lack the comfort and movies of the Mexican buses, so take your own entertainment.

Both the Megabus and the Greyhound stop every few hours for a loo and food break. Greyhound seems to have a close relationship with fastfood chains, whereas the Megabus usually stops at a service centre where you can make your own choice.

Trains
Travelling by train is definitely our preferred method of public transport in the US. The seats are comfy with plenty of legroom, there are plug sockets so you can work on your laptop, there’s a dining car and the toilets are acceptable. They are better than British trains in terms of comfort, although delays are also not unusual.

The view from the train is often much better than the soulless, corporate chain lined interstates that the buses favour. The train can take you through farmland and forests and alongside rivers and lakes.

Amtrak runs the trains in the States. You can buy tickets on line or at the station, with online sales offering the best deals. There are weekly ‘hot deals’ and if you are planning to travel extensively during a two or three week period, a rail pass could be a good option.

Turn up 30 minutes to an hour early to collect your tickets (if purchased online) and wait to be directed, or sometimes escorted, to the train. The waiting areas in the stations are generally more comfortable than those for buses.

The only drawbacks for us have been that Amtrak does not operate services across the whole country and only in the northeast does the service seem to be frequent.

Travelling around the States on public transport is perfectly possible, provides a great insight into parts of America you might not otherwise encounter and can even be great fun. If only there was a Durrl on every train and bus!







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Mission Mississippi: A step too far?

"Are you guys homeless too?" asked a camouflage clad hobo with a split lip. I began to wonder if our frugal wanderings had gone a step too far.

Eating a packed lunch on a bench in our new cold weather thrift store clothes with Tom's burgeoning beard, perhaps we did have more in common with the bums on the benches around us than we realised.

I immediately scoffed "No," in response to the hobo's question, but then thought about it and, technically, yes we are homeless. We live out of a bag, we eat a free lunch where we can get it (a hotdog from a free music show in Nashville on this particular day), we use free internet at the library (incidentally Nashville must have the most intellectual hobos in the world given the numbers in the city library), we buy our clothes in the second hand (thrift) store, we don't have a car and instead ride the Greyhound and we surf couches. It's a fine line.

I don't want to look like a bum, so on that day I swore to smarten myself up, or at least choose a different bench on which to eat lunch.

My promise to self didn't take long to break when we met our Couchsurfing host for the evening who took us home for a dumpster dinner. Josh hasn't bought food from a supermarket since February 14th 2007 (a fussy girlfriend apparently). Instead he dumpster dives. In the middle of the night he pops round the back of the neighbourhood grocery store (the larger the better) and goes 'shopping' in the skips.

I've heard of freegans before and thoroughly applaud their cause. There is far too much waste in the world. People in the UK and the US throw away about one quarter of their food each year. However, when presented with a cooked from frozen burger on an out-of-date bun with green beans, all of which you know have been rolling around the bottom of a filthy skip, it does make swallowing a little hard. Gulp. We ate it though and we were fine. Josh reports no illness whatsoever from his three years of dumpster diving.

So yes, we're on a really tight budget, but no, I don't want to be a hobo. Perhaps it's time to dip into the overdraft, instead of the dumpster, after all.

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Ban the bomb

The city we’re staying in is very pleasant. It’s bright, buzzing and modern. The sun smiles down on wide tree-lined avenues, where trams trundle past, carrying beachgoers down to sandy beaches dotted along the bay. Herons and egrets hunt along rivers which spread throughout the city like outstretched fingers, whilst kites wheel overhead and palms sway gently in the warm sea breeze.

But something is wrong, very wrong about this city - it holds a terrible past.

This city is Hiroshima.

63 years ago, this city, then of little global significance was suddenly, unwillingly, propelled in the pages of history, becoming the first city to experience the horrors of nuclear attack.

On 6th September 1945, at 8.15am, the Enola Gay, an American B29 bomber dropped ‘Little Boy’, an atom bomb, on the heart of Hiroshima.

The resulting explosion, equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT, obliterated an entire city, destroying 70,000 buildings and killing hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants.

And whilst this attack, combined with the subsequent atom bombing of Nagasaki three days later, ended the Second World War, Japan, and the world, would never be the same again.

Strolling along the river, flanked by all the trappings of a modern Japanese metropolis, I initially found it very hard to grasp the enormity of this single event.

But as we drew closer to ‘ground zero’, which was directly under the hypocentre of the blast, the pleasant surroundings became overshadowed by the ghostly apparition ahead of us. We faced a shell of a large building, its brick walls crumbling and decayed, it’s domed roof reduced to a bare, rusting frame of girders.

This was once the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, where the region’s goods were proudly displayed and business bustled. Somehow, when the bomb dropped close by it survived, albeit now reduced from its former splendour into a withered skeleton. Post-attack it quickly became reborn as ‘The ‘A Bomb Dome’, a globally recognised symbol of the terror of ‘the bomb’.

Across the river, in the monument-strewn Peace Park, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum left me in no doubt as to the grim reality of nuclear weapons, grimly describing in great detail the events and after effects of the attack.

When Little Boy exploded, some 600 feet above the city, it sent out a shockwave which reduced the city to rubble. Grainy photos show grid-pattern streets, their white dusty lines dividing up the great piles of piles of charred concrete into neat squares. The flattened landscape looks as if a tsunami has hit it, relieved only by the odd blackened tree, defunct telegraph pole or reinforced concrete ruin.

Immediately following the shockwave came extreme heat rays, so hot they melted roof tiles.

Where they met people they left little trace. On part of a building left standing by the blast, one can make out the darkened form of person, sat on the steps of a bank as they waited for it to open. One moment they were here, the next they were gone , instantly vapourised, leaving behind nothing but their shadow, seared into the stone by the heat.

Later that day black rain fell. Thirsty victims, struggling through the levelled streets, drank it out of desperation, seeking to quench their thirst. Where it fell on walls the rain left eerie marks as the radioactive black liquid dribbled to the ground.

As the massive numbers of casualties poured in to whatever makeshift medical facilities could be provided, those doctors that survived became the first medics to witness the gruesome effects of atomic radiation on the human body.

The exhibition stands resembled a house of horror, some pictures too grotesque to bear. Mutilated bodies, unspeakable suffering.

Some say the death toll stands at 200,000. To me it seemed rather pointless, almost ghoulish, to try and establish a precise figure of how may people died that day, or suffered and expired from the effects of radiation in the years after.

Even today, many are still living with the physical and emotional pain. We met one of these ‘hibakushas‘, survivors of the bomb, of which there are some 95,000 still living in Hiroshima.

Mito approached us outside the A-Bomb Dome. A bright and lively chap in his early 60s, he was a four month old foetus in his mother’s womb when the bomb dropped. She was 10km from the hypocentre and so he was spared the physical pain suffered by some many of his fellow citizens.

Now he joins in the efforts to educate the rest of the world about the horrors of nuclear weapons, becoming a ‘peace navigator’ and giving up his time in order to engage with and give free tours to Hiroshima’s many visitors.

I found meeting a hibukusha not only very moving but also a frightening jolt of reality. We are living in a nuclear-armed age, characterised by chaos and uncertainty. Speaking to a survivor of a nuclear attack shook me out of my comfortable Western complacency and shattered any lingering illusions I might have had about the need for a nuclear deterrent.

You can try it for yourself and listen to some of the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings here.

Aside from the horrific impact of nuclear weapons our visit to Hiroshima provided us with an enlightening insight into the reasons being the atomic bombings.

From books and school lessons I had been informed that dropping the bomb was a necessary evil, an act which may have killed hundreds of thousands of people but saved even more by shortening the war.

Now, learning about things from the other side of the fence the doubts I harboured have turned into fully-fledged scepticism.

Before the bomb was dropped Hiroshima, although of major military significance, was curiously spared the airborne onslaught suffered by other Japanese cities. There is considerable evidence that this was a deliberate policy by the Pentagon, in which Hiroshima, alongside a handful of other Japanese cities, had long been earmarked as a kind of testbed for the US’s new fearful weapon.

Concerned about the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions, and anticipating the arms race of the Cold War, the hawks in the US administration might have been anxious to test it ‘in the field’.

Despite all this, it is strange to witness how strong is the US influence in this country: 'convenience stores', 'parking lots', a major American military presence and, irony of ironies, a baseball stadium standing opposite the A-Bomb Dome.

One thing I am now certain of is that by dropping Little Boy, many of those responsible acheived the direct opposite of what they may have hoped, at least in the long term.

This bomb didn’t end all bombs; instead it created more, ushering in a new era where death and destruction could be wreaked on a far greater scale.

Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be argued to have been the right thing for world peace in the short term, but it was surely disastrous in the longer term.

Hiroshima’s legacy is a frightening dangerous one - a nuclear-armed world, in which the citizens of the countries possessing them have been duped that their nuclear deterrent is the only guarantee of a secure and stable world.

Today these weapons are sought by the warlords and fundamentalists, from Washington and Moscow to North Korea and the Middle East. Ever since the 6th September 1945 the world has never been further from peace and harmony.

I consequently came away from Hiroshima sad at the inhumanity we all seem capable of, and uncomprehending of the apathy in which many of us back in Britain seem to be mired. I felt like a fifteen year old again, all tie-die, Doc Martens, CND badges and hopeless idealism. A hardened peacenik.

It’s encouraging therefore to see that the struggle for a nuke-free world continues, and Hiroshima plays a full part in these efforts. Its citizens seek to educate the rest of the world about the folly of going nuclear, sharing their experiences with people from across the world and never losing the faith that one day there will be a world without nukes.

This is symbolised by the flame of peace, burning in the centre of the Peace Park, a flame which will only be extinguished when the final nuclear weapon on earth has been destroyed.

Every time a nuclear weapon is tested the Mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest, calling on the nation responsible to cease such activity. These go on display in the museum.

I found one addressed to a certain Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, dated as recently as 2006, the same year that our (then) Dear Leader committed the UK to spending up to £20 billion on a replacement for the Trident submarines which currently carry its nuclear missiles.

Walking through the galleries of the Peace Memorial Museum, confronted by the reality of a nuclear attack, it is hard to comprehend such a decision, or even justify the millions spent every year on maintaining the UK’s current ‘deterrent’, each warhead many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

But amidst all this madness there is hope. You need only to look at modern Hiroshima to see this: within one year of the attack trees were blossoming; within ten the ground had been cleaned up and the city rebuilt.

Today it is a bustling, attractive home to over one million inhabitants. Despite the horrific events of sixty-odd years ago life has returned.

Back in the Peace Park the flame continues to burn. It might sound trite but surely we all owe it to the people of Hiroshima, who keep it burning, to work together to abolish nukes so that one day soon they have to keep watch over it no more.

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