In my memoir From Brooklyn to Benares and Back, I wrote about a bus ride that I took in 1981. I was on a crowded bus making its way from Katmandu to Janakpur, a town in south Nepal near the Indian border. The bus was packed and the route was a treacherous, slow descent on narrow roads carved on the edge of mountains overlooking ravines and gorges. We made it safely but I still called it the bus ride from hell.
18 years later I took my first bus journey from Athens, Greece to Tirana, the capital of Albania. The bus departed from a chaotic station in Athens where hundreds of people pushed and shoved their way onto the white buses which took scores of emigres back to their home country. I was the only non-Albanian on the bus and the overnight journey, punctuated by a long and also chaotic wait at the Greek-Albanian border, was not fun. It was the bus ride from hell, part 2. Continue reading
