Thursday, July 21, 2011

What Happened in Hungary: Day Two

At midnight the bus is still trundling along the A3 at full speed, currently past Frankfurt Airport. I'm riding shotgun in the cab with another guest, keeping the driver awake on the last part of his shift. He appreciates the conversation and in return we learn a lot: the coach has a six hundred - litre fuel tank and is actually the team bus for the Harlequins Rugby side (this explains it's slightly familiar multicolour decoration). Our driver and us swap travel stories, with intermissions whilst he explains a few of the many extra controls and buttons laid in front of us not found on cars. It's something of a novelty to actually see where we're going, despite it being only 24 hours since I last drove but having faced backwards behind a dividing wall since.  The traffic is light by now and most of the native drivers are taking advantage of the lack of any tangible speed limit, shooting past the lumbering coach in which the lights are dimmed and most occupants are sleeping.

The sat-nav beeps and an ersatz English voice makes several announcements. A few minutes later, the driver indicates, slowly eases off the power and brakes to a gentle halt in a rest area populated by trucks from all over Europe - French, Dutch, Slovak, Romanian - and a small toilet block.  Looking a little overshadowed is a little Transit minibus with a UK license plate, in the coach company's colours. From here two new drivers will take us the rest of the way and drive us around in Hungary. There's time to do a running repair job on the ski box. One of the drivers climbs onto the roof of the minibus and out comes a roll of gaffa tape, to cheers from the orchestra. It's not a permanent fix, but it'll stop the rain getting in and puts the side light back in position. The mood is convivial: we ignore the slightly grim toilets and enjoy the opportunity to converse with people sitting in different areas of the bus.  The Transit drives off, on a short hop to a Frankfurt hotel, to another cheer from the passengers.  From here we'll have fresh drivers and cross Germany in the dark until the sun rises again somewhere near to, or even in, Austria.  Back to our seats and onto the dark autobahn.

That's odd, we're stopping. We've only been going about twenty minutes but the bus has just pulled into a smaller lay-by. Bit of low conversation from the cab, but it's probably just that the emergency door isn't shut properly or they want to check the ski box lights are still working.  We move off again a few moments later and proceed to rejoin the autobahn. Orange light from the indicator, back up to full speed. Some kilometres pass by without incident and I try to doze again.

And then suddenly, a very sharp tap on the brakes, much more forceful than before, somebody's wandered out of their lane close in front of us, perhaps, but the voices from the cab aren't swearing at a German driver, they're more panicked than that.  Something is wrong, properly wrong; because now we're braking again, taking the next exit ramp, round a tight bend and up to some traffic lights onto a minor road, so it's not even something that can wait to the next service area.  I'm holding the curtain open to see anything that can be seen: the bus turns left at the lights and onto a wide-ish street with buildings, then indicates once more, pulls slightly to the right and stops. Engine off. Lights off. Silence, apart from muffled voices and a car going the opposite way.

A few other people are starting to wake up, aware that Something Has Happened. I'm trying to work out firstly what; and second: where we are.  My initial guess is the clutch cable or disk, because the coach seemed to be juddering when moving off the last couple of times; or perhaps the auto box is playing up, it's jammed or the computer changed down suddenly which would explain the sharp braking. But perhaps not, because we made several gear changes coming off the autobahn and it's been fine this far.  Burst tyre?  I'd have heard it go.  The second question is a little easier to answer. We're obviously still in Germany, and quite near to Frankfurt, probably to the south-east, but in the dark I can't tell if we're in a small settlement or a larger town.  There's a load of cherry-pickers outside a shop down the road, and I remember going past a VW dealer further up it, and some kind of car wash on the other side. Looking backwards outside the bus, I can see that we're in a lay-by with tourist information panels by the side, but by dim street lights am unable to make out the name of the town or the details of the map.


(It turns out that the problem was the alternator - or rather the lack of it.  You may recall that people upstairs reported smoke and burning back in Belgium. I later learned that this was the belt that drives the alternator becoming caught or slipping, with the result that it burned out the alternator itself. Large buses, with their huge electricity consumption, have two backup alternators, but they weren't enough to keep everything going. By the time we were at Frankfurt, having had the DVD on and with lights, air conditioning and engine management systems all running as well as having just started up the huge motor, the electrics simply couldn't keep charging the battery fast enough and it was only a matter of time before something failed.  This eventually happened in a particularly dramitic way - the sudden braking was actually the driver reacting, quite naturally, to the headlights suddenly going out! It hardly needs pointing out that this is a truly terrifying prospect for a bus with 50 passengers going at 100kph in the middle of the night. Mercifully, the co-driver quickly switched to emergency power which got us out of trouble for enough time to ditch. We can only conclude that it is a very good thing no fire broke out and that none of this happened whilst in the Eurotunnel).

The driver, who by this point has poked around the bus and consulted his colleague, climbs into the crew area and draws back the dividing curtain. His announcement to us is brief, and whilst I forget the exact text, the gist is that we will be stuck here for some time and the best thing to do would be to sleep whilst the relative quiet holds. Sleeping is not an easy achievement even with the removal of road noise and motion. The seats do not really recline and there is insufficient with for any but the smallest person to lie across two. I close my eyes but am far too restless, still full of the sensation of motion and passages of Elgar flooding around my mind.  With the electrics out of service, and thus no heating, it also becomes quickly apparent how cold it is at night, even in summer.  You will recall that, due to being rushed around whilst loading up, I stupidly neglected to have any kind of warm clothing in my hand luggage, and am now deeply regretting it.  Companion lends me a blanket, which I'm highly grateful for, but it only just does the trick.

At 3am an engineer arrives and proceeds to confirm that the problem is serious (the implication is that, sadly,gaffa tape will be of little use). This sets in motion a series of frustrated communiqués which will last the next ten hours. The coach drivers contact the coach company who begin negotiations with, simultaneously; at least one German coach company; the drivers' pools of said companies; the nearest garage able to work on the make of coach; potential hotels in the area should we not get a replacement bus.  We, charging phones on the coach's remaining battery power, attempt to keep contact with László, our contact in Hungary who contacts the hotel in Budapest; and, coming full circle, the drivers - who are being fed frustratingly vague excerpts from the various dramatic twists in the negotiations via head office - attempt to keep us informed what is being done to get us going again.  If all that makes your head hurt, the result on the ground is that: on every alternate hour we are told that a German bus is at most an hour away.  When the expected time of arrival has long since passed, we are told we will be getting another different bus to a hotel in the area whilst we find a bus to take us the rest of the way. Then, two hours later, the German bus is coming again - oh, no, we're definitely going to a hotel - yeah, that's what was going to happen, except they've now found a driver willing to take us to Hungary, except he was an hour away from us two hours ago. The night is punctuated by phone calls and repeatedly dashed hopes of a quick escape.

Fast forward to around midday. We've been here nine hours and already tensions are beginning to crack with the lack of developments. Bear in mind that we've also been in the same clothes and not had any chance to wash for a day and a half, and you can probably appreciate why at least one person nearly lost it.  Still, we've learned that the name of the town is Aschaffenburg (twinned with Sopron in Hungary) and that the main source of food and toilets is a conveniently adjacent filling station of a company we don't have in England, whose staff have severely limited English to match my severely limited German.  After joining everyone outside the bus during a rare half-hour of sunshine, I decide to take a walk with two friends and see if there is any food nearby other than the filling station. It decides to rain - in fact it decides to chuck it down with thunder and lightning right overhead - and we quickly discover there's not much in the way of eating in the neighbourhood.  After plodding around for half an hour, sheltering under bus stops and taking five minutes to cross the road, we end up back at the same forecourt again.  The only consolation is the purchase of the first (and only) schnitzel sandwich I've ever bought.  I really want some hot food but have no idea where the next meal is coming from. Banana chips are keeping me alive.

Having to wait an indefinite period of time, coupled with a lack of sleep, starts to cultivate curious mind games.  I keep trying to accept a pact with myself that if nothing has happened by a particular time, I shall find the station, withdraw, say, 100 euros, and get trains the rest of the way to Budapest.  To pass the time, I start trying to work out how this might be done: presuming Aschaffenburg is only a local line, I assume I would have to take a regional train to Frankfurt, then if I'm lucky perhaps an express direct to Munich, then Vienna or Linz, and then another to Budapest. On the other hand, I'd probably have to leave the cello int he care of somebody staying on the buses. Car hire is probably out: way too far to take a German car all the way; I don't have any insurance documents and I'm far too tired for my first foray in a left-hand-drive vehicle on a de-restricted autobahn.  A strange phenomenon, which the more psychologically inclined may be able to clarify, is that my capacity for forming short-term memories seemed noticeably diminished. I find I can't remember things that happened only a few minutes ago, (nor, more worryingly, which side of the road cars are coming from without a prompt) yet can still recall all my Hungarian and other deeply ingrained thoughts. Being in a semi-dream-like state starts to become normal.

There's another false alarm, but at 2.30 we finally achieve deliverance. A white, German-registered bus become visible on the roundabout at the end of the road, draws nearer and eventually pulls in unceremoniously behind the British one. It's a rather anticlimactic moment, given its significance. The new bus also has a ski box so we set about transferring as much luggage as we can into it.  Loading the instruments and remaining bags into the underfloor area is not easy. Although the bus is parked off the main carriageway, gaining access to the luggage doors on the driver's side involves standing feet away from passing traffic, all whilst arranging unwieldy timps, cellos and whatnot into the hold space.  I slam one of the doors shut and climb up to the seat Companion has saved for me.  At 3pm we are finally under way and back on to the autobahn, approximately fourteen hours behind where we should be. It's a depressing though that, had all gone to plan, we would be about an hour away from Budapest at this moment.  As such we now have to face a second full day travelling and, at an optimistic estimate, an arrival time of after midnight. 

The new bus is a more normal single-decker and isn't half so accommodating as the original one. There are barely enough seats for us all, what with having to put the contrabass inside the bus, and not nearly as much legroom or potential sleeping positions. There's also no segregation of decks so the luxury of being in the quieter area is gone.  Worse, we run into a traffic jam just half an hour after setting off, the type that are caused by tailgating so there's not actually any real obstacle up ahead, just stop-start traffic. I'm sure if I were well rested I'd appreciate the increasingly mountainous scenery more as we progress gradually across the huge expanse of Bavaria, but not at the moment.  A rest stop approaching Nuremburg is welcome. The toilets charge, but are actually worth are actually worth paying 70 cents for as they have an interesting party piece when you flush - the seat revolves 360 degree to be sanitised and the towel dispensers are automatic, I can't help feeling that this fastidious level of cleanliness is undermined my the fact that were I in my car I would probably check the oil or some other unhygienic task immediately afterwards.

More road, most of it still two-lane.  Some hours later we cross the Danube, the first of several times.  Southern Germany rewards our persistence with a double rainbow as we near Passau, which provides a brief distraction from the situation in hand. It's a town I have a former house-sharing friend in, one foot either side of the river and indeed either side of the border, for we are close to Austria now. We make another (horribly short) stop and I finally get a hot meal - schnitzel and chips with almost the last of my Euros.  More speculation about how long the journey time remains. We've got the whole of Austria and half of Hungary to go, several hundred kilometres. Once again, we plunge into the night.

Next time: I finally get to sleep, and then play the most nerve-racking concert ever

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