InterRail Soap Series (final) part 17: Viva la France!

16) 800 people in one bus in France?
After three days Barcelona, we continued our journey. Our next stop is Marseille, in France. We took an early morning train from Barcelona to Montpellier, changed trains there and after 7 hours, we arrived in Marseille. It took a while before we get a place to sleep. One cheap hotel, managed by an African Family offered us a room with bathroom, only was the bathroom not quite finished… At an other hotel, an Indian gentleman offered us a room with shower, but as we looked at it, it was indeed a room with a shower, right in the middle of the room with on each side a bed! I never saw something like that…

We ended up in a budget hotel run by Algerian people. It was a cheap room, with bath, and it was okay, except we finally didn’t use the shower because after a close look, it didn’t look very well… (fungus)

After we dumped our packs in the room, we got back to the station, to reserve seats for our next journey to Vienna. As we arrived at the station, something was going on. We saw that it was a huge chaos. Due to bomb threats on several routes of the French railway; almost every train service was cancelled. On the news, there was also a TGV train in problem close to Paris.

Because of every train was cancelled, the French railway company (SNCF), arranged busses to take the passengers to their destination. Dirk and I took a look outside the station, where a huge number of people (hundreds, maybe more than one thousand) was waiting for a bus. But there was no bus… After a while, there was one bus showing up at the bus station. This bus was going in direction Nice and as that came out, a huge number ran to that bus. It was clear that not everybody could go on that bus. The coach has maybe 50 seats and outside there were hundreds of people waiting.
We think that people who were traveling from Marseille to Paris had the biggest delay. We noticed at arrival the double-decker TGV train, which runs between Marseille and Paris. Every service is run by two double-decker TGV trains coupled together. So one train is able to take at least 800 people. Can you imagine: if every hour goes one train to Paris, with a capacity of 800 people, how many people there were waiting or a bus…

--- The InterRail Soap Series ends here. Thanks Jay for sharing your refreshing views on travelling through Europe with InterRail! ---