Unconfirmed Reports

2nd Leg: London - Paris
Friday night / Saturday morning

The second leg is a painful one - the overnight bus from island to continent is a cheap option, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it. We sat in a huge bus, which I had always imagined would drive through a long tunnel under the Channel. Only once on the bus did Oriana explain to me that there is in fact no road in the tunnel: instead, the cars and buses are all loaded into a sort of “train for cars”. Big, enclosed metal boxes, with little wheels on tracks. The loading was extremely slow, including idiotic and badly organised passport control, the like of which I haven’t seen since crossing from Ceuta into Morocco.

Inside the metal box, the bus’s vents were turned off. Everything was still, but for faint howling or whistling sounds coming from the tunnel. Since air movement had ceased, things became warm and humid, the smells of the other passengers emphasised.

For quite a while, the metal box didn’t move at all. After a while an announcement told us in two languages that we weren’t going anywhere. With beads of sweat gathering on my forehead, I started to feel a hot-and-cold nausea, a desperate need to get out of the enclosed space. I tried to distract myself by complaining to Oriana about the delay, but inside I was repressing a frantic, seething anxiety. This only receded very slowly, after I closed my eyes and imagined that I could feel the slightest cool breeze on my face. Apparently I fell asleep, and when I woke up again it was because the bus started up, the air vents opened, and we drove out of the metal box into a night-time France.