bus Keyword
Greyhound
It is 2am. I’ve been on the Greyhound bus for 7 hours. The sound of the road peeling away under the wheels and the gentle rocking of a cabin should be lulling my senses into a blissful stupor but they bring no respite. I watch through my window into the clinging blackness and try to ignore the poster child schizophrenic that chose to sit next to me. He keeps yelling and yelping, one of three personalities at any time bursting forth onto the bus. Sometimes it’s the retarded boy, others the racist Southerner and when ever a sign came into resolve enough to be read: the educated Harvard scholar. If I am lucky I can catch them arguing between each other as their vessel jerked and roiled about in his seat. Their arguing continues through the night and punctuates the darkness. Around 5am he quietens a little, yet keeps snorting and fizzing and fidgeting. His odour has driven a few of my fellow passengers to move up into shared seats, foregoing their comfortable reclining positions for relief from the smell. I breathe through my teeth and count the hours, the minutes, the seconds until the next stop.
With the break of dawn comes an oasis of a gas station where we stop for food and drinks. My seat partner rises from his perch and lumbers down the isle, carrying with him his most valuable worldly possessions, 15 recycling containers. I stretch and am greeted by numerous faces that smile at me reassuringly and words of praise and amazement at my resolve. Only 13 more hours of travel face me but they lay stretched along the i5 through the new day. The terrain changes in hue and composition as we roll ceaselessly onwards into the morning. California opens before the bus welcoming me into it’s warm bosom. Mesas rise along the highway and farmland covered in dry grass surround the coach as we travel south in the morning sun.
While my strange friend has moved on he leaves a sinister stink he in his stead, standing sentry in the cabin like a ghost. I push my chin deeper into my chest and watch the white lines weave and duck back and forth along the asphalt. We’ll be coming up to San Francisco soon according to the woodsman that sits in the seat in front of me. I look out of my window and drink up the scenery. I gulp it up in an attempt to satisfy my excitement. A new city awaits just on the other side of the bay. A new city, with new sights, new people and hopefully new adventures.
Toronto
Toronto, not high on my list of “must sees” to begin with had quite a hard act to follow in New York. The city is the biggest in Canada with a population of around 8 million (depending on who you talk to), but it seemed empty and unsure of itself.
The tower that looms over the skyline is an example of this insecurity. It was built to show the world the power of Canadian industry and woah, was it mighty. Well… it was. It has since been surpassed in height and in the next few years there are several more buildings on their way to knock it further down the ladder. The Toronto feels a little like they are not accepting the fact that things are just moving forward, a constant progression that they are being swept along with rather than driving.
Don’t get me wrong, the people of Toronto aren’t backwards and the city is fairly modern but something just feels off. I feel I needed maybe more time and more local help to come to understand the importance and purpose of this city. Maybe it is that my impressions of Toronto were coloured slightly by the 35 day garbage strike that covered the city in a pall of rancid stink and litter. Or maybe even the unusual vibe of the hostel where a large portion of the residents were long-termers who’s attitudes formed a kind of “us and them” segregation that was hard to break the barriers of.
I did manage to get out and see a bit of the city, but it held no real wow moments, other than acting as a platform for me to launch into Niagara Falls. I went for a few beers at The Horseshoe, out clubbing with some other backpackers but was well and truly over it an hour in. I had a quiet night in watching movies and then quite the opposite drinking vodka with danes and germans till the wee hours of another night. Oh, and in what seems to be a staple of his holiday, I got completely and utterly drenched by a massive storm that swept over the city while I was out wandering. The skies opened up so much that within minutes of the torrential rain starting not a single inch of me was dry. I did provide a little entertainment to a collection of gym goers who had taken shelter in their lobby when I came in asking for a plastic bag to put all my electronic equipment in, dripping bucket loads of water on their floor and leaving bare foot prints leading out from their little refuge and into the dark beyond their doors. Some people look at me strangely when they see me walking barefoot through the city, but I believe feeling the ground beneath the hardened soles of my feet helps me to really connect with a place, to make it feel real. I don’t think there is a single city I have visited where I didn’t spend at least a day barefoot.
I said goodbye to Toronto with no real sense of dolefulness after a night of chatting with some frenchies until 5am. In fact I am sitting on my bus to Montreal right this moment wrapped in excitement in seeing somewhere new. I’ll also be meeting up with some of the nicer people I met at the hostel who will be making their way up to Montreal in the coming days. I hope to have a quiver of local knowledge to deliver when they come a-knocking.