I’ve always dreaded the thought of travelling in buses while it involves a travel of more than 4 hours. I try somehow to avoid the bus travel and adopt any other means or if possible, avoid the travel itself. I can cite enough incidents that made me uncomfortable while travelling in bus. The travel to Kodaikkanal in my childhood days, the travel from Thriupathi to Chennai, the travel from Hyderabad to Chennai, etc.. In all these occasions, I vomited and that led to me synonymizing bus travel with nightmare.
So now, when I had to travel to Hyderabad and had to reach there by 15th, there was no other go than to get a bus since the train tickets were all sold by the time I got the news that I should travel. And that was when I found out that there were these buses with sleeper coaches or sleeper beds where you can lie down and sleep as you come in trains. The next thing that I normally do is of course search that in google images. The images tTrhat I saw satisfied me.
Now, the day came and I boarded the bus near Chennai Central. I normally enjoy privacy and I expected the beds to one below the other with two in a cabin-like format. But it was not so. It looked like a train cube with 4 beds and smaller spaces between them. Nevertheless, it was just comfortable. One thing that you cannot do is that, you cannot bird-watch outside if you are allotted the lower berth. The upper berth gives you a comfortable view of the outside if you lie down. So until you get down, you are almost devoid of the outside world.
Another luxury that they have added here is a small LCD TV for every passenger which he can turn it on or off as per his wish. But I was only lucky enough to watch a Telugu film. I was more expecting the lights to be on so that I could read my favorite books but one of the men-in-charge replied in the negative since some passenger hurt himself due to the melting of plastic from the light that injured his forehead. I was getting prepared for the turbulence that is gonna be caused when the bus goes through the badly laid roads but even that seemed manageable. All the more, it was a good travel in the Sleeper coach A/C bus. One would wonder given all these luxuries, how much would be the cost for a night’s travel from Chennai to Hyderabad. Yes, it is surely on the higher side as it costs around Rs.1100. There are a couple more travels offering you sleeper coaches.
So, provided I continue to travel only in sleeper coach-A/C buses, gone are the days that I dreaded the bus travel and fought hard enough to avoid the same.
