Welcome to the bus with the highest stress level in Europe: bus 91 from Marseille St-Charles railway station to the city’s airport. It is supposed to run every 10 minutes until well into the evening, at least according to the tourist office. But I have waited 40 minutes for this mid-evening departure, along with dozens of other people who are equally presseé.
The passengers who fondly believed they would be stepping off the airport bus beside the terminal by now are at least 30 minutes adrift.
Forget “every 10 minutes” – as the writer Charles Nicholl once wrote of trains in Colombia: “There are no timetables, only rumours.”
We are the lucky ones, because at least we have found the bus. To deter as many passengers as possible, the transport planners of Marseille make finding the airport bus departure point almost impossible. All the way up the Métro escalators at St-Charles station, time-pressed travellers are cheerfully advised that they are heading towards the navette (shuttle) for the airport.
As soon as you reach ground level in the vast terminus, though, all indications that there might conceivably be buses from the centre of the biggest French city outside Paris to the main airport for the region vanish.
In early evening, the railway station is devoid of helpful people to ask. After pacing back and forth I found a sign to the Gare Routière (bus station). Perhaps that might be the departure point for the elusive conveyance?
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And there it was. Or rather, there it wasn’t. But the bewildered huddle of people and their baggage provided some kind of hope: were an airport shuttle ever to show up, it would probably be here.
I tracked down the correct stop a minute or two after 8pm. The first bus would be at 8.20pm. So much for every 10 minutes.
A gigantic double-decker from the airport turned up. The driver offloaded her passengers. When the last had disembarked, we fondly assumed we would now be allowed on board what was surely the 8.20pm.
Instead, she promptly drove away, empty, into the gathering gloom. The illuminated sign flickered over to 8.40pm.
The pleasant young man who sold me the bus ticket shrugged when I went to ask why the bus had vanished. “Sorry, we don’t have any information,” he said. “But I can refund…
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