On my recent trip to Vaishno Devi, I took state transport buses for to and fro journey from Delhi to Katra. Having spent over 33 hours in bus in the span of a couple of days, I have reached the conclusion that traveling on a motorcycle is actually easier than traveling in a bus, here is why:

You have to go to the Bus Depot: On a motorcycle my journey starts right at my doorstep, this saves time and effort since I just have to load the luggage on my motorcycle and get on my way. In case of a bus, I have to first find an auto or a taxi, then load luggage into them, then take off that luggage at the bus station and put it in the appropriate bus and then go through the whole ordeal again when I reach my destination.

You have to wait for the bus: If the tickets are booked then one can afford to reach bus station 15-30 minutes before the journey thus cutting down waiting time. However as I found out in Katra, in case of small bus stations where the person sitting at the information counter really has no information about bus timing, this wait can stretch for hours, I personally had to wait for two and a half hours to get a bus to Delhi!

You have to deal with rude and annoying passengers: Quite a few people think they own the bus and they can park their luggage, legs and attitude where ever they want and others would have to live with it. This gets really annoying after a couple of hours, especially when one is tired. On a motorcycle you have your own space which no one else can intrude and if some one bothers you, you can always accelerate/brake and make them disappear.

You can’t stop when you want: This is another major negative point of traveling in a bus, you can’t stop to take photographs of the places you found interesting, you can’t stop at the nearest dhaba if you are hungry and you surely can’t stop to attend to natures call.

All this makes traveling in a bus an uncomfortable and severely limiting experience. As a motorcycle tourer, I take these things for granted and never had to think twice about it.