Lyon to Marseille by bus

Lyon to Marseille by bus

Marseille, France, Europe

Today has been quite a long day. I woke up at 5:30am, left the hostel by 6am and got to the bus station for 6:30am. Perfectly planned and executed for my 7am bus ride. Unfortunately, I received a phone call from Eurolines at 6:35am saying that my bus was going to be delayed by an hour and wouldn’t arrive until 8am. Okay, not ideal but I can live with that. It was a bit annoying however when the bus didn’t actually show up until 9am. There was no explanation as to why they were late, they just were.

I got on the bus (without wifi) and managed to get two seats to myself in the back, so that was good. Only about a half hour outside of Lyon, we got stopped by customs agents. I’ve never been checked by customs before except for at a border. We were smack dab in the middle of France, on our way from one French city to another, and got stopped. They searched five of us (yes, I was one of them), took us outside the bus, got our backpack or suitcase, opened it all up, found nothing, packed it all again, and sent us on our way. The whole thing took about an hour, so that slowed us down again. We were meant to arrive in Marseille at 12:45pm, and we ended up getting in around 2:30pm, so it wasn’t really that bad.

I walked from the bus station to my hostel (which I’m starting to think is a bad idea because my first impression of every city is bad based on the vagrants around the bus stations). The hostel is not nearly as nice as my last one, but that was to be expected. The hostel in Lyon was beautiful. That’s going to be tough to beat. This one will do the trick for a couple of nights. I wandered around the Vieux Port for a while and made my way up to the Palais du Pharo. It was a nice view of the port, city and mountains in the background.

I came back to the hostel and tried to get some of my planning sorted for the next couple of weeks. I booked a few nights in Nice, where hopefully I can do a day trip to Monaco and then a day trip to Cannes. Then back to Marseille for a night before flying back to Edinburgh for about a week. I have some things I need to take care of and it will be good to see everyone again before I head of to South America for eight months. Of course I’ll be going to Spain before I leave for South America, but it’ll still be nice to have a few days in the €Burgh before heading off for a while.

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