So. The journey from Nice to Morocco overland was a hectic and long two-day journey. Today I’m sharing the first day with you which takes us from Nice to Barcelona. This is the one that includes the story of the lost camera, the cancelled train that took four months to get reimbursed for and the Bulgarian party bus. So…

As I have intimated in previous posts and a vlog or two as well, I booked my journey from Nice to Barcelona solely by train via the website trainline.com. I was booked to leave Nice at 12pm, travelling to Marseille, changing trains to Beziers, and then changing again to Barcelona due to arrive around 9 – 930pm.

A day and a half or less before the journey I received the email that the Beziers to Barcelona train was cancelled. I spent a couple of hours trying to work out alternatives and basically it came down to using a website called ‘Busbud’ which found me a bus from Beziers to Barcelona Sants (next to the train station) which left 2 hours later than the cancelled train and arrived at 1230am.

It was far from ideal but at 34 Euro was a lot cheaper than my cancelled train (71 Euro or so) and it did the job. We had a morning train the next day from Barcelona and had a small cheap hotel booked an easy walk from Barcelona station. Things would be okay. Probably. I’d searched loads of options including direct bus Nice to Barcelona but it meant getting out to the airport at the crack of dawn, changes and more. I wouldn’t have got money back on the first two booked train journeys either which was a bummer.

Because I couldn’t cancel the first two train journeys, I couldn’t get earlier transport without losing well over a hundred Euro. So I had to make the best of it. The train was more or less on time from Nice, thankfully with reserved seating, and it was superfast because it was the TGV iNOui.

It rocketed along through the southern French countryside at times along the coast, and again it’s a very pleasant ride with some great scenery. Not quite as impressive though as the ride from the Italian border to Nice.

There was nearly an hour to kill in Marseille although I didn’t leave the station. I grabbed a  sandwich and I hopped on the ticket screens. I wondered if there were any trains between Beziers and Barcelona running. I would happily forego the 34 Euro if there were because train is always preferable to bus!

And it seemed there might have been. It was kind of hard to tell, but what was clear was that after a certain time, all trains were cancelled it seemed going south of Beziers. As far as I could see I was locked into the bus!

The second train took me to Beziers, a place I had never heard of before and seemingly little to recommend although the park is nice. It was late afternoon when I arrived after another smooth TGV experience, and I spent time again looking for any way forward by train at the Bezier’s train station, without success. I really was locked onto the bus.

It was a Sunday, the last day of March in 2023 and Beziers is not the busiest place on Earth let me tell you. It almost felt like a ghost town. I walked up the hill and around the deserted streets to what Google told me was the bus station. Not really a bus station, more like a bus ‘area’, it was like a large round-about and half built. No building to go in, no clear signage as to where I might meet my bus. Some local buses running, I literally saw three people the whole time I was in Beziers. I had three hours to kill.

Struck by the lack of signage and the deserted nature of Beziers, I was now worried that I might not be in the right place to get the bus. I asked a guy who said I should wait elsewhere for the bus – back at the train station 1.5km down the hill – a bus driver of a local bus said I WAS in the right place. I felt less and less sure. I did not see a single taxi nor Uber, and barely a car that was moving.

I looked for other options on my phone in case this did not work out. I found this ride-share app and I found a guy driving via Beziers to Barcelona. He wouldn’t take me to Barcelona Sants, and he was picking up off the freeway a twenty minute drive from where I was, but the other option if no bus was to stay overnight in Beziers and sacrifice the train tickets I had for tomorrow – by the way with my friend Graham who I was meeting in Barcelona.

As the time passed I did not see a singular long distance bus pull in or out of this ‘bus station’. So I started to get a bit stressed. I contacted Graham on What’s App to let him know of my predicament. I told him to move on to Tangier tomorrow (the next day) if I didn’t make it and that I would catch him up – we had paid for two tickets in Spain at it seemed silly to lose both of them (or more to the point the money they cost).

I decided I better line up this ride share so I booked it. I would need to get out to this point on the freeway/highway (whatever they call it in France). It was now time the bus was due and no sign of it. But I was having another issue, I couldn’t get an Uber. They were all a fair way from the centre of town and none were taking me as a ride.

No taxis either, I kept trying and trying. I still probably had an hour, or just under before my ride was due. The bus was now ten minutes late – IF I was at the right location. Fifteen minutes late, still no takers on Uber. I was on the corner, there were a couple of small bus shelters, I’d been sitting on one. I’d been filming regular updates on my action camera for my vlog, but trying to get this Uber I got up and walked around as I was a little concerned.

Twenty minutes after the bus should have arrived, no Uber or bus, Twenty-five minutes, no Uber no bus, Thirty minutes…. Holy CRAP! The bus arrived! I WAS in the right spot after all. I grabbed my bags, the driver jumped off the bus motioning for me to hurry up. My backpack went under the bus and I hopped on board, within 60 seconds we were off!

The bus was full – if turned out it had come from Sofia, Bulgaria. The company name by the way Union Ivkoni. It had been going for three days and a lot of the passengers had been on the entire journey which I imagine had been at least three days at this point. The toilet didn’t work and my seat … I cant fully remember but it wasn’t possible to sit on it. There were a few other seats and I did get one though.

I was next to a Spanish guy I think, I was obviously the only passenger on boarded at Beziers. There were a few people who were not Bulgarian, maybe 5-6 including myself out of 35-40. There had obviously been a fair bit of drinking going on, and I really did wonder what I had stepped onto.

The bus looped around past the train station and then onto the freeway. I had to make sure my request for an Uber that let’s face it was never going to happen anyways was cancelled and then cancel my ride share. Which I was able to do and I sent a message to the guy apologising. I’m not sure if the payment went through, I presume it did but it didn’t really matter.

And then it struck me. I had forgotten to pick up the action camera! I’d been travelling for over two months shooting every single day, and I had just lost the camera! I felt… like an idiot obviously. But just depressed really to be fair. I had been backing up all my files daily, to a lightweight portable hard drive and also to Drop Box so all I had lost was the day’s shooting. Which was quite a bit and would have made a very interesting vlog. But there was nothing I could do. To even suggest to the bus to turn around would have been a ridiculous call.

Night fell on the road. At some point we crossed into Spain. We stopped at a roadside stop which was pretty quiet, I grabbed something to eat. Got into Barcelona Sants at about 1245am I think it was. Graham came out to greet me and show me back to the hotel for the night. I did use my phone to shoot a little – not much really – footage on the bus which is what you will see on the vlog above. But it should have been a separate vlog. I carried my Akaso V50 with me which I mainly used for underwater shots – the camera I lost was my Sony FDR-X3000 which I loved. Bought a replacement when I got home but it just didn’t seem as good as this one and thus I swapped to GoPro.

Graham and I caught up and chatted for a bit, as you would. Adventure still waited for us, we would be travelling from Barcelona to Algeciras via train the next day – well it was already after midnight, and then if we could get the ferry across to Morocco and Tangier. I was now more than two thirds through the trip and I was heading to my final continent. There were still more adventures to be had!

Thanks for joining me as always. Take care wherever you are in the world – May the Journey Never End!