Travel Book Review ~ RULE NO 5 NO SEX ON THE BUS Confessions of a Tour Leader by Brian Thacker

Rule No 5 No Sex on the Bus is a book packed with great travel yarns, highly recommended. We usually have a copy in stock, click here to see if we have one in stock now.

I particularly enjoy reading travel books about other peoples adventures when they have done stuff I wish I did when I was a bit younger, ie the stuff I was either too chicken or not aware I could do.

Rule No 5 No Sex on the Bus is a prime example. I think it would have been quite and experience to lead 18-30s bus tours, probably something you wouldn't want to do for to long, but a challenge that could prepare you for anything.

This book is light, easy and very funny read. Rather than gabble on, here are some of our favourite passages from the book:

On passenger stereotypes:

Curiously enough, every trip seemed to have the same passengers. There would be the half-dozen bogans pissed at the back of the bus; two straight girls in glasses who sat at the front of the bus and asked stupid questions all day; the boring fellow that no-one spoke to the whole trip; the quiet girl who, all of a sudden on day fourteen, stripped down to her underwear, threw up on the bus and slept with the driver; the history buff who cross-examined me during my spiels ("Wasn't it 1378?"); and always just one odd nationality; like a Ukranian or a Venezeulan, thrown into the mix. As a tour leader I'd have to empathize with them all. One minute I'd have a bogan, then a history buff, then a Venezualan.

On Octoberfest:

During Oktoberfest, Camping Ptlaz Thalkirchen was the scene of nothing more or less than full-scale, no-holds-barred debauchery. The whole campsite would be full predominantly of Aussies and Kiwis. The Kiwis always seemed to easily outnumber the Aussies. For a country of just over three million people about as far away as you can possibly get (apart from the South Pole), the size of its Oktoberfest squad was very impressive. From my observation, most of the population seemed to relish the senseless destruction of brain cells, and would willingly travel to the other side of the world to participate.

Touring Kiwis are easy to spot. Just before they leave the fair shores of 'New Zulland', they are given a pair of black tracksuit pants with three white stripes, a green Steinlager T-Shirt and a pair of 'Jandals' (thongs or flip-flops). I believe it's their national costume.

Much Oktoberfest could easily be renamed 'Munich beer-induced bonking fest'. The amount of coupling that went on was incredible, with passengers and crew alike going at it in shower blocks, in tents, under trees, against trees, in trees and in the bus. Rule No 5. of the crew manual stated: Crew must not engage in sexual activity on on board the bus with passengers or fellow employees.

You'd be pretty lucky to find any crew member who hadn't broken that rule. Coach Captain Kevin Kelvin broke it almost daily.

...I remember seeing a young Kiwi fellow from my bus, out of his national costume and his head, standing in the middle of the campsite naked. Sticking out of the eye of his penis was a lit cigarette. He was just standing, or rather rocking, there. What the hell was he doing? The New Zealand version of the cigar lady's act, perhaps?

Two of my passengers had been to Oktoberfest the year before - some go year after year until they have no brain cells left at all. They had been travelling on unlimited Eurail tickets and, when they couldn't find any accomodation in Munich, they took rooms in Innsbruck, Australia, less than two hours away. They would commute each morning to the beerfest grounds, and back again to Innsbruck at night.

Have you ever caught a train home and, in your tiredness or just plain drunkenness, fallen asleep, missed your stop and woken up five minutes later? Well, these guys did better than that. Having got pissed out of his brain and lost his mate, one of them had jumped on the train, fallen asleep, and not only missed his stop, but missed the whole bloody country. He'd left Germany, slept straight through Austria, and woken up in Italy. He opened his bloodshot eyes to find a conductor waffling to him in Italian. But things got even more bizarre. He stumbled off the train and there, fifty metres up the platform sitting on a bench was his drunken mate. He'd done exactly the same thing.

On Polish tourists:

Chatting one night to a cute nineteen-year-old Polish girl in the disco at our campsite in Venice, I asked her why she wasn't drinking. She was sitting with a couple of friends by the bar (you could tell they were Poles because they all wore shell suits) and getting up now and again to dance. She told me how much she earned in Polish zlotys. At the then current exchange rate, I figured out a beer would cost her the equivalent of about 80 Australian dollars!

Being the gentleman that I am, I bought here a couple of beers, but sadly she ran off to bed before I could show her my smelly sausage.

Now what it is it about Poles and shell suits? Every Polish person out of Poland seems to wear those horrible, outrageously brightly coloured, wafer-thin, shiny shell suits. Apparently, and I believe this to be true, when a Pole leaves Poland they are given a shell suit and a string of smelly sausages at the border. I met a Polish couple back home who had been living in Australia for six years, and they both had horrible shell suits on. I asked, when I first met them, 'Are you from Poland?'

'Yes they replied enthusiastically 'how could you tell?'

'Your accent,' I replied.

'Ah you are very clever.'

But perhaps the most bizarre thing of all was what happened when Poles and showerheads met. This totally baffled me. When Poles arrived at a campsite, they stole the showerheads. Was there a shortage of showerheads in Poland? Or was it like collecting matchboxes or something? And why didn't they at least wait until they were ready to leave? I would go for a shower and find nothing but a stump that poured water out in one long, impossible to wash yourself under stream. I can just imagine going to the Zlockow's family home in Warsaw and having the very proud owner show me his impressive collection of showerheads from all over Europe, beautifully presented in a large glass case. 'Thiss vun's my favourite, I got it from the wery nice cumpsite in Paris. Oh yass, it took me tventy minutes to get thiss vun orff.'

Cover blurb:

Brian Thacker confesses all as he reveals the best (and worst) of 20 trips as a tour leader around Europe. He tells how he fed passengers horse meat spag bol, hamburgers made from breakfast cereal and roosters' testicles; how he left a passenger standing by the side of a motorway in France for 3 hours in his underwear clutching a purple toothbrush and how, along the way, he lost his driver, his cook, his bus, ten brightly coloured canal bikes, a large church and eventually his patience.

Rule No 5 No Sex on the Bus is a book packed with great travel yarns, highly recommended. We usually have a copy in stock, click here to see if we have one in stock now.