The majority of the buses in Mauritius are old and spew out clouds of black smoke as they rattle along. The seats are ripped and if you want air conditioning, you open the window. The drivers live by the rule that the biggest vehicle has priority so you soon learn to keep out of their way as much as possible. Having said that, the buses are relatively frequent and you can travel across the island for less than £1.
In Réunion, there are buses and there are "Cars Jaunes", coaches which travel between the big towns around the island. They are different in almost every way from the buses in Mauritius - air conditioned, modern, no conductors to buy your ticket from - but given the choice, I would travel on the Mauritian bus every time.
The local buses I travelled on in Réunion were fine, except that the air con was set to about 15 degrees and the seats are incredibly slippery, which can be a bit awkward if you're sitting next to a stranger and you end up practically on their knee going round a corner.
The Car Jaune, however, is a different story. In the UK, and most other places I've visited, each bus line has a timetable. You check the timetable before leaving the house, and generally the bus is more or less on time. Often there's a pause factored in at one stop so the driver can either wait if he's running ahead of schedule, or catch up any lost time if he's running late. No such organisation in the islands - if you leave the house 10 minutes before the allotted time, but the bus is running 11 minutes early, tough luck. On the line I used, there are two buses per hour, an express which travels directly between towns, and the "normal" bus which goes round the houses and takes a bit longer. To me it would be logical to space them out a little - have a bus every half hour - but no, they arrive within five minutes of each other and if you miss them, you wait almost an hour for the next one.
The Car Jaunes are coaches and you're not allowed to stand up on coaches, so you might wait 1h for your bus, only for the driver to go whizzing straight past you because he has no free seats. Or he might stop and let on the first 5 people and then close the doors on everyone else who has been waiting patiently for ages. Worse still, he will let you on and sell you your ticket, only for you to discover that someone snuck in through the rear door and took the last available seat, meaning you, with your now useless ticket, have to get off and wait for the next bus. If only the French were as good at queuing as the British everyone would know where they stood, literally. But as it is, they stand in a scrum and elbow each other to get to the door first in the hope of getting a place on the bus. I can understand their desperation but frankly it was enough to put me off leaving the house.
With your bottom firmly on your hard-won seat, you look out of the window at the poor people left behind and realise that sometimes, the driver doesn't even stop when he has free seats. I have no idea how they decide which people are worthy of their seats, it seems totally random.
As you approach your final destination you look around for the bell to ring, to let the driver know he needs to stop, and soon realise there aren't any. The first time I rode in a Car Jaune, I was with Merv and asked how on earth the driver knows when to stop if there are no bells. Those of you who know my husband will know that he likes to joke and often tells me things that are completely untrue, just to see if I will believe him, so when he told me that you had to clap your hands to signal to the driver that you wanted to get off, I laughed in his face and told him to pull the other one. We were getting closer and closer to home and I was getting a bit anxious that we would miss our stop. Fortunately Merv didn't want to spend the day riding round on a bus either and he started clapping. Who knew, for once he was actually telling the truth!
