The Longest Bus Route in the World

For nearly two decades, one of the strangest travel bargains on Earth was a bus ticket that took you from London all the way to Calcutta. The first such service, called “The Indiaman,” was launched on 15 April 1957 by the London-based operator Garrow-Fisher Tours. Its inaugural bus, an AEC Regal III with “London to Calcutta” painted right across its side, departed London under driver Oswald-Joseph Garrow-Fisher and reached Kolkata roughly fifty days later. Tickets for the one-way trip were priced at just £85, with the return leg costing £65, and the inaugural journey carried 20 passengers, seven of whom completed the full round trip back to London.

The route stretched roughly 20,000 kilometres and included food, accommodation and travel all bundled into the fare, with each passenger effectively living aboard the bus for the full fifty days. Along the way, the itinerary doubled as a grand tour of the ancient world, taking in stops such as Varanasi and the Taj Mahal in Agra, with shopping excursions in cities including Tehran, Salzburg, Kabul, Istanbul and Vienna. By the time the route eventually wound down, at least 32 other operators had joined “The Indiaman” in running services along it.

Enter Albert

Among those operators, the most famous by far was Albert Travel, whose story began almost by accident. The original Indiaman bus was eventually sold off in 1968 after an accident left it unstable, and it was purchased by a British traveller named Andy Stewart, who had been trying to make his own way home to London from Sydney. Stewart rebuilt the damaged double-decker into a mobile home of sorts and renamed it Albert, after its previous owner, before driving it from Sydney to London via India in 1968, a journey of roughly 132 days that reportedly beat the previous route’s own travel-time record.

Stewart went on to found Albert Tours to keep the bus, and the spirit of its journeys, running. Under that banner, the company completed 15 full round trips along the London–Calcutta and, later, London–Calcutta–Sydney routes before finally discontinuing the service in 1976. Along the way, the double-decker Albert crossed nearly 150 international borders, a feat almost unthinkable by today’s standards of visas, checkpoints and travel restrictions.

Part of a Much Bigger Migration

The London-to-Calcutta bus did not exist in isolation. It was one very literal expression of what became known as the Hippie Trail: the loosely defined overland route that carried thousands of young travellers, mostly from Europe, North America and Australia, into the Indian subcontinent from the late 1950s through the 1970s, typically via Turkey, Lebanon, Kashmir, Iran and Afghanistan, as they searched for alternative and affordable ways to see the world and connected with fellow travellers along the way. Passengers on these buses came to be known as “overlanders,” and the route itself became something of a rite of passage for a generation drawn to countercultural travel, the kind of journey that would later help shape an entirely new genre of travel publishing built around independent, budget-conscious exploration of the world.

Why the Buses Stopped Running

The overland route’s undoing was ultimately geopolitical rather than commercial. Political unrest across the Middle East through the 1970s made the journey progressively more difficult, and the route effectively came to an end with the twin shocks of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that same year. Albert Tours itself had already wound down its own service by 1976, several years before those final upheavals, as the countries along the route grew steadily less hospitable to slow-moving convoys of foreign tourists. What had once been a viable, if eccentric, alternative to flying became, almost overnight, a route through some of the world’s most volatile territory.

A Modern Revival, Still Waiting to Depart

The idea of retracing that overland route has never entirely disappeared, and in recent years an Indian travel company has tried repeatedly to bring it back. Adventures Overland, founded in 2012 by entrepreneurs Sanjay Madan and Tushar Agarwal after the pair completed a record-setting Delhi-to-London drive of their own, has spent years developing a modern “Bus to London” service. Billed as the first-ever hop-on/hop-off bus route between the two cities, the plan called for a modified luxury coach to carry around 20 passengers across 18 countries over 70 days, taking in stops such as the pagodas of Myanmar, the Great Wall of China, and the historic centres of Moscow and Prague.

The project’s timeline, however, has been repeatedly upended by forces well beyond the company’s control. The original journey was scheduled for April 2021, but closed land borders in Myanmar and China amid the COVID-19 pandemic forced its postponement. A relaunch was subsequently pencilled in for April 2023, again contingent on China’s borders reopening to overland travellers, which by then remained the single biggest obstacle to the full Delhi-to-London itinerary. Rather than wait indefinitely, the company eventually re-routed the concept altogether, launching a shorter “Bus to London” service in 2023 running from Istanbul to London, a 12,000-kilometre, 22-country journey that bypassed the China and Southeast Asia legs entirely. That Istanbul-to-London route has continued to run, even as the original full Delhi-to-London vision remains, for now, unrealised.

A Route That Refuses to Fully Disappear

Nearly fifty years after the last Albert Tours bus rolled to a stop, the idea of crossing continents by road between London and the Indian subcontinent still holds a peculiar grip on the travel imagination. What began in 1957 as a curious, budget alternative to flying became, over two decades, both a literal transport service and a cultural symbol of an entire generation’s appetite for slow, overland discovery. Its modern successors have found that recreating it is far harder than reviving the idea, but the fact that companies keep trying, delay after delay, suggests the original bus tapped into something that a plane ticket never quite could.

References:

1. MessyNessyChic. “All Aboard the Giant Hippie Bus from London to Calcutta.”
2. Secret London (SecretLDN). “The Bus Service From London To India Was Once The Longest Bus Route In the World.”
3. GetBengal. “The bus route between Calcutta and England that crossed 150 borders!”
4. East India Story. “London to Calcutta by Bus.”
5. Kaangri.com. “Albert: The Legendary London to Calcutta Bus Journey.”
6. IndianYug. “London to Calcutta Bus Service, the Longest Bus Route in the World.”
7. Wikipedia. “India–United Kingdom bus routes.”
8. Time Out. “This epic bus journey from the UK to India will actually start running next year,” June 2022.
9. CBW Magazine. “Delhi to London in 70 days with Adventures Overland.”
10. CNN Travel. “New bus trip will take you from Delhi to London.”
11. Adventures Overland. “Epic Bus Journey - Bus to London.”
12. Wikipedia. “Adventures Overland.”
13. Adventures Overland (official site).
    

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