Did you ride one of the last buses yesterday as a tribute and fond farewell to Malta’s quaint public transport “system”?

A few creative souls came up with the idea of taking one last journey on the chugging, polluting yellow bus, taking photos and posting them on Facebook for posterity. They also suggested taking a picture of the last bus ticket, but this idea quickly unravelled. By Friday the disgruntled, remaining bus drivers had already stopped issuing tickets.

This, more than anything else, perhaps epitomises the belligerent attitude that had reduced our bus service to the shambles we have had to live with for years. For the last few weeks I have been reading about how tourists are sad and dismayed to see the unique Maltese buses being scrapped and sent to that great big terminus in the sky. Even Maltese people have been voicing their melancholy, speaking with nostalgia and sentiment about “the end of an era” and how they are going to miss the whole colourful bus experience. Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, except for one small, tiny detail – most of these people have probably never ridden a bus in their life. Like me, they have probably avoided the whole maddening ordeal like the proverbial plague and would rather endure the prospect of driving their own car through chaotic traffic and face the daily battle of the parking spaces rather than be subjected to the erratic, unreliable transport system we have been lumped with for decades.

For me, it was not so much the shocking rudeness of the shabbily dressed, foul-mouthed bus drivers which made me avoid riding the bus; after all, haven’t you noticed that these days having a mouth like a gutter and being insolent has become the norm? Oh yes, it’s very “in” apparently. No, it was the fact that I could not rely on this blessed bus to get me where I wanted to go on time.

That is, after all, the whole point of using public transport instead of your own vehicle isn’t it? Getting from A to B on an island the size of a town, preferably in less than half a day. Unless your destination was Valletta, in which case it was pretty straightforward, travelling, for example, from Mosta to nearby Gharghur was a feat in itself. Of course, one makes allowances for waiting at a bus stop, and catching the bus as it “happens” to pass by (a timetable? Why surely, you jest!). And you also factor in walking from the bus stop to your destination − you know, all the things you do when you use buses, tubes and trains when travelling overseas. But Maltese buses and their drivers have always been very cunning and devious in that way. It would have made life much too stultifyingly boring to have a system which you could set your watch by (where do you think you are, Switzerland?). So sometimes a bus would stop, and sometimes it wouldn’t, depending on the driver’s mood that day. Sometimes it wouldn’t show up at all, because, well, no reason really. Maybe the driver had eaten a heavy lunch of timpana and needed to sleep it off. With no idea of which bus number you need to take you are really taking your chances as the bus comes to a grinding halt and you tentatively enquire whether this bus goes to the place you want to go. Acting mortally wounded, as if you had just offended his mother or his canary, the bus driver would shout at you in exasperation for having the nerve to be Maltese and not know this information. “Of course this is NOT the bus to Gharghur, don’t you know anything?!” And with a grimace and an expletive he zooms off leaving you covered from head to toe in diesel fumes, and none the wiser.

Like Snoop Dogg, our bus drivers were the superstars, and we were the lame journalists who waited for four hours hoping they would show up to hop on their throne. And, if you dared with all temerity to ask ‘but why?’ they would snarl and bite your head off, and if you happen to be from Africa they would even call you ‘nigga’ except it would be in a heavy Maltese accent rather than in the dialect of a black rapper from LA.

I’m not surprised that tourists loved our rattling, uncomfortable buses because let’s face it, when you’re on holiday you have no sense of urgency, and riding a novelty, bone-rattling bus for a few cents was like riding a daredevil rollercoaster in a theme park. You got all the thrills and you didn’t have to travel all the way to Orlando. I will never forget the amused tones of one American tourist whose teeth were practically dislodged as we hit another pothole, “Boy, you haven’t lived until you’ve ridden a Maltese bus!”

I smiled wryly and cringed inwardly. No, it was not nice to be the butt of touristy jokes, no matter how “charming” they would insist our buses were.

Charming, shmarming. We had to live with them, and even if you never rode one if you could help it, all of us have had the misfortune to be stuck behind one, as it stopped squarely in front of us, suffocating us with black toxic fumes which reached your lungs even with all your windows closed tight. Bus bays were there simply to be ignored, for nine times out of ten, the driver would still refuse to swing into the bay, and instead he would halt a whole line of traffic as his passengers boarded, paid for their ticket, and with deliberate, infuriating slowness, he would eventually start driving again.

I am not sorry to see these squat yellow Bedford buses (and their untouchable drivers) go, and I’m really not sorry that tourists are heartbroken to see them go. We had to live with them Mr and Mrs Tourist and it was not in the least bit amusing or funny, not when our nerves are frayed because everyone is forced to use their own car resulting in gridlock traffic just because we lack a good transport system. It might have tickled your fancy to see “Eat my Dust” and Elvis juxtaposed with a picture of Our Lady, but to us it was a daily reminder that we were still trapped in some kind of bizarre time warp. You will just have to find something else to fill your scrapbooks to remember your Malta holiday by.

Frankly, to those of us who have had to live with it, it stopped being cute a long time ago.

So as we say goodbye to an era, and (I trust) welcome in a new one which will make our lives less stressful, I look forward to the day when I can choose to leave my car at home and take a bus to work, without panicking that I will be stranded for the rest of the day.

* * *

And yet, even as I’m trying to be optimistic about the new bus system, I am still full of trepidation that something, somewhere will go wrong, and the reason is this. As I write, the busy main road just outside my door is backed up with traffic because someone has decided that Saturday morning is an ideal time to paint the tarmac with new traffic signals for the Arriva buses. It would have been too much to ask to do this, say, at night, when there’s no traffic. And of course, leaving it to the very last day makes it that much more exciting and cutting edge doesn’t it? Why plan ahead, how utterly boring. So for those of you who were swearing in traffic which was backed up for almost a kilometre yesterday, just say a prayer of thanks that you live in a country where nothing is predictable and you are guaranteed traffic chaos no matter what. Don’t you find it absolutely charming?

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