This was published 1 year ago
Opinion
The boozy European bus tour is no more and that's a shame
Globetrotting columnist Ben Groundwater explores the things that make travel great (and sometimes not great), offering a mix of opinion, anecdotes and advice.
Ben Groundwater
Travel writer
Contiki tours aren't what they used to be. Credit: Alamy
There's a yearly reunion of Topdeck staff in Australia. Every 12 months all the old coach drivers, tour leaders, cooks and office staff get together at a certain venue and reminisce about old times, tell war stories, tall stories, hilarious stories, disaster stories (these are often all the one story).
These reunions are a chance to catch up with old friends – you forge incredibly strong relationships when you work together on the road, you see things no one else would understand. But mostly, they're just chances to talk about the good times, about the people you met, the things you did, the insane things you saw.
I get it. This is going to sound strange, but this is the one travel experience I really miss that I just can't do anymore: European bus tours. The much-maligned, boozy jaunts around the highlights of Western Europe, back in the '80s and '90s and the early 2000s, when no one really learned that much about the destinations they were visiting and no one really cared. You were there for a good time, not a long time.
Those tours don't really exist anymore, at least not in the form they once were.
You can still travel with Contiki and Topdeck and plenty of others like them and no doubt have a great time. But the soul has changed. People don’t camp anymore. Or even stay in campsites. They don’t pitch in with the cooking anymore. They don’t tolerate mishaps and screw-ups and just roll with the punches.
Illustration: Jamie Brown
I'm not complaining about that, either. Travel changes in the same way everything else changes. Generations change. Expectations change. That's fine.
And even if that style of travel did still exist, I couldn't do it. I'm too old. This is travel for the young, for the carefree, for the unencumbered. You can't go buck wild when you're a 40-something-year-old with kids at home. Or at least, you probably shouldn't.
I feel like I can still partake in pretty much every other travel experience, and enjoy it. Budget backpacking around far-flung destinations is still very much an option. I travelled to Bougainville last year – it was rough, and wild, and amazing.
People my age, Gen Xers and beyond, can still do overland trips in Africa, Eurail journeys in Europe, hiking expeditions in South America, banana-pancake wanderings in South-East Asia. And if anything the world has opened up, because now there's also the option to go a bit fancier too, to stay in places that have, say, childcare, to take care of needs that were never there before.
The great thing about modern travel is that there's very little anyone of any age can't do. The whole experience has been democratised. There are no limits. If you desire it, and you can pay for it, you can do it.
And yet. I will never do a boozy European bus tour ever again.
You might wonder why the nostalgia. This was never a respectable way to travel, it never had any cachet among "real" travellers. Plenty of people would question this as an actual travel experience, given you spend most of your time on these tours in the company of people from your own country, doing a lot of things you would do back home.
And that's fair enough. But what all of those criticisms miss is the sheer joy of those tours.
I know all about that. I did a Contiki tour, as a passenger, when I was 17. My eyes were opened to the world. I worked for a couple of summer seasons as a travelling cook with Topdeck (a position that doesn't exist anymore, given no one wants to stay in campsites and eat my delicious, though culturally questionable, food).
I know how much fun this style of travel used to be. There's just nothing quite like getting a large group of young, like-minded travellers together on a holiday, taking them to amazing places, showing them amazing things, giving them the freedom to do whatever they feel like doing, and then gathering them together at the end of each day in some far-flung campsite and letting them run wild.
Most of the best times we had on those tours weren't in the best places. They weren't in Amsterdam or Paris or Rome, as wonderful as those cities are.
They were in Lauterbrunnen, the tiny Swiss village where everyone would hang out at the campsite bar at night and play a game trying to bang nails into a block of wood with a very thin hammer. They were in St Goar in Germany, at "Hermie's Place", where our quirky host would always put on a good time. They were in the Venice campsite, where we would organise a definitely-culturally-appropriate toga party and everyone would go nuts.
Lifelong friendships were formed on those tours. Couples got together, and some are still together. Couples broke up, too. Intense bonds were forged but also sometimes immediately broken when everyone was forced to wave goodbye.
The travel world has changed now, probably for the better. These sorts of tours don't happen so much, and they certainly don't happen for me.
The good news is that pretty much every other travel experience is still there, it's still accessible if you have the money and the time, and it's still incredibly enjoyable.
But not the old bus tours. I'll just have to go to a reunion to get back in touch with that.
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