Last year I was roaming my way through Central America on a budget, as a result of trying to keep my costs down, I decided to overland it all. This meant that I was sat on several busses throughout my travel and some of the were incredibly long and as the cheapest were the overnight ones, I took advantage of those. You can only sleep for so long on an overnight bus and you need to fill in the hours somehow. I managed to get a pretty good system of how I would do exactly that I thought I’d share with you some ideas for keeping yourself entertained.
Movies
If you are taking a laptop or a tablet with you then you should prepare wisely and download some movies or TV shows to watch whilst you are traveling. If you are traveling in an English speaking country then you may find that there are some movies on the bus for you to watch but don’t run the risk, be prepared and download before you go.
Games
I love spending my time playing games and being sat on the bus fro 20 hours gave me the perfect opportunity to button-bash to my heart’s content. These days you can play games on your phone, tablet and laptop and if you’re smart, you can even hit some popular online casinos to play games for money. Again you will need to be prepared here and ensure that you have downloaded any games before you travel and also that you have chargers for your devices, gaming doesn’t half drain the battery!
Reading
An overnight bus journey gives you a perfect opportunity to get stuck into a book and even if you are traveling and don’t want to carry a book around with you, devices such as a Kindle makes carrying around plenty of books at once very easy. Admittedly for an overnight journey you will be far better off with a device that has a backlight as you can’t always rely on the bus having a functioning spotlight above your head.
Music
I absolutely love listening to a full album from start to finish and for some reason, since my teenage years I no longer do it. A bus journey gives you the perfect chance to put the headphones in, get away from the World for a while and listen to a good album be it new old, from beginning to end. Music has the power to change your emotions and I would advise that you create a playlist to help you with sadness, loneliness, boredom and to lift your mood in general when it gets a little low. You can also put some music on to help you sleep, vital for shutting out all of the noise from the bus’ engine.
You should look at a long journey as an opportunity rather than a pain, how rare it is that you will get such a great amount of time where you have no responsibilities and in reality, nothing to do. Use your time wisely and enjoy that overnight bus ride.