Veteran adventurer Mary Russell has travelled by camel, Iraqi taxi and snowmobile. But nothing prepared her for the challenge of public transport between Dublin and Kildare

Camels do it slowly, Arctic snowmobiles are quicker and Iraqi taxis are speediest of all, zipping from Baghdad to Damascus overnight. (Though, to be fair, there are no traffic-lights or roundabouts in the desert to impede their progress.)

With all these modes of transport under my belt, commuting between Dublin and Co Kildare, as I had to recently, should have been simple to the point of boredom. No need for map, compass or guide book. Just buy ticket, get on bus, get off bus. You thought that too, did you?

Bus Éireann's website is easy to open and easier to use. You say where you want to travel between, the time and date you want to travel and up it comes, price included.

Some of my journeys were difficult to dovetail; and one in particular, Dublin to Newbridge on a Sunday morning, seemed complicated and, though it would take over two hours, not impossible. I would catch a bus from Busáras to Kildare, hang around a bit and then catch another bus back to Newbridge.

"Oh, no," said the real person on the other end of Bus Éireann's helpline when I phoned to confirm, "we wouldn't send you that way at all." The computer hadn't worked out that the Expressway bus passing through Kildare to Cork was pick-up only. Further - you've guessed it - coming back, it was set-down only.

On one occasion, leaving Dublin, we deviated into Tallaght where the driver, clearly with no sense of geography, got lost and was happily heading back for Dublin (on the outward journey surely the mountains should be on your left?) until a resourceful passenger put him on course.

On a second occasion, a Friday afternoon, demand exceeded supply. The form at Busáras is that you line up in something that might loosely be called a queue then, when the bus pulls in, you make a run for it. Think Sudan, I told myself. Think the bus station in Damascus. And by the time the third relief bus had pulled in, I'd got the hang of it - as well as my seat to Sweet Athy (though the driver of this bus, too, had to rely on guidance from the passengers).

Travelling by train wasn't much better. The carriages had a historic feel to them, perhaps due to the disposable foil ashtrays on each table and the faintly distasteful state of the upholstery.

We were 20 minutes late pulling out of Heuston Station.

"Why?" I asked the train conductor. "Ah," he beamed cheerfully, "it was late getting in."

Trying to leave Athy on a wet, squally night, I found a handwritten note announcing there was no train: we should wait for a bus. No explanation, no apology. People huddled in corners, sodden newspapers over their heads to protect themselves from the driving rain: the station waiting room with its cracked windows was closed.

One woman was returning from a wedding. "At least, you're on your way back. You got to the wedding." She shook her head: "The train was late going the other way as well. We should have got to Limerick at noon, but we got in at 2.30 p.m." The wedding had taken place at 2 p.m.

Forty minutes after the scheduled departure time of the train - because this was a Bank Holiday I'd phoned to confirm the special timetable - the bus arrived.

The irony of it all was that I was in Kildare to run a series of travel-writing workshops based around the theme of Challenge and Endurance, both of which I had ample opportunity to explore, courtesy of Bus and Iarnród Éireann.

So what's to be done? Bus Éireann has a fleet of 1,400 coaches, of which 700 are for school use, the rest for punters like me. We take 35 million bus journeys a year in the Republic, so that's a lot of voters with first-hand experience of an underfunded public transport system.

The Expressway service is not designed for short-haul journeys, hence the restrictions on pick-up and set-down. Luckily, some drivers ignore this. Waiting in the rain on a Sunday afternoon in Athy, and after two full buses had passed, I forced my way on to the third one, giving the driver a full-frontal smile.

"I'm not supposed to," he said resignedly but I was on and wasn't getting off.

Bus Éireann has its problems, says its press officer, Cyril McIntyre. "People have complained that the website gives details of all feasible journeys, but if you write a programme to filter out the discrepanices, you filter out other things as well."

Traffic congestion is a major problem. "Holdups on the road cost us €13 million a year," says McIntyre, "what with diesel fuel wastage and overtime pay - which, after tax, doesn't add up to much for the drivers." The answer? "The hard shoulders should be made accessible to buses, taxis and the emergency services," he says.

And what does he think of the confusing information given out on the website? "To be honest, the web timetable gives out too much information, the sort that would be of interest only to tourists or a bus enthusiast. Some of the routes, you'd want to be daft to travel that way."

He said it - and some of us are. My next bus journey is from Killybegs to Galway. Watch this space.

www.buseireann.ie