I had had huge difficulty persuading the staff at the Kreditkassen Bank on Karl Johans Gate to cash sufficient traveller’s cheques to pay the extortionate 1,kroner bus fare – they simply could not be made to grasp that the William McGuire Bryson on my passport and the Bill Bryson on my traveller’s cheques were both me – and now here I was arriving at the station two minutes before. I thought I’d take a cab, but there were none at the station, so I walked into the town – a large village really – looking for a bus stop or a cab office, and went into a hotel on the main street and discovered from the dour patroness that Barvaux had neither cabs nor buses. In my best schoolboy French I asked how one then gets to Barvaux when one is sans l’auto. I braced for the lady. 02/03/ · Bill Bryson’s first travel book, The Lost Continent, was unanimously acclaimed as one of the funniest books in years. In Neither Here nor There he brings his unique brand of humour to bear on Europe as he shoulders his backpack, keeps a tight hold on his wallet, and journeys from Hammerfest, the northernmost town on the continent, to Istanbul on the cusp of Asia.