A friend of mine took this route in the 70's. It was not only relatively cheap but once you arrived in India you could live off the very generous UK Unemployment Benefit for a very long time as the exchange rate was incredible and the price of basics extremely cheap. He did it for several years before moving on to Japan. So he didn't need to take any time 'off' :)
There were almost no checks - he was, in theory, 'available for work'. The system is very different now - in part because it used to be too easy to take advantage of . . .
Go spend some time on r/onebag. Every day there is a post by someone who is taking 3 months or 6 months to travel a few different countries. Usually younger people, but includes people who are taking a long break from work.
Or to put it another way. There were only a handful of such buses running simultaneously. So there were only a few hundred passengers per year. Is it hard to imagine that in the 3ish Billion people that live on that route today, you couldn't find 500 people who can take a few months off to do an epic journey through 20 countries?
> There were only a handful of such buses running simultaneously
Indeed, the Wikipedia article is written in a way that strongly implies that there was in fact just a single bus, unless there were other companies running the same service.
When I was planning my ~3 months euro trip from India, I just couldn’t connect/identify with those subs at all. I guess it’s for the other way round mostly :)
