Enough of the technical. I turn up at 7.45 am one cold, wet Monday in July to experience a long, slow bus ride.

The bus driver greets me, his lone passenger, with a brief smile before closing the door and launching our cheerless odyssey. I say cheerless not because the bus is awful – it is clean, modern, and comfortable by the standards of short-haul buses – but because outside it is raining and so dark that motorists will have their headlights on until mid-morning. Inside, it is brutally cold. The motor purring beneath my seat must be producing heat, but none of it enters the cabin.

Participation in this journey is spotty to start with. A young woman gets on at the second stop, and a couple of young men a few kilometres later. One of the young men asks the bus driver, 'This bus goes to Sunshine, yeah?' When did this form of casting a question – a flat statement appended with an upward interrogative tail – make its way into Australian usage?

'The 903, from Altona to Mordialloc, which transcribes a massive, jagged arc around Melbourne's suburban sprawl, takes four and a quarter hours to complete eighty-six kilometres'

The young woman alights at a shopping strip in Sunshine, the men at an industrial location, presumably all heading to work.

We've been on the road for half an hour already, cutting through the rain, sending up plumes of water whenever we pull into the kerb, kneeling at stop after stop to let people on or off. The signs say Sunshine, but the word can only evoke a tremor of longing. Modest houses, shabby shops, and thundering trucks all squeeze between the wet road and the weeping sky.

I've begun to figure out why the average speed of the 903 is one replicable by modest human legs. The bus is moving briskly enough between stops, managing, I would guess, the speed limit. Stops are not lengthy – that is, until we pull up at some place presumably designated on a timetable, and sit and sit. I assume we are making sure we don't run ahead of schedule – the timetable must be configured to account for worst-case traffic, which is not on offer today. These pauses vary from one to about ten minutes, and would be irritating if I were going somewhere. As I am not, they are merely moments to be soaked up.

At Hassett Street, a woman's recorded voice pipes up. She begins announcing each stop, her messages augmented by an electronic display at the front of the bus. Where has she been until now? Sometimes she speaks clearly, at other times she fades off – 'The next stop is [inaudible].'

We hit Keilor. It's been an hour. The rain continues to blur the windows, the headlights are still on. I am just warm enough in my thick coat and scarf, but my feet have begun to freeze, in spite of socks and leather boots.

A melbourne bus on the 903 route (photograph by Marcus Wong, via Wikimedia Commons)

People continue to get on and off in ones, twos, and threes. Mostly they seem unknown to each other, and we ride in silence.

Just before Essendon station, we are bailed up by a set of traffic lights in front of the railway line. Nothing moves. Trains cross, the boom gates go up, and down, and up, but the light remains obdurately red. I idle away these long pauses picturing the imaginary self, who had set off on her bicycle from Altona at the same time as the bus, catching up. There she is now, beside us in the rain, water dripping from her helmet, the tell-tale line of grey road grime inscribed up her back. She is smiling, yeah? The light is ready to change.

Essendon station. All but two of us get off, and three men get on. One sits across the aisle from me, bringing the stink of cigarette. He may have thrown his butt into the gutter before boarding, but he has carried a lungful of smoke on board to share with us.

'The signs say Sunshine, but the word can only evoke a tremor of longing'

Another long wait. The windows fog up. My imaginary cycling self has departed, making the best of a head start.

Next stop, Essendon DFO. No one gets on or off, probably only because it isn't that sort of a day. I think it likely that the workers in these concrete barns will have to warm themselves today with something other than the frenzied swiping of customer credit cards.

We ride the freeway back towards the city briefly before exiting at Coburg. This is a blessing – traffic into the city ahead of us is as motionless as a paddockful of rocks.

More people on and off, averaging about a five-kilometre journey each. We pass Coburg station, then Coburg cemetery – it's huge, densely built. I feel as if I am looking down from the sky at an ancient city miles below.

At the two-hour mark, we reach Northland Shopping Centre. Another pause, presumably while the timetable (and my flagging imaginary cycling self) catch up.

By Bell Street I finally witness some companionship – a mother and daughter join us, followed by an elderly couple. Neither pair converses, but there is a warmth in their touching shoulders. The mother and daughter get off at the Austin Hospital – I wonder what takes them there – and we move on for a few more stops before another timetable-calibrating hiatus.

Finally, the rain eases. Perhaps it is this that helps make Melbourne look less ... unlovely. Or perhaps it's that we've arrived briefly at a spot where it is genuinely more pleasing – I see a series of brown signs directing the hopeful towards the Yarra Scenic Drive.

We pass a large nursery, stop to pick up someone who pays with cash – I am thrilled that this is still possible. Next stop, Doncaster Shopping Centre. A pile of people get off, another smaller pile get on. At a major intersection shortly afterwards we stop and the driver pops his head out of his cabin to let a woman with purple hair know that this is her destination.

'By Bell Street I finally witness some companionship – a mother and daughter join us, followed by an elderly couple'

Beyond the Eastern Freeway, it stops raining. I count our little band – there are about twenty of us on board – the busiest it has been. At the three-hour mark, we arrive at Box Hill Central. People with shopping bags get on and off, and we sit waiting for the clock to catch up.

As we take off again, I notice regular piles of hard rubbish on the nature strip. Even in the cold and rain, people must be obeying some cleaning-the-nest urge. I have plenty of time to think about this because only fifteen minutes down the road we have another long pause.

My feet are half numb with cold. We exchange goodly numbers of passengers at Holmesglen TAFE and then Chadstone Shopping Centre, and soon afterwards jink into a small shopping street near Oakleigh station. An old man comes out of a florist's holding some gift-wrapped flowers. He marches off down the street with them on his shoulder like a rifle.

By now I am imprinted with the repetition of the landscape – the miles and miles of houses and shops, roads and traffic lights, cars and trucks, shopping centres and railway stations. There are logos and names that appear on repeat, as if the bus has not really moved but is looping endlessly through a short video clip. JB Hi-Fi, Red Rooster, 7-Eleven, Chemist Warehouse, H&R Block. It is both comforting and numbing. Mysteriously, hundreds of little massage businesses have not succumbed to franchising or branding.

'We pass a large nursery, stop to pick up someone who pays with cash – I am thrilled that this is still possible'

We pass a house on the main road that has a rotary clothesline in the front yard. The line is empty, of course, but it is strange to think of the sunny days on which someone might put her towels and knickers out for thousands to see.

At Centre Road, a woman leaves her seat and asks the driver where Chadstone is. He tells her it is behind us and pulls over so she can get off and cross the road. She will only need to wait a few minutes to pick up a 903 going the other way, stepping through the mirror to fold herself back into the reflection of the journey she has just taken.

Four hours into our journey, at a most unlikely bus shelter, the driver pulls over, picks up his bag and gets off, exchanging a greeting with a woman who now adjusts herself into the driver's seat and takes us the last quarter of an hour. I am the only person aboard to see the whole thing through.

Right on noon, I am deposited at the Mordialloc shops. I get off and stand in the street, stunned. Just for a moment I see my imaginary self pull up, flushed with exercise and not in the least bit cold, before she gives me a wave and turns her bicycle towards the bay.

I am cold, my feet are numb, and I'm hungry. I check my iPhone. It's 9.6 degrees, but my weather app says it 'feels like 3.6'. It does.

'It's 9.6 degrees, but my weather app says it ''feels like 3.6''. It does'

In a café I thaw out and order lunch. Over a coffee and wrap, I reflect on the fact that in the time I could have flown to Christchurch and collected my baggage from the carousel, or had my seatbelt fastened for the descent into Darwin, I have been deposited thirty kilometres from home as the seagull flies. It is possible that, on a good day, I would be able to see the smudge of Altona across the bay from here.

I feel a bit flat. Just the weather, yeah? After all, I got what I went looking for – I have inspected this city by examining the plumbing rather than by asking to see the living room and the view. I have investigated the workaday arteries of the metropolis, rather than sit in a fancy restaurant gazing into her made-up face. What I found there is heartening, it is true. There may have been no social sparkle, but there were many small politenesses. The bus may not have been warm, but it was clean and punctual. While the trip was grindingly slow, it was never intended as a long-haul route for the curious outsider. And I have seen all of this for less than ten dollars.

No, the flatness springs from something else – from spending a long, cold morning imagining the city through the eyes of a stranger. On the bus I gazed through the window and daydreamed how the scenery would strike me if I weren't me, but someone else – someone without employment, say, or someone with no one to go home to. I had experienced the practical solidity of Melbourne, but I was also full of a sense of the fragility of what makes the city – and life – beautiful.