Cruise ship bus breaks down

Weary but jubilant passengers finally set foot on dry land on Thursday after five days stranded at sea aboard the crippled Caival cruise ship - but for some, the nightmare was not yet over.

The Triumph finally docked in Mobile, Alabama at 9.30pm after a slow crawl into port and hundreds of passengers boarded buses for New Orleans, Galveston and Houston.

But as one bus of passengers, who had endured days without water, heat or working bathrooms, made the two-hour trek to New Orleans, one of the vehicles broke down at 2.30 a.m., leaving them stranded for an hour.

'The bus literally breaks down,' passenger Clark Jones told Live at Daybreak. 'It comes to a stop in the middle of the highway. We have to pull over to the side. It's dark. All the lights on the bus go out.'

Neverending story: Passengers haul their luggage onto a new bus after theirs broke down on the side of the road travelling from Mobile, Alabama to New Orleans

Out of power: He also uploaded this picture of the broken-down bus on the side of the road

He added that there was a mixed reaction from the exhausted passengers on board.

'My son Jacob and I, when we pulled over and realised the bus was broken, we just started laughing.  People were giggling. Other people were not happy,' he said.

For Jones, it was just another blip in the long jouey back home. A back up coach picked up the passengers and they headed to New Orleans. He will now fly to Houston, pick up a car in Galveston and drive back to Dallas.

It was a more jubilant scene hours before, as the ship inched along the dock and loud cheering and the song 'Sweet Home Alabama' could be heard from the decks as the vessel blew her ho.

Some passengers had written Valentine's Day messages while another had scrawled: 'The ship's afloat, so is the sewage.'