MIAMI – About 50 people are lucky to be alive Friday afternoon after the double-decker bus they were in caught fire, shutting down the westbound lanes of I-595 in Davie.

It happened before 3 p.m. near Nob Hill Road. 

CBS News Miami’s Nikiya Carrero interviewed two of the tourists who say they were headed to the Everglades, but they never made it.

Edward McElduff, visiting from the UK, said “It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I started thinking about my fiancé and my wedding that I got coming up. Sort of started accepting defeat.”
  
McElduff, along with his colleagues, decided to take a break from the World Finance Forum and take a trip to see alligators when the unimaginable happened. 

Lewis Chandler, also visiting from the UK, said “It’s just one of those things that would never happen or ever happen to you and then all of sudden you find yourself running off a bus on the freeway.” 

The group got on the bus at 305 Lincoln Road on South Beach where Miami Tours is located. 

About 40 minutes into the drive, they noticed smoke. 

“Then, about 10 minutes later, we noticed we were being pulled over on the freeway. And it was at that moment we noticed something more serious was going on.”

The group said the driver did not give them any instructions, so they took matters into their own hands. 

Calmly, exiting one by one, but the door on the bus was against the guard on the shoulder. 

“We had been pulled over so far that you had to climb over the shoulder to get out of the door,” said Chandler.

Both men said they were two unsung heroes who assisted the entire group. 

No injuries were reported. 

Images from Chopper 4 showed a charred skeleton of a chartered bus on the emergency lane of an empty highway. 

It is not clear what may have started the fire. 

The bus was eventually towed away from the scene, as lanes started to reopen. 

Traffic was affected for miles.