Entre Rios - Part I
In December, Greg and I visited the riverside towns of Gualeguachu and Colon in the Entre Rios province. Please forgive the untimely report of our trip.
I will start at the beginning….
Prior to our first inter-city bus trip here in Argentina, we found the bus system confusing. Why can’t we book on-line? Why isn’t there a comprehensive schedule of all departures and arrivals available on-line? Why do we have to go to the bus station (E GADS! THE BUS STATION!) to buy the tickets in advance? Coming from a one-click culture, we found all this to be so….old-fashioned.
With images of horrendously scary U.S. bus stations in mind, I sent Greg off to go find the answers. I may be a liberated wife, but I’m not stupid.
Greg came back with a wealth of information, lingering confusion, more questions and thankfully no communicable diseases. But, most importantly, he also came back with tickets. Allegedly we were set to sail (so to speak) in two days. I considered Greg’s excursion my first success.
We returned to the bus station two days later (Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2006) to start our trip.
The path to the train station isn’t the most pleasant of experiences. We took the regular city bus from our house to the train station. From there we had to walk through a scene of veritable chaos. Generally speaking, Buenos Aires does not resemble the stereotypical city we elitist Americans often associate with South America. For example, there are no chicken buses, no colorfully clad indigenous people, no military dictators clad in tri-color sashes (well, not anymore).
But here, en route to the bus station, we finally felt like we were in South America. With people hawking wares on the street, meat cooking on open grilles, dogs running amuck, standing water with really yucky looking stuff in it, you get the picture.
When we finally arrived at the Bus Station I was pleasantly surprised. Although it was confusing for us neophytes, I have to admit it was rather civilized. It was clean (relatively speaking), orderly and, most importantly, air conditioned.
The confusing part of the bus system is that there is no central ticket agency or bus company. Instead there are individual companies serving individual routes with their own individual booths. I repeat: there is no central information desk or schedule. In theory, one would have to hop from booth to booth to get information on all departures.
To put this into scale for you, there were over 200 different booths to choose from. Imagine Greg’s confusion two days earlier when he had to ascertain which of the 200 different lines served our route (about 10) and then had to make an informed (?) decision as to which to choose. After playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with himself, he chose Flechabus.
However, I digress. Once we arrived at the bus station, we didn’t need to visit the sales booths again. We needed only to find the port (or gate or door, whatever you want to call it) from which our bus was leaving.
This part was interesting. There were at least 75 ports, but Flechabus told Greg at the time of purchase that our port would be between Number 38 and Number 54. That doesn’t sound so confusing, but we were making two important assumptions. Number 1: the Flechabus employee relayed the correct information to Greg (and wasn’t having fun at our expense). Number 2: Greg understood her correctly, in Spanish.
We relied on our faith in a) the system and b) Greg’s language skills and headed over to the general area of Ports 38 to 54. There we waited for our bus number to appear on the marquis (it was like a marquis in a train station that lists trains by destination and departure time). Being confused foreigners, we arrived WAY too early—approximately one hour before departure—and sat nervously staring at the board waiting for our bus number to appear.
We waited for quite a long time.
As it turns out, the port numbers aren’t assigned until the bus physically arrives in the station, so we had at least an hour to sit and twiddle our thumbs. Plus, our bus was late. There was nothing to indicate the bus would be/was late. Apparently it was just assumed when the port assignment information failed to appear on the marquis 5 minutes before the scheduled departure. No one but us seemed concerned about this. Of course I was convinced that we had somehow missed the announcement for our bus and sent Greg (again, I’m liberated but not stupid) to go ask people where our bus was. Again, no one but us seemed to find anything noteworthy about a bus being late.
At last our bus arrived and we boarded.
Once got underway, I started to relax. Things were looking up. Our bus had assigned seats that comfortably reclined kind of like a Barca lounger. Our second-story seats gave us a great view of the city on our way out of town. We even had in-flight snack service.
Things were rolling along smoothly until the bus pulled over to the side of the road about an hour outside of Buenos Aires. We were told that the bus was broken and that we would have to board another bus that had just pulled up behind us.
Unsure whether we were simply the victims of poor bus maintenance or whether something more nefarious was in store for us, we boarded the back-up bus and hoped for the best.
To be continued….
I will start at the beginning….
Prior to our first inter-city bus trip here in Argentina, we found the bus system confusing. Why can’t we book on-line? Why isn’t there a comprehensive schedule of all departures and arrivals available on-line? Why do we have to go to the bus station (E GADS! THE BUS STATION!) to buy the tickets in advance? Coming from a one-click culture, we found all this to be so….old-fashioned.
With images of horrendously scary U.S. bus stations in mind, I sent Greg off to go find the answers. I may be a liberated wife, but I’m not stupid.
Greg came back with a wealth of information, lingering confusion, more questions and thankfully no communicable diseases. But, most importantly, he also came back with tickets. Allegedly we were set to sail (so to speak) in two days. I considered Greg’s excursion my first success.
We returned to the bus station two days later (Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2006) to start our trip.
The path to the train station isn’t the most pleasant of experiences. We took the regular city bus from our house to the train station. From there we had to walk through a scene of veritable chaos. Generally speaking, Buenos Aires does not resemble the stereotypical city we elitist Americans often associate with South America. For example, there are no chicken buses, no colorfully clad indigenous people, no military dictators clad in tri-color sashes (well, not anymore).
But here, en route to the bus station, we finally felt like we were in South America. With people hawking wares on the street, meat cooking on open grilles, dogs running amuck, standing water with really yucky looking stuff in it, you get the picture.
When we finally arrived at the Bus Station I was pleasantly surprised. Although it was confusing for us neophytes, I have to admit it was rather civilized. It was clean (relatively speaking), orderly and, most importantly, air conditioned.
The confusing part of the bus system is that there is no central ticket agency or bus company. Instead there are individual companies serving individual routes with their own individual booths. I repeat: there is no central information desk or schedule. In theory, one would have to hop from booth to booth to get information on all departures.
To put this into scale for you, there were over 200 different booths to choose from. Imagine Greg’s confusion two days earlier when he had to ascertain which of the 200 different lines served our route (about 10) and then had to make an informed (?) decision as to which to choose. After playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with himself, he chose Flechabus.
However, I digress. Once we arrived at the bus station, we didn’t need to visit the sales booths again. We needed only to find the port (or gate or door, whatever you want to call it) from which our bus was leaving.
This part was interesting. There were at least 75 ports, but Flechabus told Greg at the time of purchase that our port would be between Number 38 and Number 54. That doesn’t sound so confusing, but we were making two important assumptions. Number 1: the Flechabus employee relayed the correct information to Greg (and wasn’t having fun at our expense). Number 2: Greg understood her correctly, in Spanish.
We relied on our faith in a) the system and b) Greg’s language skills and headed over to the general area of Ports 38 to 54. There we waited for our bus number to appear on the marquis (it was like a marquis in a train station that lists trains by destination and departure time). Being confused foreigners, we arrived WAY too early—approximately one hour before departure—and sat nervously staring at the board waiting for our bus number to appear.
We waited for quite a long time.
As it turns out, the port numbers aren’t assigned until the bus physically arrives in the station, so we had at least an hour to sit and twiddle our thumbs. Plus, our bus was late. There was nothing to indicate the bus would be/was late. Apparently it was just assumed when the port assignment information failed to appear on the marquis 5 minutes before the scheduled departure. No one but us seemed concerned about this. Of course I was convinced that we had somehow missed the announcement for our bus and sent Greg (again, I’m liberated but not stupid) to go ask people where our bus was. Again, no one but us seemed to find anything noteworthy about a bus being late.
At last our bus arrived and we boarded.
Once got underway, I started to relax. Things were looking up. Our bus had assigned seats that comfortably reclined kind of like a Barca lounger. Our second-story seats gave us a great view of the city on our way out of town. We even had in-flight snack service.
Things were rolling along smoothly until the bus pulled over to the side of the road about an hour outside of Buenos Aires. We were told that the bus was broken and that we would have to board another bus that had just pulled up behind us.
Unsure whether we were simply the victims of poor bus maintenance or whether something more nefarious was in store for us, we boarded the back-up bus and hoped for the best.
To be continued….
posted by genevieve dara sapir at 7:29 PM
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