Early Morn­ing Arriv­ing In Bahía Blanca

Get­ting to Patag­o­nia was easy enough — duh, we flew from San­ti­ago. Now, get­ting out of Patag­o­nia is a whole dif­fer­ent story. It took us a week in total.

We were stuck in Ushuaia where we had to wait for the first bus of the week. From there, we crossed to Chile, stop­ping another night in Punta Are­nas, and two nights in Puerto Natales, to visit the Tor­res Del Paine national park. We were still down under, at the bot­tom of the world. Out of Tierra Del Fuego though. We crossed again to Argentina, leav­ing Chile for good. A six hours ride to El Calafate, North.

From El Calafate, we bused to Comodoro Riva­davia, a city on the Atlantic Coast, a 15 hours overnight jour­ney. Slept in Comodoro, left again the fol­low­ing day for Bahía Blanca — another 15 hours overnight bus. Another 10 hours and we made it to Buenos Aires, Argentina´s cap­i­tal. Phew.

In total, we bused over 3,000 kilo­me­ters from Tierra Del Fuego to Buenos Aires. It´s not as bad as it sounds: most buses are com­fort­able double-deckers. Yet, it´s a long long ride.

The bus sched­ule is totally fucked up in Argentina. A lot of buses leave in the mid­dle of the night (i.e. mid­night or later), or arrive ridicu­lously early (I´m talk­ing 3:00 am or before). These are not an option for us: if we leave late at night, we have to pay a night´s accom­mo­da­tion for noth­ing (where would we wait with our back­packs?), and arriv­ing early in a new city is not great either. So we have to ask every sin­gle bus com­pany for the sched­ule and price. I think I´m almost flu­ent say­ing “¿tiene un ser­vi­cio de bus a…?”, “¿A qué hora sale el bus ya qué hora llegara?”.

Bus rides are pretty tir­ing. We try to sleep as much as we can, but between the police check points (“Señores pas­sajeros, por favor, su pas­aporte o su cedula de iden­ti­dad…”) and the many many stops, it is hard to doze off for more than a few hours. Not to men­tion that at every stop (includ­ing gas sta­tions), the dri­ver will yell “cinco min­u­tos, no más” and that we will jump on our sits and run out­side for fresh air, a smoke, bath­rooms or a snack. The break is invari­ably longer than five min­utes (after all, the dri­ver also has to pee, smoke and eat), and by the time we are back on board, we are too sleepy to be awake and too awake to be sleepy. Tough life, eh?

There are dis­trac­tions in the bus. Movies for exam­ple. On the bus to Buenos Aires, we watched six, I repeat, six Adam San­dler movies, back to back, dubbed in Span­ish. To this day, I can not watch an Adam San­dler movie with­out shiv­er­ing. I became quite addicted to Pod­casts, on the other side: my favorite are from the BBC or Amer­i­can Pub­lic Media. Or I read, when­ever I have a new book (I use book exchange in hos­tels). All in all, time goes by fast enough, once you get used to the idea of 15 hours bus rides. We do get hun­gry, some­times. If we get the chance, we stop by the super­mar­ket before we leave for basic sup­plies: water, Coke, cook­ies… But some­times, there are no super­mar­kets or we sim­ply don´t have a chance. We became quite good at not eat­ing but there are times where I would sell a mem­ber of my fam­ily for a sand­wich or a choco­late cake at 2:00 am, lost some­where on the road.

Buses are often late, delayed, ahead… It is use­less to count the hours. The bus ride from Bahía Blanca to Buenos Aires, for exam­ple, drove us crazy. The bus was at 7:00 am, another early depar­ture because we wanted to arrive early in the cap­i­tal. In fact, the bus only left at 8:30. It was an old bus, and it was dirty: I think it had been on the road for two days straight, com­ing from Río Gal­le­gos. The stereo sys­tem was right about our head, so loud and so annoy­ing… plus, I told you about the Adam San­dler movies thing. Ten hours later, we were get­ting close to Buenos Aires, way later than expected. That is when the dri­ver decided to first drop off one of the pas­sen­ger: a 45 min­utes detour. Then, he skipped the express way to stop at a sub­urb bus sta­tion. Then, about 200 buses con­verg­ing together com­peted to get to Retiro, the main bus sta­tion. I had never seen a road jammed with buses before… We were get­ting really hot and tired and just couldn´t wait to arrive. Hun­gry, too. We even­tu­ally arrived in Buenos Aires three hours later than expected… but hey, at least we made it.

I shouldn´t com­plain. We are now in Argentina´s cap­i­tal. It´s 30C, the nightlife is great and I even spot­ted things I hadn´t seen in a while: a movie the­ater, a mar­ket, cheap internet…

Yeah, I should not com­plain.

Related arti­cles:

1. Cross­ing To Uruguay
2. Argen­tinidad
3. The Food Saga: The Feast Era
4. Buenos Aires By Night
5. The Food Saga: The Sweets