The main bus terminal in Buenos Aires is no better or worse than most. No one ever thinks to put “bus station” and “luxury” within a mile of each other.
But some buses leaving Argentina’s capital are another story.
If you’re traveling on a budget from B.A. to Mendoza, it’s hard to beat the “executive buses” common throughout Latin America but that have strangely failed to surface stateside.
For about $41 per person one way during a winter holiday weekend, my girlfriend and I found an overnight bus that provided more-than-adequate accommodations for the 12-hour ride west – a double-wide seat that folds out into a fully horizontal position, two meals, an English screening of a recently released-on-DVD movie and, nice touch, champagne.
The food was predictably mediocre, but it was way easier to sleep on the bus than sitting in coach on the flight south from the States.
That experience was just one of the surprises, pleasant and otherwise, to be found traveling to and from Mendoza.
We also learned there’s a major difference between the best national bus lines and the regional ones.
At first confused why a ticket clerk would guesstimate that a trip from Mendoza to Puente del Inca would take between three and four hours, we better understood after the bus made repeated stops for schoolchildren and workers who have no other way of traversing the region.
That trip ended up taking closer to five hours and left us resolving to learn how to drive a stick shift so we could rent a car on our return for a trip that should take about two hours. It’s worth ponying up a few more dollars for a tour.
All of that bus riding left us eager to research airfares back to Buenos Aires. A 90-minute flight for about $50 that turned up on Aerolineas Argentinas’ website seemed too good to be true. It was.
Only after purchasing the tickets did we learn the local airlines charge a lower fare for citizens and full-time foreign residents and about twice that for tourists. A small, easily missed pop-up warned that tickets bought outside Argentina have different rates, but we bought our ticket in Mendoza. They are very rigid about this – beware of any local travel agent who says he has a way around the problem.
We ultimately decided $106 one-way per person was still pretty reasonable for a last-minute fare, less so after a three-hour delay and legroom that only grade-
schoolers could deal with. The silver lining – even though it was well past midnight and we were the last passengers out of Buenos Aires’ convenient domestic airport, Aeroparque Jorge Newberry: The bars there were hours from shutting down.
It’s possible to fly from Mendoza to not only Buenos Aires but also Cordoba, home to Argentina’s largest university, and Santiago, Chile. But with Santiago just 164 miles away and so much beautiful mountain scenery along the way, the bus ride should be relatively painless as long as the weather cooperates.
The best way to fly repeatedly around Argentina, a deceptively large country with interesting spots in all corners, is to buy a ticket similar to the train passes available in Europe.
There is one available for Argentina alone, though it requires a flight on the national airline from the States, as well as the Mercosur Airpass for travel between Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. These passes come with their own bits of red tape, so it’s best to check with a travel agent before leaving the United States.
– Adam Thompson
