Bus travel from Buenos Aires
 

My husband and I will be traveling from BA to San Martin De Los Andes in late March, 2009. We will be arriving in BA on January 2 and were thinking we could make arrangements then. We have read about bus travel and how nice it is. Seems like this would be a good way to see some of the country and its people. Are tickets hard to get? Has anyone used buses for travel?

Hi
I haven't taken any of the bus trips here yet, don't know if I will, but here is a good bit of information for you from someone who wrote of his experiences on TripAdvisor.
Hope this helps..
http://tinyurl.com/5futxs

My husband and I made two bus trips last month with Andesmar Bus Company. One day trip from Santiago to Mendoza and an overnight trip from Mendoza to Buenos Aires. In both cases, the Andesmar buses were very nice with comfortable seating. I was not crazy about the toilets, but they functioned. Overall, we were very satisfied with this bus company.

The overnight bus was quite an experience. I highly recommend the first class bus with the fully reclining seats. You can actually lay down, and they supply a pillow and blanket, too. The only downside is the road noise and the lights of the oncoming traffic (although curtains blocked out most of the headlights). We did manage to get some sleep -- which is better than we do on most overnight planes.

The steward on our overnight bus spoke very little English, but he was very kind to us and always made sure that we understood what was going on. Both dinner and breakfast were included. Dinner was similar to airplane food and breakfast was mostly sweet snacks. We even got champagne served in plastic flutes at bedtime!

We bought our tickets online via their website: www.andesmar.com The site is easy to use and provides tickets that you can print on any printer. One thing to be aware of is that tickets do not go on sale until 30 days before departure. We booked soon after the 30 day point and had a big selection to choose from.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

Spent the last 3 weeks traveling in Argentina and have these comments on buses:

1. Did roundtrip on bus from BsAs to Cordoba.
2. To minimize stress, make sure to take the cama or cama suite bus. Some of these will be overnight and include food service, movies, and full reclining seats.
3. Big problem: how to buy the tickets you need. There are two or three options- if you fluent in castillano, go to the bus station or visit the web sites and buy your ticket that way. Another option is use a travel agent. The option we used on our trip out to Cordoba was a great web site in English run by a gentleman in BsAs who will take your request and find the best bus for you. Here is the web site: http://www.omnilineas.com/ He will book the tickets, and you pick them up in Buenos Aires at his office downtown. There is a small service fee attached.

Now here is one more learning. If you take a day bus, as we did from Cordoba back to BsAs, be sure you check around to find the EXPRESS bus. We got on the milk run and visited every small town on the way, which took about 11 hours, instead of the 8 hour night trip we took on the way out in cama suite class. The milk run bus was inexpensive, but there is no food served and seats don't fully recline. You do get two 20 minute stops in small town bus stations to buy refreshments. Also, if you sit in front on the top level you get to watch all the dynamics of passing vehicles and close calls (our bus ran one car off the highway when we passed two trucks and couldn't get back over fast enough). The car survived, and we had quite an experience watching the world go by.

Here's an online bus ticket booking site you should check out - it'll save you an extra trip to Retiro. The url is http://www.plataforma10.com/.

Just enter your destination/origin cities and date of travel, and you'll get a list of the different services/companies to select from. For a comfortable ride, always choose cama total or cama ejecutivo. Semi-cama is super uncomfortable.

I've bought tickets online before with them, with my CC, and haven't had any problems.