We piece together Argentina’s myriad bus options to make our way from Puerto Iguazu to Cordoba.
We spent hours – really, hours – trying to decide how to get out of Puerto Iguazu. We’d only planned the first week of our trip (beach – city – waterfalls, please) and had decided to worry about the rest later. A few days ago ‘later’ had arrived. It’s pretty hard to get a route map of Argentine buses so we spent a long time typing in different destination names to see which combinations we could get. We were toying with Buenos Aires, a wetlands nature reserve near Posadas, Corrientes, Rosario, Cordoba and in the end decided that getting to Cordoba as quickly as possible was the main goal, for a few reasons: the heat in the north-east was giving us a pretty much constant headache and we needed to get somewhere cooler; even though the wetlands looked great, it would have involved a lot of faff trying to get to the actual park; and, well – we thought that Cordoba sounded nicer than Buenos Aires (later we saw on the news that BS AS, as they abbreviate it here, was in a code orange hot weather alert and there’d been an outbreak of dengue fever. No regrets, then.)
We whittled it down to two options – option 1: 5 hour bus to Posadas, 3 hour leisurely lunch in Posadas station, 5 hour bus to Paso de los Libres (which I got to by Googling where there were hotels along the route), a relaxed overnight stay, then an all-day bus the next morning to Cordoba. Option 2 – stay an extra day in tourist town Puerto Iguacu then night bus it to Cordoba, still arriving a day later than option 1. We did what we tend to when we can’t decide – eat. And of course by the time we’d come back from lunch, option 2 had been taken off the table. No more seats on the bus. Option 1 it was, so we quickly booked 3 separate buses and a hotel.
I’m writing this just a few hours from Cordoba so it feels like we’re in the final stretch now, but to summarise: it may have been more straightforward to take a camel. So, first bus was fine, and I even managed a little nap. We quickly learned that the buses don’t seem to be as nice as their Brazilian counterparts but 2 days later I think we’re over that now. We arrived in Posadas to find it not quite as relaxed as we thought it would be. There were 2 small cafes which had air conditioning, and the rest of the station seemed to be just melting into the ground. So we started with a couple of cups of coffee and an empanada in one cafe with a view to seeing how long we could eke it out. When they came over with the bill, we then decided to order a lomito which is basically a Philly cheese steak sandwich with a fried egg thrown in for good measure. I’m glad we only ordered one to share because it was about the size of a rugby ball.
Once fed we went and joined the other melting passengers and waited for our bus to arrive and then we were on our way to Paso de los Libres – a town which which we will not be going back to in a hurry. This was the sticking point of option 1. Our bus was due to arrive at 8.20pm (so, after dark) and the only non-scary looking hotel we could find was a 20-minute walk from the bus station down what looked to be not the safest streets. Our bus ended up picking up a 40-minute delay and, after having rearranged our wallets a bit to generate a handy ‘here have this, please don’t stab me’ package, we arrived at 9pm. We certainly hadn’t counted on any taxis waiting, but there were a couple. When I say ‘taxi’, I use the term loosely. It was more a bucket on wheels with no meter or anything that looked very official. We asked how much before we got in (irrelevant because I think we would have paid whatever to not have to walk down the backstreets of this town) and we were then whisked off by a potentially partially sighted taxi driver to our hotel.
Paso de los Libres is a border town with Brazil so that’s the only reason we could think of there might be hotels there. And the ‘nice’ one we picked was super overpriced. Probably had its glory days somewhen in the Seventies. We thought we were really pushing our luck that the restaurant would be open at all, let alone at 9.30pm but after dumping our bags in our room we headed back downstairs to take a look. I heard some kids squealing and splashing about in the pool outside so we followed the path, and there it was: smoke rising from an enormous outdoor brick BBQ. We hopped up the steps and suddenly felt like we were gatecrashing a pool party. The garden was packed with families cooling off between their mixed grills. The relief! We were having our first asado! Given what we could see on the BBQ, and the fact we still haven’t acclimatised to eating a whole cow at 10pm, we decided to just order one bit of meat to share. The waitress looked at us like we were mad, but when it arrived we were the smug ones again. One bit of meat is about 600g here. And it seems to come with fries whether you want them or not.
After a bad night’s sleep (paper thin walls, slamming doors etc), we were up at 6am to steal some stale croissants from the breakfast room before making the 20-minute walk (this time in daylight thankfully) back to the bus station where we we sitting pretty thinking we had this 3-part camel ride in the bag. At about 7am I asked Kim, ‘hey, what’s this extra word at the end of the station name?’ Kim also hadn’t spotted this (as far as we were concerned we’d just booked a ticket in and out of Paso de los Libres). We quickly Googled and it didn’t show up anything. There was also nobody from the Flechabus company at the station to ask. At 7.20am a bus pulled in and we cheerily went up to the bus driver, ‘Cordoba?’ He gave us a blank face, said no and that the Cordoba bus doesn’t go from here. Reading the very small print at the bottom of the ticket revealed that in this tinpot town there is both the main (tiny) bus station, plus a pick-up point about 1km away.
Well we were done then, stuck in Paso de los Libres for the rest of our days. Or at least until the afternoon when another bus (going not where we wanted it to) would pass through. We quickly regrouped and thought that we could get to Concordia, or Rosario, or even BS AS. Even degue fever would be better than Paso… The bus driver, seeing us flapping about, came back and we took the gist of what he said to be: still go to the pick-up point because I don’t think it’s come through yet. So off we hopped in another bucket on wheels to the pick-up point. There we asked the taxi driver, who pointed a bit, then we asked a guy hanging out by the road. He pointed a bit more, then we asked a couple in their car who told us to ask at the customs office, where a lady told us to ask in the Flechabus office. Forgive us for missing the cupboard that they called an office. We headed in there to be told – to our relief – that the bus hadn’t yet arrived, and that there were others waiting. So we found the others waiting – a couple about our age – and confirmed again that they were also waiting to go to Cordoba. They were off to a rock festival for the weekend. Kim made the international symbol of rock, and – despite arriving an hour late for our bus – we let our a huge sigh of relief. Until….it became 2 hours later, then 3. This bus was 3 hours late. We had been on the verge of buying a new ticket and completely wrecking our coming days because we’d made the perhaps classic European assumption that it could not be possible for a bus to be 1 hour late. They’d apparently been some problem on the Brazilian side – we still aren’t sure if was a problem with the bus or a problem at the border, but finally it arrived and we were so very happy to be sitting in a cool, comfortable seat. Everyone else, though, was toma-ing a matte. No rush then. When we pulled off we thought – great, this is finally it. Until we pulled into the Flechabus garage and waited a bit more time there. So in the end we set off 4 hours later than scheduled. But the most bizarre part of it all is that it looks like we’ll still make it into Cordoba not too far of our scheduled arrival time of 9pm. Loco.
Disclaimer – there are no photos of the last 2 days for perhaps understandable reasons. The main image is what I’ve been staring at for the last 6 hours. Countryside? Just fields and trees for 6 hours straight – no people or buildings or anything else. This country is big.