Posts Tagged ‘bus’

Stop.. So We Can Rob You

The title says it all.  For what it’s worth, the land route from Bangkok to Siem Reap (the home of Angkor Wat and other cambodian temple complexes) is one of the most unabashedly corrupt places on earth (as far as we’ve seen.) It is so corrupt that an entire web site (it took Hazel and I about 2 hours to read the whole thing) has come into existence with the sole goal of guiding helpless travellers through the gauntlet they will experience taking this trip.

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Our plan, once we took the bus and catamaran back to Bangkok, was to fly up to Hanoi and begin our exploration of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  But a number of factors made us change our plans.  First, I got sick right when we arrived, and we agreed that we shouldn’t leave the city till I got better.  Nothing like having a case of food poisoning on a cramped plane!

The other thing was the typhoon looming over Vietnam.  It had just hit the Phillippines, causing widespread damage, and was predicted to make landfall just east of Hanoi.  We thought long and hard – should we cancel our flight?  Knowing the airlines, it would be a big hassle, and we’d end up a lot poorer and without any set plans.  Eventually we decided that yes, we don’t really want to fly into a hurricane, so we called Orbitz and asked to cancel.

Much to our delight, the carrier we’d booked with (Qatar Airways) allows cancellation for no fee!  That’s right, we got off scot free, paying only the Orbitz booking fee in the end.  This allowed us to give me a nice recovery break.  Eventually, we decided to take the land route over to Siem Reap, Cambodia where we’d get to see one of the amazing sights in South East Asia – Angkor Wat!  Another bonus came from delaying our trip to Vietnam: I got to experience my first coffee to go served in a plastic bag.  Interesting.

Brew In A Bag

After the end of our tour we pretty much just crashed out at the Ritz backpackers. We ordered take out Indian food, did laundry, and slept basically as long as possible. But our rest was not super long because we had booked a shuttle – the only one we could find – to Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland.

The shuttle (website link) was all-in-all a good experience, but it was a lot of hassle trying to get the reservation. We were wary of all the transport options between Johannesburg and Swaziland; the bus station in Joburg is said to be really dangerous, there were no trains as far as we could tell, and no coaches would go past the border. We had heard that Baz Bus, a popular backpacker’s bus, used to go there but alas it had been removed from the route selection. So we were pretty stuck until I found another option – TransMagnific minivan service. This was a company with a 15-seater van that had daily departures, a reasonable website and online bookings, but I couldn’t find any recommendations or reviews online. Needless to say, we were reluctant to pay $70 USD a piece ahead of time for a company that didn’t exist. When it became clear that they were the only option, we gave in and booked online.

Then the difficulties began because they wanted a prepayment to their Swazi bank account. We booked the day before our Acacia safari, and were unable to get to a bank before we left. There were a few banks along the course of our safari that looked as though we could use them, but since apparently banking hours are 9:30 to 3:30 with a lunchbreak in the middle we didn’t manage to get to any bank until Maun, just before we left for the Okovango Delta. That was when the big kicker came: you can’t transfer money to a Swazi account from Botswana unless you have an account! We got agitated at this because we would be unable to pay until maybe the day before our journey.

Fortunately TransMagnific came through – they let us just pay the driver after the trip! We were really happy that we could keep our seats for the van (which turned out to be completely full) and showed up the day of with our luggage.

Besides our payment issues, we had no trouble at all with the service! We had a smooth, comfortable ride with complementary snacks. I think our request for no mayonnaise on our sandwiches caused them to omit the sandwiches completely, but we were prepared with our own food anyway. I can highly recommend this shuttle service. The only caveat is that our van got in to Mbabane more than 1.5 hours later than the website stated, and we didn’t run into any traffic. So our generous hosts in Swaziland ended up waiting at a gas station for a really long time! We made it to Mbabane after dark, a little tired, but happy to be there!

We weren’t able to get a seat on the overnight train from Sofia to Istanbul, so we decided to try the overnight bus. We had read on the internet that many people prefer the bus anyway, and the bus we went for (Metro) was supposed to be pretty nice. Turns out we had been completely spoiled as far as buses go by the deluxe buses in South America. The timing of the trip also turned out to be pretty awful.

We left Sofia at something like 11:45 pm, and tried to get some sleep. Around 1:30 am we pulled into the border between Bulgaria and Turkey. About two hours later we finished all the border business and were able to get back on the bus. We fought to get back to sleep, but had a pretty restless trip and arrived in Istanbul shortly after sunrise at 6:30 am. Of course, this was way too early to check into our hostel and we were exhausted from a very disturbed night and had a pretty daunting task ahead of us in navigating a new, huge, chaotic city to navigate.

We were saved by a very kind local who had been on the bus with us. He saw that we were looking a bit lost and not only explained how to get where we were going, but walked us to the correct tram, and insisted on buying our ticket so that we didn’t have to use the bus station ATM. This immediately put us in a state of mind to love Istanbul, and we were not at all disappointed. We made it to our hostel after a fairly long, but very scenic tram ride and a short walk, dropped off our bags and headed back out into the city for a few hours until it was late enough to check in.

Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with the bus (except that the entertainment system they advertised didn’t work), but it was nothing like the overnight buses we got used to in South America. Those have big, comfortable seats, movies, snacks, and a fairly quiet, undisturbed night. In fact, those you can count as a night saved on accommodation. This experience was much more like staying up all night traveling, but missing all of the scenery.

All I can say is that the bacon I had at our pricey breakfast near the Blue Mosque while we were hanging out waiting to check in to the hostel was one of the best things I have ever tasted.

Istanbul in the early morning

Everything we’d heard about Slovenia told us that we should not just stick to Ljubljana – we needed to get out to the countryside. So, on the recommendation of a fellow hosteler, we set our sights on the small country town of Bohinj, a 2 hour bus ride from the capital.  The direction we headed (NNW for the crossword puzzle geeks out there) took us into the Julian Alps section of Slovenia, a mountainous paradise with lakes and hiking and everything you could want!

Bled Lake and Castle

In fact, on the way to Bohinj we passed another retreat town well-known to Slovenians called Bled.  There is a rather large lake with a super castle perched on a rocky overlook on the lake.  Unfortunately we had to pick one or the other but we will leave Bled to another trip.  It appeared much more built-up and touristy than our final destination: Bohinj!

The View from our Hotel

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Herräng Sign

Each summer, the tiny town of Herräng becomes the swing dancing capital of the world. Hazel and I had both wanted to attend the camp for several years before but actually getting to Sweden for weeks on end in the summer was always too difficult. This year, we made sure to go by setting up our Europe itinerary such that we’d end up there at the right time! (more…)

I haven’t been looking forward to writing this post.  To be honest, we hit a pretty low point in our trip and it threw both of us for pretty ugly loops.  I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think there are some traveling lessons to be learned, and we’ve had to adjust recently.  We got very accustomed to being able to plan a day or two ahead of time and just show up places and have things work out.  This is not the way that Europe works.  Especially in the summer.  Especially if you’re trying to save money.

We discovered this in a dramatic fashion.  The night before we left London I booked us a bus from London to Paris (which is really kind of cool – they put the bus on a train and take the train through the chunnel!) and then started trying to look for a place to stay.  It was late and we may have had a drink or two with our friends and we just wanted to go to sleep since we had to get up early for our bus.  But we couldn’t find a single hotel or hostel online in Paris for the next night for less than 200 Euros.  Total panic ensued.  And we still didn’t have a place to stay when we left the next morning.  We also didn’t have our bus ticket printed, but that was easily solved with an internet cafe across the street from London Victoria Coach Station.

By the time we got to Paris in the evening we were worried, tired, stressed out and figured we had two choices.  We could jump right into our Eurail pass and take a train to somewhere smaller where we thought we could get cheaper accommodation, or we could wander the streets of Paris fairly randomly until we found a place to stay.  We flipped through the train timetable (which we have since become very well acquainted with) and picked Strasbourg since we wanted very much to go there and there was a train leaving soon and it was only a two hour trip by TGV.

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We couldn’t wait to get back on the road to see Barcelona.  We had heard that it was a really cool, funky city – but we were even more excited to see John & Cynthia who decided to meet up with us there and tour the city!  It was unfortunately not fated to be as easy as it sounds.  After our wonderful date at El Buey, we went right back to the dorm and crashed; we woke up in the morning and realized that we still had one more night left in Madrid before our bus left for Barcelona.  No worries, I said, and went down to the desk to ask for another night at our hostel.  They were full!  It was quite a surprise to me since not a single room we’d been in there had ever been full and now they tell us there is not even one more bed for us to take the next night.  And we had to check out in an hour!  So I ran back up to the dorm, awakened Hazel, and started looking for another place to stay.  I wanted a private room to ensure we got some good rest before going out on the town in Barcelona, and booked it at a nearby hostel.

So we got on the Metro, made it to our proper stop, and began walking looking for the street.  Did I mention that streets change names nearly every block in some parts of Madrid?  We ended up taking a wide circle around the hotel, with all our worldly possessions on our back.  It was frustrating!  We were both afraid for our personal security, since we looked like (er, were) lost foreign tourists with all their worldly possessions on their backs.

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So Hazel and I have been up to some serious tourism in the most recent months and we decided that we needed some time to relax.  What better place in the world to lounge around than Brazil?

The Beach

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Once again I find myself trying to catch up with the blog.  We’re more than making up for taking it easy at the end of our time in Chile by racing around Peru like crazy.  We’ve had pretty much zero internet access, so I’ll at least make a start at getting caught up.

We flew from Santiago to Lima and had a nice smooth flight.  Honestly, we were a bit more apprehensive about Peru than the countries we have already been to since we have heard more stories about muggings, dangerous bus rides, etc.  So far though, it has been really great!  We had the hostel we were staying at send a good taxi to pick us up from the airport and were fairly glad we did since the airport is not in the best part of town.

The hostel we stayed at, Link Hostel, was great – helpful with recommendations, advice, booking help, pretty much everything.  It is in the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima which is a nice area with lots of restaurants and cafes and handicraft stores.  It’s also close to the beach.

Miraflores Area

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