From memory, it takes about 22 hours and, if you travel economy class, there isn't much room to move around. There is always the chance to stretch your legs during the couple of hours stopover in Bangkok or Singapore but other than that the only thing between you and a potential case of deep vein thrombosis is the occasional trip to the bathroom.
Now everyone's got that image in their mind let me tell you about my 57 hour bus trip from La Paz to Buenos Aires.
Bolivia is stunning. The series of photos below were all taken out the window of the bus and don't really do the landscape justice. The only visual experience I can compare it to is Tuscany where every hilltop brings a new Kodak moment. In Bolivia, every death defying turn on the one lane dirt road similarly provides a new photo opportunity, which is especially amazing given how high and dry most of the country is.
Special note: The above photo is Tupiza where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their end after robbing a payroll coach in Huaca Huañusca, which we also passed through.
As my extended stay in the US to get the visa cut a week out of my South American travelling time, unfortunately I didn't get the chance to go and see the Uyuni salt flats and missed some of the best views. 16 hours after leaving La Paz, a city that is a photo opportunity in its own right, the bus reached Villazon on the Argentine border.
Buses in Bolivia (like those in Guatemala) are notorious for their poor quality and I consider myself fortunate to have reached the border without incident as we passed more than one broken down bus on the trip south, including one that had hit a fallen rock during the night and appeared to have broken an axle.
During this bus ride there was no bathroom, however there was one bathroom stop, in a town with a pair of squalid toilets (amazingly, western style rather than squat) where each patron was handed a wad of paper before entering, in which you "locked" the door by pushing a rock against it, and the toilet was "flushed" by retrieving a bucket full of water from the 44 gallon drum outside the toilets and pouring it into the bowl. Hand washing was accomplished under a dribbling tap feeding the aforementioned drum.
Border crossings haven't always been the smoothest part of my travel, and I can report that my experience at the Bolivian-Argentine border was no exception. Suspiciously on arrival at the travel company office, the Argentinian passport holders were shuffled immediately to the border crossing, while myself and two German backpackers were advised to go have lunch and we would cross in good time.
Three hours, and a strange lunch consisting of chicken, rice, spaghetti AND french fries (this wasn't my poor ordering skills, the restaurant had only this one dish which they served to all patrons), rather than the 7pm onward bus I was expecting, I was instead presented with a 12:05am ticket for departure. Apparently there were no seats on any of the earlier buses, possibly on account of them being given to the "frequent flyer"Argentinians.
So over the border I went, passing through both Bolivian and Argentinian migration which was nicely incident free, to collect my boarding pass (for whatever reason, the travel agency can't deliver actual bus tickets, only vouchers) only to discover that there was no 12:05 service, there were no seats on any of the direct buses that did exist, and my only option was to accept an 11pm Collectivo (mini bus) with two or three bus changes during the next 24 hours to get to Buenos Aires and no ETA.
Now this may have breached the migration laws of two countries, but I'm pretty sick of this happening and I'm now confident enough in my broken Spanish to explain the problem and ask for a nwe ticket. So I marched back across the border into Bolivia, ignoring those little details like passport control leaving my luggage with the Germans. I went back into the tour company office and asked for a new ticket... and got one, albeit with a 3am change of bus at General Guemes. Feeling good, I then marched straight back across the border again, once again ignoring migration offices on both sides. And as a bonus, no-one shot or arrested me.
The connecting bus from General Guemes to Buenos Aires was a bit of a mystery, and my new connection ticket (printed in a hurry) had a couple of anomalies, like being for 20/02 at 8:10am rather than 18/02 at 03:00am which had been hand-marked over the top. Not exactly filling me with confidence that I wasn't going to be spending a cold night in the bus terminal.
So, was I going to be jumping straight on another bus to Buenos Aires at 3am or getting dumped by the side of the road until I could convince some bus conductor to accept my dodgy ticket?
Yep, at 3:45am the bus terminates at Salta (about an hour short of General Guemes) and the bus conductor rather unhelpfully points out that the person who issued the original ticket obviously made a mistake as (a) it isn't possible to get to General Guemes on the Salta bus and (b) there is no 3am connection to Buenos Aires from either Salta or General Guemes in any case. Thanks.
So its 4am and I'm stuck spending the rest of the night in a cold bus terminal waiting for the ticket office to open to see whether, when and how I can get to Buenos Aires on Monday which is still 20 odd hours away. And at this point I've already been travelling for 31 hours.
Actually, it didn't end up being that bad. The ticket office opened at 5am, there was a bus to Guemes at 5:30am and a connecting bus to Buenos Aires at 8:10am, and there was one remaining free seat on the Buenos Aires bus. Apart from the final bus being about 30 minutes late, the rest of the trip was incident free and I arrived in Buenos Aires at about 6am Tuesday morning, having left La Paz at 7pm on Saturday.
Well, now I've shared all that, do I think there is a moral to this story? Don't give up? No. Don't take No for an answer? No. Don't pay any attention to border control? In hindsight, I probably won't be doing that again and don't recommend anyone else try it either. No, the moral of the story is when faced with a $350 airfare or a $100 bus ride that takes two days longer, take the flight because however nice the view of the country side, it isn't worth the pain of three nights on a bus, lazy travel agents and four bus changes.
Oh, and don't ever whinge about how long it takes to fly to London.
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