Moving on to Cordoba
Cordoba, Argentina, South America
I spent all day on a bus today, and unfortunately, it wasn’t a very nice ride. The day started out with me having to pound on Ruben’s door to wake him up so I could check out and get a taxi. I was only about 6km (4 miles) from the bus terminal, but it took 45 minutes to get there due to the traffic. That was annoying. I got to the station to find out that this is the most confusing bus terminal I would come across in South America, so far anyway. I bought a ticket on Andesmar.com, but apparently that doesn’t mean that my bus company is Andesmar, it’s Chevalier. This took me about ten minutes to find out, so then I was looking for the bus stand for Chevalier. It turns out there are 15 possible spots they can park in, so that’s awesome.
All the bus arrivals and departures show up on the monitors, but you have to be standing in the right area. to see those bus stands only. There’s no central monitor, like there is at every other station in the world! So I found the area I was meant to stand in, and my bus wasn’t on the departure monitor. I asked a few people and they had no idea, so I just waited. Fifteen minutes after my bus was supposed to depart, I decided to go to the Chevalier desk upstairs and find out what was going on. Luckily the guy at the desk spoke english and told me it would be another 15 minutes. I felt a lot better to know that I hadn’t missed my bus, because I was sure that’s what had happened.
He was wrong about it being another 15 minutes, it was only five more minutes, but I was very happy to see my bus pull in. I got in, got comfy, and then sat back hoping to see some nice scenery on the way to Cordoba. I did not. There was no nice scenery on the way. It’s not a nice looking ride at all unfortunately. At one point we stopped in a random town for about 15 minutes and then had to switch busses, but no one on the bus knew because the driver just got in the other bus and sat there. Finally we figured out what was going on, so we got on the other bus. I wonder how long that driver would have just sat there for.
We got into Cordoba at about 9pm, and I had just a four block walk to Residencial Brio. It’s one of the dirtiest, dingiest hostels I’ve stayed at in a while. I was absolutely starving, but I had no cash at all, and it is like an eight block walk to the closest ATM. I’ve decided to just stay in, get some sleep and I’ll have a decent breakfast in the morning. Plus, this hostel doesn’t seem to be in the nicest neighborhood, so the less time I spend walking around at night on my own, the better.