Riding the Buque Bus to Uruguay

Uruguay means river of painted birds – referring to its over 475 species of birds and many rivers, including the widest one in the world Rio de la Plata.

And, if you’re visiting Buenos Aires you’ll find lots of day trips to this same river which borders Argentina and Uruguay. On our itinerary, we needed to get from Buenos Aires to Montevideo. The easiest (and cheapest) way to make the journey is via the Buque Bus – a ferry that runs many trips daily to and fro.

Disclaimer: I didn’t take but a few photos while on the Buquebus on my iphone, so apologies for the poor quality here.

We had concern before arriving to the bus terminal, having been in some pretty crap bus terminals during other South American trips. This one was pleasantly new and nice. Note this review is based on our transit without a car. If you have a car, you can drive onto the ferry and off into Uruguay. We watched some luxury cars de-board in Uruguay, envious knowing we had a Chevy rental in our future!

Buy your tickets in advance, and arrive one hour early. No need to buy the more expensive first class tickets, there’s nothing fancy about them and we didn’t see they had any advantages like getting bags early.

We checked two massive 27” rollers. There is no weight limit for luggage, since it’s not a plane they don’t need to worry about that as much. The lines moved fast for us and you’ll go through a checkpoint with your carry-ons just as you would to get on a plane.

After checking in there is a shared lounge area for all gates. Once you see people start to line up for your ferry, go ahead and get in line so you can have a bigger selection of where to sit. However, note that it doesn’t matter a bit where you sit. The entire ferry has clouded out windows so you can’t see outside, or get outside.

Upon entry, you’ll be asked to put the cover footies on, just like an open house. It was strange but I suppose helps with clean up.

Inside you’ll find a kids play area, televisions shared between the seats, and duty-free shopping. The seats are comfy and we both passed out hard – slept the entire ride and woke up in a new country!

Upon arrival to your destination, you can be the first one off but that doesn’t mean you’ll get your baggage first, so you might need to wait. Right outside the arrivals there are lots of cabs lined up. We hopped in one that took us to our rental car pick-up (Hertz).

We regretted not renting a car from a place that was on-site at the ferry, so check those out and have a smooth ride!