We took a bus from Esquel to Villa La Angostura on Thursday morning. The lakes district here in Argentina is beautiful and taking our breath away! The scenery from Esquel to Bariloche to Villa La Angostura was just gorgeous. Bright blue clear lakes, green pine trees and snow capped mountains. Gorgeous!!
We’ve decided that taking the bus (even with the occasional long journey) is well worth it. You really feel like you’ve gotten to see the countryside and haven’t missed anything. South of Argentina the countryside was very baron and dessert like…. but this part of the countryside is gorgeous.
There is only ONE downside to taking the bus which we find incredibly frustrating!! The scammy, scummy bag handlers!!
We travelled all through Chile and the buses were very professional. There’s a driver and a conductor. The conductor looks after your baggage, loads it and gives you a ticket and makes sure you get off at the right spot. With the snowboard bag we had absolutely no issues in Chile…
Argentina however has been a little different. A plain clothes dude from the town comes along and tickets and loads your bags for the driver. This guy will ask for a tip as well. Initially this was okay, we’d give the guy the accepted standard tip of 5-10 pesos (2 or 3 dollars) and they were fine with that.
In the snow towns however the guys are onto people like us with a snowboard bag and they demand more money. This happens both loading and unloading your bag. If you don’t have enough money or what they’re asking for, they won’t touch your bag if loading, and unloading, they’ll basically hold it ransom and won’t take it off the bus.
One of the bad ones asked for 50 pesos for the board bag, and when we were alarmed at this, he grabbed the bag and started walking away with it! We both freaked and tried to grab it back but he marched on so Matt followed him in pursuit. I stayed with the other bags.
What he did was take it into the Ticket Desk and get the lady at the desk who sells the tickets to charge us 50 pesos for the bag. She gave the dude a dirty look and seemed bothered that he was wasting her time! Funny thing was he won’t get that money! He was just being nasty, so he got no tip at all.
Since then we have told the people when buying the tickets that we have the bag and they NEVER charge us… Instead, the plain clothes guys at the bus try and get money off you again! It’s been anywhere from 20 to 30 pesos. We’ve managed to negotiate with them to get it to 15-20 for all our bags but it’s so annoying because you they don’t give you an option. We’d gladly load them ourselves!! And it doesn’t always happen so you know these guys are just being greedy.
On our trip from Esquel to Villa La Angostura, we had to stop in Bariloche and take our bags off the bus, so that was 6 potential tipping stops!!! We negotiated with the first 2 guys then ran out of money. In Bariloche, the bus drivers wouldn’t open the cargo to get our luggage because they were waiting for one of these dudes to come over and no one was coming. In the end a passenger opened the cargo door himself so the bus drivers ended up doing their job and giving us our luggage… guess what? No tip required!! It’s like the bus drivers actually like these guys doing their job because they’re too lazy to do it themselves.
At the last stop of Villa La Angostura, we had NO money left. The guy here took all the luggage off the bus and put it on the ground which they don’t normally do so we thought we wouldn’t have a problem. We pointed to our luggage and showed our tickets… he put them on the ground… so we (as smoothly as possible) grabbed the handles, and tried to slip away as he was grabbing more luggage off the bus… As we walked we heard yelling… I figured it was at us… Matt snuck a brief glance and sure enough he was almost chasing us and yelling! I said, “keep walking!” and we continued playing “I don’t know what you’re on about” and got away with our luggage!!!!!
So yea… that part of the bus trips can get a little confronting. We’re not big fans of people holding our luggage ransom… We’ve got no problem tipping a guy for doing something for you, but at the end of the day, we want to be given an option to TAKE the SERVICE, or NOT TAKE the service… hahaha
We debriefed later that night over a yummy dinner and a beer!! We came up with 50 different ways to approach it and be big and tough for our next encounter in Bariloche… We’ll probably just end up trying the grab and run again! haha!
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