I’ve spent more nights folded into a bus seat than in actual beds. Not exaggerating. Nine years of travelling cheap has put something like 40,000 kilometres under me on overnight buses across Southeast Asia, South America, the Balkans, West Africa. Some rides cost less than a hostel dorm. Every one taught me how to arrive at the other end without wanting to quit travelling altogether.
Long bus rides are the tax you pay for cheap travel. Pay it badly and you lose a day to misery. Pay it well and you barely notice it happened. There’s a skill here, and nobody teaches it. Here’s everything I’ve learned, mostly by getting it wrong first.
Why This Matters
Buses are how you actually see a country. Flights erase the distance between places, which is convenient and also the whole problem. Take a bus from Medellín to Bogotá, or Hanoi to Huế, and you watch the landscape change. Rice paddies give way to coffee farms. Roads stop being paved. People get off and disappear into villages you’ll never read about in a guidebook.
Buses are also stupidly cheap. A 12-hour overnight in Vietnam runs about 300,000 to 400,000 dong — roughly £10 to £13. The same route by train costs triple. A flight costs more than a week of food. On a real budget, the bus isn’t a compromise. It’s the move.
But nobody tells you this: a bad bus ride can wreck two days. You arrive wrecked, sleep through the afternoon, feel awful, and the money you saved on transport got eaten by a wasted day. Learn to do buses properly and you keep both the money and the time.
Top 5 Tips
1. Book the seat on the shady side of the bus, not the window seat. Everyone fights for the window. That’s backwards. On a daytime bus in the tropics, the sun side turns into an oven by 11am, and the window doesn’t help — the glass just radiates heat at your face. Figure out your direction of travel and the time of day. Heading north in the morning in the northern hemisphere? Sit on the left, the western side. I learned this in Myanmar after four hours of being slowly roasted while the guy across the aisle napped peacefully under shade. Can’t work out the geometry? Ask the ticket seller. Most think it’s a funny question and will happily tell you.
2. Bring a sarong, not a pillow. A sarong weighs nothing, folds to the size of a paperback, and does five jobs: blanket when the air-con is set to arctic, pillow against the window, eye mask, privacy screen, beach towel at the other end. I’ve used the same one for six years. A travel pillow is bulky, useless against a rattling window, and you’ll leave it on a bus somewhere by trip three.
3. Eat before you board, but eat light. This is the one people get wrong constantly. A heavy meal plus a winding mountain road plus a bus with no working suspension equals a very specific kind of regret. I once ate a full plate of fried rice and pork before a six-hour ride through the Peruvian Andes. I will not describe what happened. Eat something plain a couple of hours before departure — rice, bread, bananas. Save the real meal for when you arrive. And bring your own water. The bottles they sell on board are often refilled from a tap.
4. Download everything before you leave, and bring a real power bank. Not the tiny one you got free at a conference. A proper 20,000mAh brick. Buses rarely have working USB ports, and when they do, half the time the port is dead or the cable gets yanked out. Download offline maps of your route, a couple of podcasts, a few albums. Also grab the offline translation pack for the language you’re heading into — you’ll need it at 3am at a roadside stop when you’re trying to figure out if you have twenty minutes or five.
5. Take the back seat only if you have no spine to protect. The back row is where they put the people who booked last, and it sits directly over the rear axle. Every pothole arrives there first and hardest. That said, on some routes the back row is the only place with space to stretch out, and on a 14-hour overnight ride, lying somewhat flat beats being upright. It’s a trade. If the bus is half empty, ask the driver if you can move once you’re rolling. They almost always say yes.
Budget Breakdown
Real numbers from my last few long-haul bus trips. All converted to British pounds at the time I travelled, because that’s what I keep my budget in.
- Vietnam, Hanoi to Huế, 13 hours, sleeper bus: £12. Included a thin blanket and a bottle of water. Toilet stops twice.
- Peru, Cusco to Arequipa, 10 hours, semi-cama: £14. Reclined to about 140 degrees. Blanket provided, food not.
- Morocco, Marrakech to Merzouga, 9 hours, shared grand taxi alternative: £11 for the bus. No air-con, and the windows only opened two inches.
- Laos, Vientiane to Luang Prabang, 11 hours, VIP bus: £16. “VIP” means the seats recline and there’s a curtain. It does not mean much else.
- Colombia, Medellín to Bogotá, 9 hours, overnight: £18. The most comfortable of the lot, and the most expensive.
Add-ons that actually matter: a decent eye mask costs about £5 and lasts years. A 20,000mAh power bank is £20 to £25 and charges your phone four times. A sarong is £8 in most markets. Total kit under £40. It pays for itself in one trip.
What you should not spend money on: the overpriced snacks at the bus station. They’re marked up two or three times. Buy fruit and bread at a normal shop before you get there. Same goes for the “VIP lounge” at some terminals — usually a plastic chair and a broken fan.
One Mistake to Avoid
Do not, under any circumstances, drink a lot of water in the two hours before a long bus ride in a country where the bus has no toilet.
I did this in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa to Bahir Dar, a route that took 11 hours on paper and 14 in reality. I’d read somewhere that you should stay hydrated on long journeys, which is true, and I’d interpreted “stay hydrated” as “drink a litre and a half before boarding.” We stopped at a roadside toilet after four hours. Then not again for six more. The last three hours were a kind of meditation on regret I have not experienced before or since.
The lesson isn’t “don’t drink water.” It’s this: pace your drinking to the stop schedule, and ask the driver before you board how often you’ll stop. Most will tell you. If the answer is “once,” ration accordingly. Carry a small bottle, sip it, and drink properly at each stop whether you feel like it or not. Dehydration on a bus is real, but so is the alternative, and the alternative is worse.
A second mistake, smaller but worth mentioning: don’t assume the bus leaves when they said it leaves. In much of the world, “departure time” means “the time the bus starts filling up, and then leaves whenever it’s full.” I’ve sat on a bus for 90 minutes in Bolivia waiting for two more passengers. Build slack into your plans. Never book a tight connection after a long bus ride. Four hours minimum, ideally overnight.
Closing Inspiration
Some of the best moments of my travelling life happened on buses. The woman in Guatemala who shared her tamales and taught me three words of K’iche’. The sunrise over the Zagros mountains I would have missed entirely if I’d flown. The French kid I sat next to for 12 hours in Argentina who ended up being my travel companion for the next month.
None of that happens at 30,000 feet. Buses are slow, uncomfortable, occasionally maddening — and they’re the reason I keep travelling the way I do. So the next time you’re staring at a cheap bus ticket and a slightly more expensive flight, think about what you’re actually buying. The flight gets you there. The bus gets you through. Those are different things, and one of them is worth the sore back.
Where’s your next long ride taking you?