I think most US domestic travelers are familiar with bus companies like Greyhound and the Amtrak trains. They also know how expensive and time consuming they can be. The more seasoned among us know where to get the cheapest plane tickets or the best deal on renting a car. But, short of hitchhiking, you can’t really call yourself a veteran of travel on the East Coast without having travelled on the mysterious “Chinatown” buses that operate between places like Washington D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
These buses, which operate under company names like Boston Deluxe, Fung Wah, and Lucky Star, can beat any price I have yet seen on trips between these major cities, with the 4-6 hour Boston to New York route that I just came back from being a mere $15 one-way.
On the way down to New York I caught the Fung Hua bus, that runs almost every hour of the day, on the hour, from South Station bus terminal which can be reached by the red line subway. Finding the place to board the bus reminded me of Harry Potter’s attempts to find his train to school. While I didn’t have to walk through any brick walls, Fung Hua and Lucky Star buses were operating out of gates 13 1/3 and 13 2/3 respectively. The line of waiting passengers was filled with mostly student types and young Asian Americans. You can buy the ticket there or show them your print out of the “e-ticket” from their online ticket order page.
The bus was decent and the ride would have been quite tolerable were it not for the Finnish college student sitting next to me whose cellphone battery was one of those marvels of Finnish technology that could sustain her many conversations for almost 5 continuous hours. I wouldn’t have minded so much were it not for the fact that I was annoyed at being constantly reminded of how completely foreign that language is to a Scandinavian like myself who has little difficulty in being understood in most other places in our blessed and most holy lands of the North (except Iceland, whose inhabitants have, of course, been linguistically frozen in time for so long that our students of ancient literature have a better chance of communicating with them than any of our more modern Nordic ambassadors of good will or, for that matter, Danes armed with a nostalgic colonial condescension).
About half way through the trip, however, a large hissing noise came from the front of the bus and our driver pulled the bus over onto the highway’s shoulder. We waited about 15 minutes while the driver called his bus tech support line. Without any announcement or attempt at repair he re-boarded the bus, and continued the drive to New York with the hissing still going. Judging by the hissing sound and the draft of freezing air that flooded the bus for the remainder of the trip, the front door of the bus was having difficulty in keeping itself closed. I tried to keep warm and drifted in and out of sleep before arriving finally at the “Confucius” tower apartment complex in New York’s Chinatown where my first trip with a “Chinatown bus” company came to an end.
I tried a different company on the way back. The “Boston Deluxe” goes only three times a day for the same price, but is convenient for Columbia University students and other New York visitors/residents who use the 1 or 9 subway line because it departs from 32nd and Broadway very near the Penn. Station subway stop, before making another stop at E 86th street and 2nd Avenue. I caught the 8:30 morning departure. The bus pulled in, with its Cantonese-speaking driver yelling into his Nextel walkie talkie and beckoning me onto the unmarked luxury bus he parked illegally in the No-standing zone by the road. I wasn’t sure I had the right bus to start with, since the bus door had a large sign upon which was hastily scribbled the Chinese characters for “Washington D.C.” (華盛頓). I asked the driver if he was going to Washington D.C. or Boston and, since I interrupted his yelling into the Nextel phone, my question was met with an irritated look before saying something sounding like the closest thing Cantonese can get to the word Boston. He waved me onto the bus and indicated I should take my luggage onto the bus instead of loading it in the bus’s luggage compartment, presumably since they weren’t expecting many passengers today.
The bus was completely filled with empty coffee cups and trash bags, probably left over from the Washington D.C. trip that was announced by the door’s sign. For the first hour or so of the ride, the bus belched a loud grinding sound so frightening that I seated myself furthest from the noise in the hope I would thereby survive any explosion of the engine. As I drifted in and out of sleep I counted two unannounced stops, one I believe was at a small Chinese operated grocery store somewhere near New Haven where our driver disappeared for a few minutes. However, unlike the Fung Wah experience, this bus also stopped for about 10 minutes so that passengers could get a bite to eat on the way there. I slept through most of the trip.
The Chinatown buses can’t be beat for their low price and I think they usually can get you there in one piece.