I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about riding the Chinatown buses. From smelly toilets to breakdowns to firey bus crashes to general unreliability, I was extremely skeptical and cautious in taking my very first trip this year.
The trip up to Boston on Saturday morning was a joy. I had an entire row of seats to myself. There were only 15 other people on the entire bus. I slept most of the way, and instead of a stop for smelly Chinese food (another turn-off for many of my friends who had ridden before), we stopped for smelly fast food at a Burger King in Connecticut. The trip to Boston took almost exactly four hours, including the 15-minute rest stop. That’s almost as fast as Amtrak’s Acela Express (3 hours, 40 minutes) for about a tenth of the cost. Sure, there’s always the risk of spontaneous combustion, but you pay for what you get.
On the way back, I realized that I had booked my return trip online at a time far later than I really wanted to leave Boston (goal: spend as little time in Boston as possible, recover from my buddy’s bachelor party on bus ride back). I thought about trying to change my ticket ahead of time, but there was no means of doing that, as far as I could tell. I decided I’d head to South Station, take a gamble at the ticket counter, and hope for the best.
The fine print on the ticket and the web site made me think that my efforts would be fruitless. The rules were pretty clear:
I walk up to the ticket counter, expecting to shovel out another $15 to get out of Boston when I wanted to.
“Hi,” I say, smiling. “I have a ticket for the 4pm bus, but I was wondering if I could use it on the 2pm.” I hand the boarding pass to the woman at the ticket counter, panicked. It’s 1:55. I think I’m really pushing my luck at this point.
The woman examines the sheet of paper for about two seconds. “Yes, yes,” she says. She takes a pen, crosses out the 4pm departure time on the pass, and scribbles “2 PM” on the sheet. She hands it back to me and points me to the gate, where I just make it onto the bus.
They may be fluent in Chinese at the Chinatown bus counter, but I guess their grasp of Legalese is a bit looser.
Posted in On the Road on 4/28/2008 | 6 Comments »
