Trials and tribulations of long bus journeys with children

Hooray - another long bus journey!

We've taken some fairly long, arduous journeys over the last few months, and become increasingly ambitious about what we can achieve. Initially, we had plane trips punctuated by the odd 4, 5 and 7 hour bus ride.  Once or twice these stretched to 30 hours or so, but with the odd few hours in a hostel to catch up on sleep, or different modes of transport involved.  At the start of our travels the idea of this was not appealing as the children, when at home used to complain about a quick hour and a half trip to the coast and Frankie, in particular, suffered from car sickness.  Now we've done a number of these trips ( South America is HUGE! ) the boys are getting quite blasé about it all and a mere 4 or 5 hours doesn't even raise an eyebrow anymore!   More recently we took an 18 hour bus ride, followed immediately by another 4 hour bus trip to travel south in Argentina from Puerto Madryn to El Calafate.  (select "Read more" below to continue)

The night buses in Argentina are pretty good and tend to give you a couple options, either semi-cama or cama.  We had been on a cama 13 hour journey a few days before and it was comfortable although not flatbed sadly!  The chair reclined and was fairly wide with a comfy footrest, warm blanket and pillow and the food was acceptable, it even included some wine.  Sadly for the 18 hour journey we could only get semi-cama so we weren't feeling too good about the prospect.  The seats did recline a little but they were more like a normal bus seat.  You had a skinny footrest and whilst there was food they didn't give us any wine!  There was also no blankets even for the kids which I thought was a poor show.  So my vote definitely goes to the cama option and since then I've heard there is a super cama which is a flat bed...I'll be checking that out next...budget allowing!  (Phil says no chance!)

Before embarking on this journey, Phil and I thought we had better do a bit more preparation than we had before and researched good games to play on long journeys.  One of the comments at the end of one web site 'top 25 travel games' said "if you still don't feel prepared with all these games then you're either on an expedition or you should leave the kids behind!"

The most successful games we have found has been bingo, the classic "who am I?" game and word games, where, for example, you pick a subject and the the next person has to choose a word beginning with the last letter of the previous person's word. To prolong the bingo we all actually took time to draw the bingo cards ourselves with pictures of things we might see on our journey.  That whiled away a good couple of hours drawing, colouring and then looking.  It included things like a dead animal, a guanaco, snow etc, and made a very dull landscape interesting for a while.   

Best we could manage on a wobbly coach

purple cars proved to be the most elusive

Frankie was upset about his dire rhea (top right picture)

Didn't see many horses.....that looked like that.

Bingo!   Louis wins a biscuit

The 'guess who I am' game was fun although I wasn't keen when Phil licked the paper to try and stick it on my forehead...a little unnecessary!  Louis and I had a bit of fun thinking up silly answers to questions, for example Louis had to use the answer "pink frilly knickers" for everything I asked him without laughing.  The obvious first question was "what is your favourite thing to wear?"  He thought that was very funny and things then descended into answers involving poo and wee of course!

And then Frankie often amuses us with an interesting fact - on the journey he asked if we knew what the deadliest animal in the world was, and surprised us by explaining it was the antelope.  Feeling rather dubious we checked his source and in fact it was the "Anopheles" latin for a genus of the mosquito!

The boys also found static electricity to be a good way of consuming journey time.  Not sure how hygienic it was, but they achieved some strange hairstyles by rubbing their heads on the seats!

But it's not always perfect and there are times when we have the most amazing views out of the windows and yet the children are still intent on trying to take lumps out of each other or being exceptionally loud, which can be a little embarrassing and Phil and I try to pretend we're not with them...quite tricky as the blonde hair often gives things away!  Reading would be a handy pastime but sadly the boys feel sick if they read while moving (at least that's what they tell us).  The journeys can also be made more challenging by one or both boys needing the loo and the loo not working, or them feeling sick...but I think this is called character building!