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Foxhound5366
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- Oct 23, 2014
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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: The guide below is a travel guide that opens up buses as an option for some people who might have been in the same boat as me recently, because I wasn't aware of all of this before I basically lived through it 
This is not the place to share your terrible bus experiences (we all know about THAT bus with the cockroaches on). If it works for you, it works. If it doesn't, move along.
So I needed to pop down to Queenstown recently from Pretoria, just for a weekend. This is no simple logistical feat.
The three options are:
1) Drive down in my own car (around 9 hours) - R750 one-way in petrol at 6l/100km, so R1 500 return + tolls + maintenance wear-and-tear on car
2) Fly down to East London + rent a car + then drive around 2,5 hours to Queenstown - return flight around R2000 + R1000 car rental + R3500 refundable deposit
3) Take a bus - I settled on a Greyhound bus for the reasons below, and with my Discovery Vitality promotion applied and the most luxurious seats selected (these are ironically not the Luxury Seats but rather the 'Premium Seats') this was only R480 down + R396 up (i.e. R876 return)
Why did I select the Greyhound DreamLiner bus?
1) I'd travelled long-distance on the Intercape Sleepliner before and didn't have a bad experience (this time the schedules didn't match what I needed)
2) That return price was awesome ... only snag was I ended up paying R280 each-way to my Uber driver to get me to the station (so spent almost as much for two 20km trips as I did on the entire 800+km bus journey!)
3) The timing really worked out well. By leaving at 16:00 on Thursday afternoon, I arrived in Queenstown at 04:00 (or was meant to - actual arrival was 05:30) and so got to spend all of Friday there as well in return for only one day's leave. I couldn't have done that with either driving down (unless I drove through the night myself - which wasn't safe) or flew down + rented a car (which would have cost me more AND got me there around lunchtime). Return was great too: left Queenstown at 20:00 (so got to spend all of Sunday there vs having to return to East London around 10:00 to catch an afternoon flight out), and arrived in Pretoria at 06:30 (again actual arrival was 08:00 but still).
Three things about the bus itself:
1) The bus looks awesome and is really well-maintained. I was impressed at the size of the Greyhound logistics operation: at one point there were three large double-decker Greyhound buses all just meeting up in a random town in the middle of nowhere late at night, with paths crossing going along different routes.
2) The 'Premium Seats' are totally worth the 'extra' cost. There are only around 15 seats in a little closed off ground-floor cabin (behind a locking door), so it's like the first class of bus travel. The seats recline 150 degrees and are super comfy, so actual sleep was possible (WITH my noise cancelling headphones lol). The seats on the left are only one seat in the row, and on the right-hand side there are two of these large seats side-by-side (but the seats are large enough that you're still private). This is a terrible photo I took of the seats in their 'up' position, but they recline a lot further backwards and you have plenty of space (more than on an airplane).
3) The actual travel experience is pretty 'meh' ... there is supposedly some WiFi system with in-travel streaming movies you can connect to, but I'd downloaded Netflix episodes already so didn't bother with that. There's no food or drink service, except there was one 'meal stop' each way at a Shell Ultra City where you could go into the petrol station convenience store or the neighbouring Wimpy for a burger. Basically the point is just to try get as comfy as possible and sleep the trip away, and that works (mostly).
Tips for bus travellers:
1) Get an eyemask to block out light ... this really bothered me, because the cabin is so dark, so ambient lights (like the flickering muted TV screen at the front of the cabin) bugged me.
2) If you suffer from travel sickness, make sure you've bought medicine for it. I finally found travel sickness meds that work for me: Medazine (Cyclizine Hydrochloride). Worked like a bomb and I felt fine for the most part.
3) Either use noise-cancelling headphones or else earplugs to drown out the drone of the engine / chatter from people getting on / off the bus at the many stops along the way.
Overall summary: Was the experience perfect? Nope. The bus being 1,5 hours late without warning was a pain. I certainly do NOT recommend just jumping on at any bus station if you've got options. Stations like Park Station in Johannesburg and Pretoria Station are not for the faint-of-heart ... they're full-scale African logistics hubs (i.e. massive taxi and bus ranks), so if you're in the area I'd recommend jumping on at the much nicer new Midrand stop (the 'Big Bird' petrol station on the highway). Was I safe in the stations? Yes. Were there beggars in the stations? Yes. Should I have found an alternative solution to Uber to save more money? Hell yes. But did it work for its intended purpose? Hell yes. I managed to get a trip down to Queenstown far cheaper than expected, with a lot more time spent there than any other mode of travel would have allowed me. Consider it
This is not the place to share your terrible bus experiences (we all know about THAT bus with the cockroaches on). If it works for you, it works. If it doesn't, move along.So I needed to pop down to Queenstown recently from Pretoria, just for a weekend. This is no simple logistical feat.
The three options are:
1) Drive down in my own car (around 9 hours) - R750 one-way in petrol at 6l/100km, so R1 500 return + tolls + maintenance wear-and-tear on car
2) Fly down to East London + rent a car + then drive around 2,5 hours to Queenstown - return flight around R2000 + R1000 car rental + R3500 refundable deposit
3) Take a bus - I settled on a Greyhound bus for the reasons below, and with my Discovery Vitality promotion applied and the most luxurious seats selected (these are ironically not the Luxury Seats but rather the 'Premium Seats') this was only R480 down + R396 up (i.e. R876 return)
Why did I select the Greyhound DreamLiner bus?
1) I'd travelled long-distance on the Intercape Sleepliner before and didn't have a bad experience (this time the schedules didn't match what I needed)
2) That return price was awesome ... only snag was I ended up paying R280 each-way to my Uber driver to get me to the station (so spent almost as much for two 20km trips as I did on the entire 800+km bus journey!)
3) The timing really worked out well. By leaving at 16:00 on Thursday afternoon, I arrived in Queenstown at 04:00 (or was meant to - actual arrival was 05:30) and so got to spend all of Friday there as well in return for only one day's leave. I couldn't have done that with either driving down (unless I drove through the night myself - which wasn't safe) or flew down + rented a car (which would have cost me more AND got me there around lunchtime). Return was great too: left Queenstown at 20:00 (so got to spend all of Sunday there vs having to return to East London around 10:00 to catch an afternoon flight out), and arrived in Pretoria at 06:30 (again actual arrival was 08:00 but still).
Three things about the bus itself:
1) The bus looks awesome and is really well-maintained. I was impressed at the size of the Greyhound logistics operation: at one point there were three large double-decker Greyhound buses all just meeting up in a random town in the middle of nowhere late at night, with paths crossing going along different routes.
2) The 'Premium Seats' are totally worth the 'extra' cost. There are only around 15 seats in a little closed off ground-floor cabin (behind a locking door), so it's like the first class of bus travel. The seats recline 150 degrees and are super comfy, so actual sleep was possible (WITH my noise cancelling headphones lol). The seats on the left are only one seat in the row, and on the right-hand side there are two of these large seats side-by-side (but the seats are large enough that you're still private). This is a terrible photo I took of the seats in their 'up' position, but they recline a lot further backwards and you have plenty of space (more than on an airplane).
3) The actual travel experience is pretty 'meh' ... there is supposedly some WiFi system with in-travel streaming movies you can connect to, but I'd downloaded Netflix episodes already so didn't bother with that. There's no food or drink service, except there was one 'meal stop' each way at a Shell Ultra City where you could go into the petrol station convenience store or the neighbouring Wimpy for a burger. Basically the point is just to try get as comfy as possible and sleep the trip away, and that works (mostly).
Tips for bus travellers:
1) Get an eyemask to block out light ... this really bothered me, because the cabin is so dark, so ambient lights (like the flickering muted TV screen at the front of the cabin) bugged me.
2) If you suffer from travel sickness, make sure you've bought medicine for it. I finally found travel sickness meds that work for me: Medazine (Cyclizine Hydrochloride). Worked like a bomb and I felt fine for the most part.
3) Either use noise-cancelling headphones or else earplugs to drown out the drone of the engine / chatter from people getting on / off the bus at the many stops along the way.
Overall summary: Was the experience perfect? Nope. The bus being 1,5 hours late without warning was a pain. I certainly do NOT recommend just jumping on at any bus station if you've got options. Stations like Park Station in Johannesburg and Pretoria Station are not for the faint-of-heart ... they're full-scale African logistics hubs (i.e. massive taxi and bus ranks), so if you're in the area I'd recommend jumping on at the much nicer new Midrand stop (the 'Big Bird' petrol station on the highway). Was I safe in the stations? Yes. Were there beggars in the stations? Yes. Should I have found an alternative solution to Uber to save more money? Hell yes. But did it work for its intended purpose? Hell yes. I managed to get a trip down to Queenstown far cheaper than expected, with a lot more time spent there than any other mode of travel would have allowed me. Consider it
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