Travel Tip 19
Here’s why you should use public transportation when you travel.
Here’s the top 3 reasons I love using public transportation when I travel.
First, you should use public transportation to see how a place works.
I have learned so much about the places I travel through the way they organize their public transportation systems.
When I lived in Istanbul, the Istanbul Kart, a plastic card that looked like a credit card, was all I needed to get around the city. Istanbul is so well organized that I could use the same card for busses, ferries, the underground metro, and light rail trains.
In Cusco, each bus line is an independent, privately owned company. They all have the same fixed price and stop at regular bus stops, but in the end, it’s not an integrated system. From that alone, you know that Cusco is somewhat chaotic and not well organized.
My friend Julie came to visit when I lived in Istanbul and we went everywhere on public transportation - including ferries.
Second, on public transportation you learn a lot about the people.
If you rent a car, or always take taxis, you get very little interaction with locals. Getting to know a destination is best done by getting to know people – and food.
I like to see what people are like outside of those who work in restaurants, hotels, and tourist destinations. I like to see what they wear, what kind of music they listen to, and how they interact. You can tell a lot about a society by how they behave on public transportation. For example, in Peru, elderly people and those with small children get a lot of help from the community.
Turkish tea
There are few things that made me feel like I really understood the local culture more than drinking a cup of Turkish tea on a ferry crossing the Bosphorus. I lived on the Asian side of Istanbul, so I took the ferry anytime I wanted to go see the tourist attractions on the European side of the city. I always said yes (evet) when a tray of tea was brought around.
Busses in Cusco have a driver and a person who collects the fare. That person also helps people get on and off. Every day in Cusco, I see somebody with bags of groceries and a small child in their arms on the bus. The fare-taker invariably gets the groceries on and off the bus, leaving the passenger both hands for the kid. I have yet to see wheelchair accessible transportation in Peru, but all busses have red seats up front reserved for elderly, pregnant and disabled people.
Third, it’s much cheaper to take public transportation.
Even if you’re not on a tight budget, your money might be better spent on experiences and good food.
Visiting more places, staying in nicer hotels, and eating in nicer restaurants are more likely to make lasting memories from a trip. Few taxi rides are memorable, and even then it’s usually the bad ones that stand out. Considering how much you can learn about a place and the people from public transportation, in most cases you’re better off saving the taxi fare for a more memorable experience.
Bonus: It’s better for the environment!
Public transportation reduces air pollution and traffic, which obviously makes any tourist destination much more pleasant to visit.
Since Cusco bus lines are independent companies, their names are marketing: Correcaminos means Roadrunner and Pegaso is Pegasus. From that alone, you can tell it’s important to Cusqueñians that their busses be fast.
Article
I wrote this for World Nomads and loved sharing about all the different ways to get around Peru. Even if public transportation in Peru is mostly private companies, it still works very well and it’s easy to get around. Busses in Cusco are s/1 (about $0.25) and between towns it’s quite cheap too. It costs me s/10 to get a seat in a van to the Sacred Valley ($2.50).
Edwin Blas Arroyo punches through a wave leaving Huanchaco to go fishing in the morning on his new caballito de totora.
Blog
What is a caballito de totora?
If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you’ve seen lots of photos of the caballito de totora. This blog post explains exactly what it is and how it’s made. I also include some of the artifacts that archeologists have used to determine that they’ve been used on Peru’s northern coast for at least 3,500 years.
