My Baltic Adventure — Part 6 The Life and Times of Riga Bus Station

Now I have been to rather a lot of countries, and in not a single one of them, have I encountered a bus station that had any architectural merit, seriously they were all dives, and the one in Riga was no exception.

As a whole the city of Riga is downright wonderful, a warm, welcoming city that really is probably the only place that deserves the title, Paris of the east, though of course, it is redundant of that French charm. So, it’s much better than Paris, and for my money, the big astronaut bear beats any large pylon on the heart of Paris.

Sadly though, travel waits for no man and it was time for me to leave again. This trip through the Baltics was probably one of the most intense travel episodes I had ever done. Personally, I prefer the slower means of travel, spending a month in a country, getting to know a place, but here I was speeding through at breakneck speed, barely spending more than a week in each country. That may seem like a long time for some, but for me, it felt like no time at all.

Again, I found myself shoving clothes back in my backpack, bidding goodbye to the Latvian Basil Fawlty and past all the drug dealers in the car park opposite the hostel. With the recent injection of EU money, and in a bid to recapture some of its population, Latvia has lost around a third of its population since 2000, there’s been a real push to modernize the city. Unfortunately, that money has not extended to its bus station.

I really don’t know why, they could have really pushed it, ‘Come to Latvia, and visit the world’s most beautiful bus station.’ They would have got literally, twenty more tourists. Anyway, they hadn’t, and following on a worldwide tradition, the bus station was a complete and utter dive. I don’t know what it is about them, but they seem to attract all the sort of people your mother warned you off when you were a kid.

First, there’s the drug dealer in the corner, offering you everything from paracetamol painkiller to things that are distinctly not paracetamol, but also kill the pain. Then, there are the tramps begging for money, because they just need that all-important extra euro to make it back to Timbuktu or wherever they supposedly came from. Next, you have to fight through the taxi touts, who still want to offer you the best price for a ride into town, even though it’s less than a two-minute walk away, and you’ve just come from there.

Once you’ve survived all of that, including the numerous thieves that surround these establishments, it’s time to buy a ticket, this challenge makes the Telegraph cryptic crossword seem like an afternoon walk in the park. Depending on the bus station they will have one counter for all the tickets, (this is by far the easiest, but of course, most rare.)

In most bus stations though, there are individual counters for each individual company, this is one of the stupidest ideas in the world. Because multiple bus companies have multiple buses to the same destination, meaning one might have one at 9 am, but not at 10 am, meaning you need to go around the whole building to find one at 10 am. Often they don’t take debit card, and rarely speak English (this isn’t their fault, but still annoying.)

Finally, though, you’ll have your ticket in hand. Sometimes it’s a fully-fledged ticket, other times a weird receipt and often, it’s just a hand drawn bit of paper on the back of a post-it note. Now though, you’ve got the trickiest part, find your bus. Often bus stations have departure boards, though be wary about using these. For the most part, they are either broken or completely misleading.

By this point you’ve probably decided to turn to drink to help ease your woes, bad idea, for the bathrooms in bus stations aren’t exactly the cleanest of places. Sometimes they force you to pay for the privilege, but even then, you run the risk of catching all types of disease from hepatitis to typhoid.

So, let’s say you’ve managed to survive all of this, you’ve found your bus stop, you haven’t been scammed or robbed, and all you’ve got to do now, is get on the bus. Here comes my final complaint about bus travel, they are never, ever, ever on time, and to be honest, how could they be? Sometimes they get caught in traffic, other times they don’t. If anyone has actually got a bus that has arrived or departed on time, I recommend you go and buy a lottery ticket this instance, as you have the luck of a charmed rabbit.

You end up passing the time by watching the other buses come and go, as you don’t dare head back into the bus terminal for fear your bus would leave without you. So, you sit about watching the other buses come and go, most of them are complete and utter death traps and you hope to the transport gods that yours isn’t one of them. Sometimes a really posh bus arrives and then you switch tactics, hoping it will pull up to your stop, but alas no, it never does.

After all this waiting though, and after being fleeced by many beggars asking to go back to Moscow, or Abu Dhabi, or wherever, it always costs a euro no matter where. Your bus finally arrives. At first, you are unsure whether it is, in fact, your bus, and there’s always that awkward moment when you don’t know if you can actually get on it, or just linger about waiting like lemmings. Fortunately, some enterprising person decides to just ask, the driver nods, and you rush forward like a bunch of bargain hunters at a Black Friday sale.

Ah, finally you sigh, as you settle down into your seat, you fire up your phone to see if the Wifi is working. Of course, it isn’t, and the driver slams the car into gear and off you go, away from this hell hole!!

I bet you’re now wondering, is that it, have I really just spend 5 minutes of my time reading a rant about Riga bus station, yes, you have…