Buquebus Ferry to Colonia del Sacramento

What you need to know:

• You *can* book the tickets online directly from www.buquebus.com from outside of the country. Many sites (such ascoloniaferry.com) claim that you can’t use a foreign credit card, but I found that *not* to be the case for me. I created an account there, and booked the 8:15a boat across from Buenos Aires and the 5:05p boat back. The cost was about $89 US dollars round trip.
• Book both legs (round trip) to avoid the ship selling out. But there were plenty of empty seats on my voyages. Your results may vary.
• The trip takes about 45 minutes, one way.
• Your ticket does not establish a seat. After customs processing, get in line in the waiting area if you want to board early and pick a good seat with a window.
• You should get to the Buqubus terminal (Puerto Madero) at least an hour ahead of your schedule. You have to pick up your ticket, and then process through Argentinian *and* Uruguayan customs. Essentially, when you are finally waiting to board the ship you are already “in” Urugauay. This means that when you arrive at Colonia, you can just exit the boat and be on your way. It took me much less than an hour to get through the processing before waiting for the ship, but others on line have stories of much longer waits.
• I used Uber to get to the terminal, so my destination was already established. But when speaking with others, it seems that “Puerto Madero” and/or “Buquebus” are commonally known destinations if you want to get there by taxi. After returning to Buenos Aires, I walked to one of the nearest subway stations.
• There is a fairly large cafe at the terminal, if you want to eat before leaving, but it is located before the customs processing area. So, you can’t process through and then sit down there to eat. There are a few coffee and snack vendors after customs.
• Both Buquebus and SeaCat leave from the same terminal.
• The area around the Puerto Madero terminal is under construction (January 2019), but the inside is quite new.
• There is a cafe on the ship to purchase food and drinks at the higher prices you would expect.
• Before the ship docks, they have staff blocking doors at various points on the ship. This means that you can’t get from the second level down to the first within 10 or so minutes before the ship arrives. I guess this is to try and control the throng of people trying to exit at the same time. In my experience, this did not help.