Any Georgetown student who doesn’t live in some corner of the Northeast Corridor most likely has, at some point, gone to visit one who does. This process usually involves some combination of planes, trains and automobiles to ferry said students through the steaming heart of New Jersey to the appropriate exit off I-95. While such methods of transit are effective, they can be unpleasantly expensive. For those more adventurous, economically-minded students, there exists the marginally seedy institution of the Chinatown bus. Contrary to popular belief, though, there is a plethora of services that provide those buses for the disturbingly low price of $35 for a round trip, on average.
The most helpful resource on the subject is www.staticleap.com/chinatownbus, a comprehensive directory of every Chinatown bus service running between any combination of major cities on the East Coast. The smattering of company names that probably sounded more exciting pre-translation could easily overwhelm a novice, so it’s important to evaluate the merits of each.
Fung Wah Transport Vans, Inc. is the original Chinatown bus, and probably the most reputable. They have experience on their side, but only run service between Boston and New York, so they’re not as useful for the itinerant Hoya. Apex Bus has the advantage of sheer volume, with the most buses per day out of Washington of any service, but I’ve never met a single person who’s ridden Apex and lived. I’ve also never met a single Apex customer who died. It has the added and unique perk of service south of Washington, to Atlanta, Richmond and Norfolk.
My greatest (read: only) experience is with the New York to D.C. buses, of which I am an aficionado. My personal favorite is Dragon Coach, which offers on-the-road movies like Arnold Schwarzenagger’s classic Red Heat and a bootleg, Chinese-subtitled edition of the ubiquitous Pirates of the Caribbean. More importantly, though, they gun it up the coast like no other. One particularly memorable trip left Washington at 6:00 p.m. and arrived in Manhattan by 9:30, which, if you’ve ever made that drive, implies ungodly speed. They conveniently drop off and pick up at 34th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan outside of Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, and the inconvenient location underneath the Manhattan Bridge at 88 East Broadway, which is the headquarters of every Chinatown bus service in existence.
Of course, as far as sketchiness is concerned, all the services make a brief, ominous stop at the Baltimore Travel Plaza to pick up an extra passenger, usually a jovial, portly gentleman toting an extremely suspicious, lumpy piece of baggage. Some of the services are also involved with organized crime; just last November, a driver was fatally stabbed by a gangster. But I can attest to the relative safety, comfort and timeliness of all of these services, regardless. I mean, I haven’t been stabbed yet.
