How to Travel from Montevideo to Buenos Aires (by ferry)

Last Updated on April 16, 2024 by Adam Watts

Below is our experience taking the ferry from Montevideo to Buenos Aires using Colonia Express. Hopefully it’s helpful for someone making the same journey. If for some reason you’re here with no idea who, why or what a Buenos Aires is, keep reading anyway, it’s a fun ride!

After browsing online we found that Colonia Express and Buquebus are the only two ferry companies that operate the route from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, the two capital cities on the Rio de la Plata. So now you have a decision to make.

Colonia Express vs Buquebus

Both Colonia Express and Buquebus offer direct and indirect ferries, with indirect naturally being cheaper. Without looking at Colonia Express or Buquebus reviews online, we went with the option that seemed best based on price and schedule. For us, that was the indirect Colonia Express and we paid $96 for both of us.

Indirect meant that we would have to take a bus from Montevideo to a town called Colonia, before taking the ferry across the Rio de la Plata to Buenos Aires. This additional bus ride was included in the same “package” and hey, we’d get to see another town in Uruguay outside of the capital, so we were all for it.

But then we noticed, far far too late, that Colonia Express reviews online aren’t exactly glowing. Why didn’t we read these before buying the tickets? we chided ourselves. Oh well, too late now. Let’s see how it goes.

Tres Cruces Terminal

The bus from Montevideo to Colonia leaves from Tres Cruces terminal, which, even at 6am, seemed to be populated by roughly half the population of the country, even when the streets of Montevideo at other times had been quieter than a ward of coma patients. Maybe everyone hates Montevideo itself and is always leaving for one place or another? Not sure, but we found Montevideo actually very pleasant.

That’s not to say Tres Cruces terminal was a chaotic mess or difficult to navigate. Not at all. It was just busy. It’s actually pretty well-organized. There are big screens with departure times and associated platforms, although the actual platform signs are fairly unnoticeable.

We walked half the length of the terminal before we realized we were at roughly the right place to begin with. Oops. We left from platform 40, which is behind the Colonia Express ticket office at one end of the terminal.

Our ticket online mentioned that the bus left at 7am, so for some reason we arrived at 6am, but after we’d bought coffee and sandwiches for the journey and then found the platform 40, it was past six thirty and lots of people were already in line.

As it turned out, it wasn’t just one bus leaving at that time. At 7am two buses had already left, and possibly more were still being loaded. Because we were in line early, we were on the first one and we left at 6:50. One review online mentioned their bus was meant to leave at 8am but actually left at 6am. I don’t know what universe that person is from but in our experience Colonia Express does indeed adhere to normal conventions of time.

The Colonia Express bus was clean and comfortable but I can’t comment much more than that since almost as soon as we got on we fell asleep. Between fits and starts of sleep I can tell you that the Uruguayan countryside of green fields, cows, and wind farms, was very pretty.

Colonia Ferry Terminal

The ferry terminal at Colonia was well sign-posted. There are large signs above specific sections saying “check in”, “boarding”. We didn’t realize that we needed to check in at the desk marked “check in” and instead we happily queued in the line for security for ten minutes before we realized.

At check in, we were given three boarding passes and a customs form each. For full context, we have a British and Singaporean passport respectively, so parts of the border crossing process might be different for other nationalities.

With boarding passes in hand, we went through a security process which was just putting luggage through a scanner (note: bottles of water should be held, not scanned in the machine). We weren’t asked to take phones or anything else out of our pockets so the metal detector screeched at everyone like a banshee.

Then we joined the line for immigration. There was a sign pointing Uruguayan and Argentina nationals to one line and everyone else to another, but staff members were literally spinning that sign at random, sending different groups of people to different lines.

Despite that, we had no issues and on the other side there was just a small line to get stamped into Argentina. No visas needed for us, but obviously you need to check this in advance for yourself. I can’t do that for you, unless you pay me in the form of a signup to my email list. Thank you.

Next was the departure lounge, which was the most chaotic part of the journey. Only Buquebus and Colonia Express make this trip but ferries are big so you end up with two long, snaking lines around the entire departure lounge. We got it wrong at first so make sure you’re in the right line!

The ferry itself was compact and the seats were surprisingly like airplane seating. Our ferry was nowhere near full though so there was plenty of space and we sat on a couch upstairs. The bathrooms were relatively clean and there’s a duty free store on board, if that’s your thing.

Ferry time is about an hour, then you chug into the Colonia Express port in Buenos Aires. We queued for a while to get out but then you’re dumped unceremoniously out onto the street where you have to figure things out for yourself. There are plenty of waiting taxis or if you don’t have Argentine pesos yet, you can call an Uber like we did.

Direct Ferry from Montevideo to Buenos Aires

As you heard above, we took the indirect route from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, taking a bus to Colonia first, then a ferry from there.

The alternative to the bus and ferry combination is to take a direct ferry from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, which costs more than twice as much. Based on our experience above, I’d say taking the slower, indirect route is definitely worth the savings. And if you have the time, Colonia is apparently quite pleasant so you could make your own way to the town, spend the night and then take the ferry across the Rio de la Plata the next day.

Hopefully this blow-by-blow account of our experience taking Colonia Express from Montevideo to Buenos Aires has been helpful. If you can’t get enough accounts of taking bus journeys from one place to another, check out How to Get From Cap Haitien to Port-au-Prince by Bus, which, given Haiti is one of the least-visited countries in the world, is a much more interesting read than this one!

Or check out things to do in Montevideo or Buenos Aires.