What's the longest scheduled public bus ride in the world?

Question

I'm about to take a depressingly long bus ride in Latin America and am wondering what the longest scheduled public bus ride in the world is.

By 'scheduled' I mean for there to be a regularly operating connection between the start and destination locations, without switching buses. Besides the fact that they no longer seem to operate, this would disqualify something like oz-bus.

By 'longest' I'm tending to favour distance over duration, though either way, circular repetitive journeys would obviously be excluded.

Edit (August 2017): I took the bus from Lima to Rio de Janeiro. Just over five days from beginning to end. A write up.

Answer 1

I work at Busbud, where we're working to aggregate all the world's bus providers and routes. I had a look though our database. We're sure we don't know about everything yet, but we've found a lot of routes. There are several long routes in South and North America. I compared them using the driving distance calculated by Google Maps.

Looking for trips with no transfers, where it seems the same vehicle travels the whole route, here are the top contenders:

South America:

• 6118 km: Lima, Peru to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Ormeño) - via Sao Paulo and Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil. DW Documentary on it's launch.
• 5582 km: Lima, Peru to Buenos Aires, Argentina (Ormeño) - via Santiago, Chile.

There are documentaries and tv reports about the long direct routes on youtube where you can see the same coach goes all the way through.

North America:

• 4644 km / 85 hours: Los Angles, California, USA to San Salvador, El Salvador (Usa Tours) - Once a week via Guadalajara and Guatemala City.
• 4607 km / 65 hours: Los Angles, California, USA to New York, New York, USA (Greyhound Lines) - via Kansas, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Greyhound runs two of these every day.
• 3538 km: Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA to Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico (Transportes Chayo).
• 3254 km / 44 hours: Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico to Chicago, Illinois, USA (Turimex) - There are several other buses from Chicago to Mexico but this is the most frequent, at least daily, and the longest we're sure is a direct bus.

Europe:

• 3631 km: Braunschweig, Germany to Grozny, Chechnya, Russia (KVN) - The route is currently a bit longer than normal since it's detouring around the entire eastern Ukraine through Belarus.
• 3558 km: Burgas, Bulgaria to Liverpool, England, United Kingdom (Sofia Bus) - via Maribor, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Paris, London, Manchester.

Africa

• 1868 km: Johannesburg, South Africa to Lilongwe, Malawi (Intercape)

Answer 2

Lima to Rio de Janeiro. Six hours more than Lima to São Paulo. DW has a documentary on this trip. My personal longest is SP to Recife - 54 hours (scheduled for 48 hours)

Answer 3

It's very hard to prove which one is the longest. There's a 96 hour ride by Expreso Ormeño from Lima to Sao Paulo. I can't find proof that Birmingham bus ever happened.

Answer 4

I once took a bus from Toronto, ON (Canada) to Yellowknife, NWT. It took 80 hours. However, I seem to recall switching buses once in Calgary, AB. A search on (search at Greyhound suggests there is a transfer in Winnipeg, which I don't remember). That makes it about 2000km. Or 3400km if it was Calgary (it doesn't cut through the US).

Answer 5

Harare Zimbabwe to Dare Salaam Tanzania 2,285 km Taqwa and Falcon Buses is the lonngest in Africa 52 Hours journey.

Answer 6

In Europe, Eurolines operates relatively frequent bus drives between major cities and holiday favourites. The longest direct line I could find on their website rides from Hamburg (Germany), to Burgas (Bulgaria), takes 40 hours and covers just over 2300 km (assuming they take the shortest route). There might be longer ones, ... EDIT: From their French site, they also operate a direct line from Paris to Casablanca (Maroc). Also just over 2300 km, takes roughly 37 hours.

I remember from my visit to Argentina that they have very long bus rides with luxury buses including sleeping facility. I looked it up in the Lonely Planet (2008 issue) and found a depressing long ride from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos that takes 36-40 hours. The distance is about 2500 km (Google Maps). I am not sure it is a direct line, but wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Answer 7

Why are you excluding the oz-bus?

While the London - Sydney route breaks your conditions, what about London - Kathmandu?

Regularly scheduled, one vehicle. 47 days. (Note that I have taken two such trips, both with budget operators {necessity--most of them had rules that excluded us.} On schedule?! No way!) And they're back in business.