If you’re going somewhere by guagua, you really need to plan ahead or have it not matter when you get there.
To get between islands, the options are to take a plane or to take a ferry. My island is really close to another one called Lanzarote. So some people will take a bus to the northern edge of the island and then a ferry to Lanzarote, but to get to any of the other islands, people take a plane. The planes, like the buses, are often delayed, but you can also fly to any of the islands within an hour or so.
I have mentioned before that the city is fairly walkable—I really don’t have to get into a vehicle very often. I live pretty close to the city center, so I can walk anywhere I need to go in a normal week (such as work and the grocery store) in about 10 minutes. I can walk to the beach in 15 minutes, and half an hour of walking will get me to the bigger/nicer beach. My gym is 20 minutes away. (You may notice, I do a lot of walking here. According to my watch, it’s about 12,000 steps a day, not counting my runs.)
I don’t have a car, so to get anywhere far away I take the guagua. The experience is fairly standard. In many ways, being on public transportation here feels just like being on public transportation in the U.S. Sure, everyone around me is speaking Spanish, and I’ll pay the bus driver with euros instead of dollars, but other than that, I’m just going to sit on the bus and wait until it’s my stop.
The experience at the airport has been similar for me. I check in in Spanish instead of English, but other than that the process is mostly the same. I actually find it comforting how familiar it feels, now.
