How does public transport both allow and limit one’s negotiation and interaction with cultural, social and material landscapes? The comprehension of social space and self is guided by one’s journey through those spaces, by witnessing events and public conduct. This paper proposes autoethnographic accounts of two communication studies researchers placed in Cape Town, South Africa, and Helsinki, Finland, for more than three months. In both situations, researchers depended on public transport with which they were unfamiliar. This inquiry explores how those experiences were perceived, and how the researchers encountered and experienced the new social environments, local population and themselves.