What we could not find out

Every entry in our local-transport data ends with a field called gaps. It is where the researcher writes what could not be confirmed and where a traveller should ask instead. Across 177 places there are 1,384 of them, close to one for every option we did confirm. We read all of them for this piece. They sort into about five kinds, and the honest thing is to show each kind in the researcher's own words.

The largest single cause is a website that refuses a machine. Some of the most important pages for a traveller sit behind a Cloudflare challenge or return 403 to anything that is not a person in a browser: the Philippine Coast Guard, Atlantic Airways, Smyril Line, the Ladakh Taxi Union's rate card, Trans Guyana Airways, Aer Arann Islands, Stagecoach and ScotRail. When that happens we say so, we say where the figure came from instead, and we date it to that source rather than to today.

A block is a moment, not a fact. The Åland entry, researched on 29 September, records that alandstrafiken.ax returned 403 to every request, including direct links to its PDF timetables. The Kumlinge entry, researched the day before, quotes those same PDFs line by line, because on that day the site answered.4 Both are true. Where the live site was closed we used the Internet Archive and recorded the snapshot's date as the fare year, which is why the Faroese helicopter fares in our data are 2025 figures.

The second kind is a number with two values. Si-Kat's boat from Manila to Puerto Galera leaves at 06:00, at 08:00 or 08:30, or at 09:30, depending on which of three sources you read, and its ₱1,550 is a return fare in one and a one-way fare in another. The Batangas terminal fee is ₱90 on the port authority's own announcement and ₱30 in a guide updated a week after it changed. The Puerto Galera environmental fee is ₱120 or ₱50.

The Brunei water taxi is B$1 per crossing on Wikivoyage and B$2 to B$5 and negotiable on the tourism board's own page. The JETT bus from Aqaba to Wadi Rum is 5 JD in the operator's live schedule and 15 JOD in a camp's price list. The Culion ferry from Coron leaves at 06:00 and 12:00 for ₱455 on one page and at 06:00 and 14:00 for ₱416 on another. Corniglia's staircase has 377, 383, 365 or 385 steps.

When this happens the rule is to keep both figures, say which we trust and why, and tell you what to carry. Carry ₱100 is a better sentence than either number on its own.

The third kind is a figure that is probably right and possibly ten years old. Wikivoyage is our single largest source, 1,761 citations, and it is very good at recording a fare and very bad at recording when. Georgetown's G$60 minibus ride is undated and has been disputed between operators and government for years.11 The ₹8 crossing to Sagar Island is undated, and the ₹250 vehicle barge fare beside it is explicitly from 2005.12 Tagbilaran's ₱8 tricycle rate has no date, and what people actually pay in 2026 is ₱20 to ₱50.

So every fare in the data carries the year it was seen, and the entries say what that year means. The Sagar Island entry puts it exactly: the year below is when the page was read, not when the fare was set. The table below is generated from the data as it stands today.

The bottom rows are the point. A fare seen in 2019 is not a price; it is a floor. On the place pages the year sits in the label next to the number, and in the margin of this page an old year is marked as old.

The fourth kind is our own fault, and we keep it in. Each researcher was given a brief with what we thought we knew about the place, and told to contradict it. 114 of the gaps do. The brief asked for the Demerara Harbour Bridge's retraction schedule; there is no longer one, because the new bridge opened in October 2025. It said SuperCat might not have survived on Cebu to Tagbilaran; it was still publishing five fast craft each way daily. It called the Panglao link a causeway; it is two bridges. It assumed Manila to Busuanga flights were the main way into Coron; Cebu Pacific moved every turboprop to Clark on 29 March 2026.

Others are simply the world moving faster than any brief. The Huacachina dune buggies were taken out of service on 11 September 2026 and the drivers went on strike; Calama's bus terminal closed on 11 April 2026 and moved; the Uyuni railway collapsed its two named trains into one weekly ferrobús.

The last kind is the largest by weight if not by count, and it is the one no amount of better fetching would fix. Habal-habal fares outside Panglao are entirely unpublished because every ride is negotiated. The last shared Sumo of the day from Sohra back to Shillong is not written down anywhere; the drivers know. Porter rates for carrying a bag down three thousand steps to Nongriat are agreed on the spot. Leh's bus board changes every season and no operator puts it online. The Kurupukari pontoon has no published tariff and no published hours.

328 of the 1,384 gaps end with the same instruction in some form: ask at the stand, phone the office, confirm at the jetty. We think that is the correct answer, and we would rather print it than invent a number to fill the space.

A gap does not go into the planner. It goes on the place page under Not yet confirmed, in the researcher's words, and it stays there until someone confirms it. If you are standing at the stand in Sohra and the board says something different, the report link at the bottom of this page goes straight to us, and we will change the entry and the date on it. That is the whole method. We would rather show fewer things we can vouch for than more we cannot, and when we cannot, we say so where you can see it.