Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 64.

The 64 goes down calle Hipólito Yrigoyen. I’m just writing in my notebook that I’ve always admired Hipólito Yrigoyen for getting elected president twice despite having two weird names (in fact, his full name was Juan Hipólito of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Yrigoyen Alem (and is it just me or does that Alem at the end not look a bit like ‘amen’?)) when a car crashes into the back of the bus. Finally, after 21 buses on which absolutely nothing of interest has happened, a moment of action.

Except, if you’re on a bus in a traffic jam and a car travelling at 5 miles per hour crashes into the back of you, the effect is overwhelmingly underwhelming. It nudges the bus forward about a millimetre, and you hear the sickly crunching of a car whose owner is going to spend the weekend on the phone to his insurance company amid much colourful use of the words ‘puta’ and ‘parió’. The bus driver pays no heed to all this and drives off. I’m not sure it’s completely legal to flee the scene of an accident in which one is directly involved, but my concept of what is and isn’t legal in Argentina gets cloudier every week. I think this episode goes under that grey legal area marked ‘One rule for buses, another rule for all other road users’. I think it’s a great law, as my bus journey times are reduced significantly by drivers jumping all the red lights.

Aside from the boredom of spending so much time on buses so low on incident that even when they do crash, it’s such a non-event that it would struggle to make the back pages of the local paper of a small village, the main physical effect of Colectivaizeishon is the return of the pain in my right shoulder, a pain that put a stop to my attempt to take all the buses two years ago. This has been a recurrent problem ever since the invention of the mouse, but it’s compounded by spending eight hours on buses, bent over myself trying to write in an A4 notebook. Luckily, I have my sister Sandra, my quasi-personal yoga teacher (‘quasi’ because I share her with two other lucky people who are sometimes absent). Today is the first time I’ve taken the buses after a morning yoga class, and the difference is notable. For the first thirty minutes. Not even yoga can defeat the discomfort of a Buenos Aires bus. And she isn’t really my sister, either.

The 64 also goes past my psychoanalyst’s office. Yes, I have an analyst. Living in Buenos Aires and not having a psychoanalyst is like living in Scotland and not drinking whisky. There’s such an abundant supply and the quality is so good, it would be a crime not to. Yoga and psychoanalysis are two of the greatest gifts that Buenos Aires has given me. Those two, and the phrase ‘Tampoco es la vaca del corso’ or ‘It’s hardly the carnival cow.’ It is no coincidence that I started writing my first novel in 2006, the same week that I added yoga to the analysis that I’d started a year earlier. There’s a theory that says that a writer or artist shouldn’t do psychoanalysis because it’s precisely the imperfection and tangled mess of a psyche that make the artist. It’s a theory invented by cowards. Psychoanalysis works to untangle the tangles so that you can write great works of literary prowess that fill humanity with unspeakable joy. Or write a book about how you bored your tits off taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, whatever.

(There’s a thought: it was just today I read a friend of a friend comment on Facebook: ‘there are three cures for all ills: psychotherapy, travel and writing.’ Colectivaizeishon feels like all three.)

Like psychoanalysis, yoga is ignored by a huge number who think that it’s all about sitting in absurdly contorted positions going ‘om’, when the reality is a demanding ninety minutes of physical effort that improves your muscles and posture and relaxes your mind. The only thing more relaxing than yoga that I’ve come across is sex, although that rarely lasts more than three minutes at a time, as my wife knows to her chagrin.

64 Buses (Photo: Lujan Agusti)

And I say chagrin, buy she rarely grins when we shag.

(I lose track of my thoughts momentarily when I’m distracted by a pretty girl walking down Avenida Santa Fe in a short spring dress. I love Avenida Sante Fe.)

For those Argentines reading these articles from abroad, when you next come back to Buenos Aires you’ll notice that our governors have avoided the need to invest in a transport system worthy of the 21st century, and instead have simply turned all the avenues that used to be one way into two-way avenues. Welcome to the future.

Taking by way of example the feminina-festooned Avenida Santa Fe, this has brought certain advantages. The streets either side of the avenue are free of buses and my sister-in-law can now watch TV with the window open. The return journey up Santa Fe instead of Güemes seems faster, and you don’t have to wander the side streets searching for the bus stop, as is the lamentable habit of the present author. Best of all, you get that transgressive thrill of feeling like you’re going the wrong way down the avenue, a thrill that lasts about as long as sex in the Tunnard household, but a thrill nonetheless. ‘Better than a kick in the teeth’, as my wife so often reflects.

But then, what else can be done to improve traffic? Santa Fe is too narrow to stick a tram down the middle, and there’s already a subway running under it. My solution, and you’re not going to like it, is to ban all cars and taxis from the avenue, make it exclusively for buses and bicycles, and widen the pavements for the pedestrians. I told you weren’t going to like it. Better still, ban all cars from entering the city. Like speedboats, the car should be a luxury item for weekend use only, one that you leave during the week in great storage houses on the outskirts of town, whence you take a utopian fast train into the city.

Of course, some people would be exempt from this new rule: doctors, the disabled, other noble cases. Police would have to go on horseback, because there’s nothing prettier than a policeman on a horse, unless you’re being baton-charged by one. Parents taking their kids to school would be totally banned from using cars ever, because they’re a bunch of lazy fuckers who only had children so that they could use them as excuses for their own shortcomings (unless they’re friends of mine and are giving me a lift somewhere, in which case ignore that comment.) And taxis will be replaced by little cars with pedals, like in Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone film. The taxi drivers will kick up a fuss about this at first, but they’ll end up thanking me when they see the positive health benefits. Like in that mineral water advert. ‘¡Gracias, máquina!’ they will cry. ‘What you have done has brought us great pleasure and fulfilment.’ Which is more than my wife ever says.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 8.

If there is one thing I have put more time, effort and thought into in my thirteen years in Buenos Aires, it’s finding a cheap way to get to Ezeiza airport. Those of you who live in Buenos Aires will know what a ballbreaker of an airport Ezeiza is to get to, and those of you who live in Argentina but outside Buenos Aires will know that these moaning porteños have no idea.

The week before my wedding in April 2011, I endeavoured to go to the world’s worst-located airport some five times to meet as many possible friends and relatives who’d taken almost as much time and money to come to my wedding as the time and money a trip to Ezeiza costs. So I started looking into cheap alternatives to getting to what was bewilderingly voted ‘Best Airport in the Americas’ a couple of years ago.

Colectivo number 8 in Buenos Aires (Photo: Maia Kano Worsnop)

The cheapest option, as many a cheapskate knows, is the bus formally known as the 86 but now known as the 8. The 86 still exists, but only the 8 goes to Ezeiza. There was a schism. They’re still on speaking terms, but you don’t want to be there when they bump into each other at parties. Very tense.

‘You look well’ says the 8.

‘You look lovely,’ says the 86.

’86, please… don’t,’ she implores him.

Then the 86 spends the evening staring longingly at the 8 from afar, getting steadily drunker and drunker. The 8 leaves with the 80, who she’s always carried a torch for, and the 86 just sits there, a single tear silently sliding into his whisky.

For a quarter of what it costs to just get into a taxi you can travel from Liniers or anywhere else on the southside of the city to Ezeiza Airport in about 2 and half hours. I’ve done this trip many a time. Got plenty of reading done. But it becomes a bit of a drag when you live an hour from Liniers and have to be at Ezeiza at 8am. Hence the search for cheaper options.

There’s a minibus that leaves from San Telmo, Defensa and Belgrano, eighteen of your pesitos. Leaves every fifteen minutes, but only 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday. Then there’s Manuel Tienda León.

Manuel Tienda León, or Tienda Ladrón as I humorously refer to them, safe in the knowledge that that joke will never get old, charge 50 of your pesos to go from Retiro to Ezeiza in an hour, and go on the hour, all night.

The day I go and pick up my sister, the first arrival for the wedding, I get to Retiro at 7.05am and the Tienda Lechón has just left. To my near-eternal joy, I spy a minibus right there with ‘Ezeiza Bus’ written across its snout in majestic purple letters.

‘Do you go to Ezeiza?’ I ask.

‘I stop in Ezeiza, yes.’ says the driver. Ah, fickle semantics.

‘How much?’

‘Seventeen of your pesitos’. Wait till I tell my wife about this, I think to myself. Seventeen pesos and I’ll be in Ezeiza in an hour.

And, in effect, after an hour has passed I find myself in Ezeiza. That is, the town called Ezeiza, not the airport called Ezeiza. We turned off the airport motorway with about three kilometres to spare. This is fine, I think. We’re probably just dropping a couple of people off, and then we’ll be right back on that motorway to the sky. I notice we’re passing Ezeiza railway station. ‘Fancy that’, I think. ‘I bet you could get a train here from Constitución, and then a taxi to the airport. And how much could a taxi cost from Ezeiza to Ezeiza, eh? It’s got to be ten pesos, tops’. I make a mental note to look into this later. I’ll find out the answer sooner.

Ezeiza and Tristan Suárez on Google Maps

We leave Ezeiza behind us and trundle along a bit. The bus is offloading somewhat and we’re now in a town called Tristán Suárez. I’m trying to work out whether Tristán Suárez sounds like the kind of town that only gets mentioned on the news in the crime segment, or the kind of town that Manuel Puig would set a novel in. Neither is good. After putting off speaking to anyone on the bus for fifteen crucially timid minutes, I finally drum up the courage to turn to the lady behind me and utter the fateful words:

‘Does this bus stop at the airport?’

‘Oh, no no. What? Airport? No. You should’ve got off ages ago!’

I tell the driver that there’s been a kafuffle. The driver acts like it’s all my fault, as if parading round Retiro in a white van marked ‘Ezeiza’ wasn’t a deliberate ploy to con thousands of cheapskates out of seventeen pesos on a daily basis. He drops me at a taxi rank. The word for taxi rank in Spanish is ‘remisería’. This transliterates as ‘great poverty’. It’s that kind of taxi rank.

‘How much to the airport’. It’s got to be like five pesos tops. I’ve been in taxis in the provinces, they never cost more than five pesos.

‘Fifty six pesos plus tolls.’

Ah. My mother’s voice appears in my head, talking about false economy. I hate it when my mother’s right.

There’s a twenty-minute wait until the taxi turns up, so I stand outside and breathe in the picturesque joys of Tristán Suárez. After that, it’s a nineteen-and-a-half minute wait for the taxi.

It’s then a twenty-minute ride, at one hundred kilometres per hour, mind you, to the airport. I work out I must have overshot my target by about thirty-three kilometres. Impeccable arithmetic under pressure, that’s what I pride myself on.

I get to the airport at 9am to find my sister’s flight arrived with a slight delay and she hasn’t got off the plane yet. This is turning into a Seinfeld episode.

Time passes. There is no sign of my sister.

McCafe in Argentina (Photo: Maia Kano Worsnop)

I notice to my joy that McDonald’s has set up shop in Terminal A, and that their prices are the same as in the city. This is great news because it is the business philosophy of all the other eateries at Ezeiza Airport that if you haven’t been robbed during your time in Argentina, they will at least ensure this experience for you before you leave. My McDonald’s breakfast is a skinflint’s twelve-peso delight, the one small crack of bargain in an overcast sky of overspend.

It gets to 9.40 and I ask if I can see the passenger list. They don’t let you do that anymore. Shame, it’s exciting asking to see passenger lists. You can still ask, but you know it’s going to be in vain.

It gets to 10am and I phone my wife and ask her to check my e-mail to see if my sister’s been in touch. I tell her to phone me back. Like I said, bit of a skinflint.

She phones me back. I got the dates wrong. My sister arrives tomorrow.