Buenos Aires on tour (Photo: Leandro Kibisz)
There’s something about riding a tourist bus that can make you feel like a goldfish in a bowl. The world goes on outside and all there is to do is to sit and watch. But visitors have adhered to these buses in all major cosmopolitan cities, like London, New York and even Buenos Aires, as they can hop on and hop off at any of the stops and visit sites at their own pace. While on it, they’re given a set of headphones from which they get a condensed narrative of the history and culture of the city from a recording, usually translated into a few languages. This concept is designed so that when a visitor gets to the airport on their way back home, they feel confident they know their alfajores from their medialunas. It’s the fast food of tourism.
I have nothing against fast food; I just generally don’t eat it myself. Plus I like the illusion of thinking of myself as a hardcore traveller, who backpacks by thumb and thinks the best way to get cultural experience is to move in with local hippies. But I would lie if I said I had never been on a tourist bus. They featured majorly on family holidays because they’re practical and easy, particularly if you’re short on time. In our case it also helped with family dynamics. My brother could pull my hair, I could kick his chin and my mother could pretend she wasn’t looking. Ah, those were happy times.
So when the opportunity came to hop on one of the Buenos Aires Buses, I thought: “Why not?” I had been here a while and sadly hadn’t seen many of the famous sites since my first visit to the city a while back.
Out of habit, I stuck my thumb out when the yellow bus turned the corner and nonchalantly showed them my reasonably priced (for this type of activity) ticket. It costs $70 for a 24 hour ticket, $90 for double the time and half of that for minors. Residents and pensioners get a discount ($50 and $35 accordingly) and there are family promotions and online purchase discounts. An attractive guide dressed in uniform flashed her warm smile and gave passengers their headphones but no informative leaflet, as promised on the website.
Amidst newlyweds, the elderly and families, I sat on the top deck and enjoyed the view to the sound of tango music that interspersed with dry, monotonic information given through the headphones. There’s a group on facebook called ‘Pretend to be a happy citizen when the tourist bus goes past’ (Simular ser un ciudadano feliz cuando pasa el Bus Turístico), so I decided to do the opposite and look like a happy tourist, taking everyone else’s prompt and clicking away with my camera.
Buenos Aires Tour Bus (Photo: RAYANDBEE)
Soon enough I started talking to other passengers. “The recording is not synchronised with what we see!,” complained Carla Bianchi, a 28 year-old Brazilian girl who has been living in Buenos Aires with her husband and took the bus to accompany her visiting parents. I confirmed that it wasn’t, and even when it was, descriptions were too vague for us to follow them. “The building half-way through the block is where Belgrano’s house originally stood,” the recording would say. Wait, was that on the right or the left? Which one of the many buildings would it be? Like goldfish in a bowl, we were all looking out without understanding what that meant. You could choose between ten different languages to be out of sync with, though none of the devices I tried had the complete set of channels functioning.
The guide warned through loud speakers which bus stop we were at. Passengers had to tune out of the explanations on the headphones and try to listen. Apart from when I asked her whether the flat screens worked (they didn’t), she gave no further information. I was left wondering what the music festival we drove past in Boca was about, and why we deviated from our original route.
Despite these problems, I learned a lot more than I thought I would on the ride. Did you know that Buenos Aires holds the largest Islamic centre in Latin America? Or that the street names in Puerto Madero pay homage to important women in Argentine history? Or that pato is the national sport? I have now become fully equipped to join a local pub quiz team. Plus I can name buildings I used to walk past before and not even look at them twice. Or at least, I know the streets they are in.
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