Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The No. 124.

Villa Devoto (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The bus goes down a street called Ramón Lista and I have no idea where I am, among the anonymous grey buildings and the abject lack of any distinguishing feature. I think it’s Villa Devoto, because it’s so anonymous that it looks like nowhere in particular, which is in fact Villa Devoto’s most distinguishing feature. I check in the map book. It is indeed Villa Devoto, the barrio where middle-class porteños go to die when they can no longer stand the thrill of achingly beautiful architecture.

As there is nothing to write about outside the bus, I’m forced to examine the urban fauna within it. A man sits down in the seat in front of me. He’s about forty and has long, curly greying hair in a classic Bryan May style. I like this in Buenos Aires’ men, their obliviousness to the fact that after the age of 32, long hair is no longer an option, least of all when it is accompanied by notably incipient alopecia. And yet, this man is clear evidence that in this city you can look like the unlikely lovechild of Isaac Newton and George Costanza and still have an attractive girlfriend. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many average-looking foreign men with stunning Argentine women on their arms, there’s your answer.

This 124 is a very conversational bus. I do a head count and discover that there are nine different conversations underway. In fact, everyone on this bus is talking to the person sitting next to them, except me. The girl next to me is reading Lolita, and I’m tempted to strike up a conversation about Nabokov, just so she doesn’t feel left out, but I’m concerned that she’ll see me as the kind of person who starts conversations with strangers on the bus, and a conversation about a novel that deals with paedophilia sympathetically, to boot. A lot of people ask me why I don’t speak to other passengers on the buses, as if I was a journalist, failing to realise that if you’re a woman and some stranger on the bus starts asking you where you live and where you’re going, it’s a bit creepy. In twenty years’ time, when I write the inevitable 20th anniversary re-edition of Colectivaizeishon, then I’ll be able to talk to the passengers, when I’m old and a bit weird and the girls on the bus see me as a strange man, but a harmless and somewhat eccentric strange man, like a distant uncle only without all the groping.

Because I wasted an hour wandering lost around La Boca in a failed attempt to find the bus stop for the 8 or the 86, and then ended up taking the 53 and the 124, it’s now half past five and I’ve still got five hours’ more bus travel before I finish for the day. The clock is ticking as we crawl down Corrientes in that way buses do on Sundays. If I carry on, I’ll wind up taking the 152 in La Boca at the same time the Boca match finishes. I’m willing to withstand all kinds of discomforts in my quest to take all the buses in Buenos Aires, but spending two hours on a bus filled with Boca fans is not one of them. I could get off at the Law Faculty, take the 67 and be home in half an hour. Or, I could cover those sixty blocks to my house via the most roundabout way imaginable, taking the 124 back to Villa Devoto, the 53 to La Boca and the 152 to Puente Saavedra and then walking the thirty blocks home. I want to take the more difficult route, because a wise man once said the hardest way is often the most worthwhile way. But the wise man would have come better prepared for this nippy spring evening, and would be wise enough not to put himself deliberately in a situation of being surrounded by 40,000 Boca fans on a Sunday night. I go home.

I complete the return parts of the three routes the next day. I discover that the “Neotrans” electronic news boards still exist on those buses built around 2000, when Argentina was still deluding itself about its economy and people didn’t have mobile phones with better jokes and more up-to-date news. The “Neotrans” board is pretty crap (older readers may also fondly remember “Infotrans”, which was the same shite, like doing a taste test between Quilmes and Brahma). It tells us that a yacht has exploded in Tigre, some eight days after the fact. And it tells us the etymology of the word “testify”, which according to Neotrans derives from Roman senators’ tendency to touch their testicles while swearing an oath. This is a load of balls, no pun intended (yeah, OK, pun fully intended.) Both “testify” and “testicle” come from “testis”, the Latin for “witness”, from a root that means “third person”. If one testified, they did so as a reliable third person. “Testicles” was coined by the Romans as a joke, as a way of saying that one’s nuts were “witnesses” to the “feats” of the member. Of course, this is a bit more risqué to be putting on a Neotrans news board, even though no one pays it the slightest heed, because everyone’s bought Blackberrys for their renowned superiority in matters etymological.

We go past a bar called “Cosmos 69 Bar Wiskería”. I learnt very recently that a “wiskería” is not, to my chagrin, a place where one goes to savour a range of fine imported whiskies, but is in fact a euphemism for “knocking shop”. It would be great if I had an anecdote about the terribly embarrassing way in which I uncovered this small truth, but I haven’t. My wife told me, after seeing me gazing longingly at the whiskerías that line Route 14 to Entre Ríos. My apologies for the lack of a more mortifying anecdote in the present paragraph.

Corrientes during a weekday is a bit different than on the weekend. (Photo: Edgardo Milla)

The difference between taking the 124 on a Monday instead of taking it on a Sunday is that on Sundays the bus goes at about five blocks a minute, while the next day the bus gets caught up in the Monday traffic and goes at about five blocks a minute. I entertain myself by looking at all the cotillón shops in Once. Cotillón, one of my favourite words in the Spanish language, is a catch-all term for all manner of party hats, wigs and other accessories. As much as I like the word, looking at shop after shop of the stuff is not the most entertaining way to pass the time on the bus. I get to wondering why there are so many cotillón shops in Once. It’s not like the barrio has this great reputation for partying.

Here’s something else I get to wondering: Is Lavalle the ugliest street in the whole city? The observant reader will know that Lavalle’s route takes in the pedestrian street where the high society once took in moving pictures but where today the low society gets taken in by fake sports gear, the crowded streets around the law courts, the tat shops in Once, the waste coming out of the back end of Abasto Shopping Centre and ending with five pot-holed blocks in Almagro, before it gets swallowed up into Avenida Córdoba. What kind of person was Lavalle to deserve such a homage? I try to think of everything I know about Lavalle. First name: Juan. Sent Dorrego to the firing squad, or Dorrego sent Lavalle to the firing squad, or maybe they just duelled with pistols. I remember he pops up a lot in Sabato’s On Heroes and Tombs, but I read the book about ten years ago, when my Spanish and understanding of Argentine history were sketchy at best, and can remember little or nothing. There were some elms, or someone called Elms, or a place called Elms. That’s about it.

Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography, this time deciding to use his feet, rather than a cab, to get from the city airport home.

When was the last time you walked home from the airport?

The British author Will Self walked from his home in central London to Heathrow Airport and then upon touching down in New York, walked from JFK airport to his hotel in Manhattan. Why would he do this? It was an attempt to curb a sense of spatial dislocation.

With this in mind, I decided to test the walkability of Buenos Aires’ Jorge Newbery airport, what has to be one of the more centrally located airports in the world, a mere 5 km from residential Palermo. I hardly think Ezeiza is an option, some 40km south-west of the centre.

Walking to and from airports is about a lot more than fitness or fascination, it’s about grounding oneself after the strong effects of flying.

My first arrival to BsAs from Paris CDG prompted near Olympic-level mental gymnastics. My brain was running in high gear to process the new surroundings and sensations that my body was experiencing. My sense of direction was hopelessly lost, staring at the setting sun unable to accept its westward-ness. It took weeks to regain, and in a sense, relearn, my bearings.

This time, I decided to linger in the airport a little longer than usual, taking in the hustle and bustle before exiting the dark tinted sliding doors leading to the world beyond.

Spatial dislocation consists in the feeling that you are in a place other than the one where you actually physically are. It happens when the brain and the body have incongruent sensations and are fed distinct and seemingly contradictory stimuli.

Walking out of the JN airport, I can imagine anyone might experience some sense of spatial dislocation simply as a result of the sweat filled upper body crevices of the topless fisherman and of course the charcoal-infused smell of choripan mixing with car fumes. A blistering affront to the visual-olfactory, mixing the good, the bad, the wondrous and unsettling.

In general, a number of factors can contribute to spatial dislocation or disorientation when flying; this includes more than just distance covered but includes the mode of transport, as well as design and architecture.

Airports: Departure

It is hard for most travellers to describe the architectural, or for that matter, any differences between airports, with the exception, perhaps, of better amenities, cleaner toilets, or the rarity of benches without the annoying armrests. Originally extrapolated from train stations, airports have become increasingly sterilized conduits of movement. To use Rem Koolhaas’ term, they are ‘nowhere architecture’.

The airport’s nowhere-ness disengages our sense from whence we depart. Therefore, by the time I boarded my plane in CDG on my way to Buenos Aires, I felt as if I was no longer departing from Paris, but from a uniform portal that could be anywhere in the world, be it Tokyo or Cape Town.

Flying:

In the air we naturally suffer other forms of alienation. We hover deceptively motionless, oblivious to the wonder of air travel, the beautiful landscapes below, and the mundanity in which it is served up and packaged for us. I am perplexed by the lack of travellers’ curiosity with the views outside the windows, whether it’s the expansive lingering sunsets or patchwork topography. One of my favourite views is of Greenland when flying LHR to YVR, I cannot understand why there are not collective gasps and fanfare from amongst the passengers at the immense glaciers and dark craggy mountain peaks.

Arrival:

And then arrival, a mirrored experience of departure, the same transnational architecture, a mirror image of what we had just departed 12 hours earlier—almost as if we haven’t moved at all. Nevertheless, when we exit we are confronted with a new reality—the local; and in the case of JN, greased up men with fishing poles.

As I thought about these stages of spatial dislocation, I finally exited the doors of the air-conditioned airport and strolled over to the riverside and made my way southwards towards the rounded jetty. I found it unusual to see so much life so near to the airport; there were picnics, young and old men fishing, cyclists and even some travellers playing dice-games while sitting on their suitcases-probably waiting between connections.

I continued southwards along the Costanera Norte towards the giant pier and mock-Tudor clubhouse. My curiosity growing, I began to spot the odd person on the pier. From a distance it looked abandoned. I detoured from my walk to investigate further and came across the dignified world of the Club de Pescadores, founded in 1903. Here, some thousand members can fish uninterrupted. Claiming to be a journalist, I was given ‘special permission’ to walk the pier which is strictly for members only; it is an exaggeratedly long structure considering its limited use.

I continued south by southwest, walking alongside the fence that cordons off the well-kept airport lawn. It was empty of pedestrians but I did come across a statue remembering a 1949 air disaster, where a group of humanitarians who travelled to Ecuador to assist in relief work suffered an internal fire that brought down the plane into a farmer’s field, killing five passengers. The statue is captivating, an airplane in flames and out of the flames rise two nude women—likely to be the nurses who perished.

The solitude and constant motion of walking lends itself to introspection. Travel itself, particularly long distance, has profound impacts on the brain. The neuroscientist/ journalist Jonah Lehren’s work on travel and the mind puts forward some compelling arguments for travel, even if only to brighten ones’ thinking or ability to problem-solve.

In particular, air travel provides an unusually conducive environment for existential cogitation. Ironically, for many of us the airplane is a place of personal stasis, despite travelling at 900km per hour, time seems to slow down, often inducing self-reflection.

Having walked the length of the airport and turned westwards towards the Planetarium the sidewalk abruptly ended. The only thing that separated me from the green parklands of the Palermo Bosque was a large underpass with no shoulder to walk on and fast moving traffic.

After some scouting I noticed a well-worn dirt footpath in the dry grass. I followed it for a time, letting it lead me beside empty patches of dis-used tarmac, piles of rubbish, and finally to a barbed wire fence barring me from crossing a set of train tracks.

I searched the area for possible options amidst a cacophony of dog barks and the noise of trains screaming by. Finally, I found a hole in the fence that had been pried open, I crawled through, praying none of the dogs would follow. Luckily, a similar opening had been forced on the adjacent fence. Once through, the rest was a smooth walk into the city.

Later, upon discussing my journey to a friend, I was informed that there is, indeed, a walkway that sits elevated from the traffic but below this same underpass. Intrigued, I decided to reverse the direction of my previous walk and sure enough, and plainly to see from the other side, is a well constructed walking option. In the end, there was no need for any crawling through fences or evading rabid dogs.

The Jorge Newbery airport is an example of how airports can be walked-to. For good or bad it is part of the urban space around it, linked not only by road but also by foot and bicycle.

For many cities, walking to and from the airport means walking outside of the urban-planned parameters, which is an act of subversion. In this case, it is less so.

Next time you fly to Jorge Newberry or are meeting someone at the arrivals, you may wish to consider walking there.