City bus and train fares will increase tomorrow while subte fares will remain the same for now. The minimum bus fare will increase from $1.10 to $1.50 and the minimum train fare will increase from $0.70 to $1.00. Passengers who pay without a SUBE card will have a doubled fare.

Minister of Interior and Transportation Florencio Randazzo announced today that these increases will be implemented tomorrow 21st December. He said that fares for retirees, beneficiaries of the Universal Child Allowance, maids, veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas War, and primary and secondary school students will remain the same.

Rendazzo’s goal for the future is that SUBE cards will recognise each passenger’s status and charge them accordingly. This project is a work in progress, he explained.

In other transport news, after 14 hours of legislative debate on Wednesday, the bill to transfer the subte services from the national government to the City of Buenos Aires was passed.

“There is no plan on increases in subte rates in the short term,” mayor Mauricio announced today.

The bill that was agreed upon Wednesday will increase city road tolls and also increase car registration fees for high-end vehicles. With these increases, Macri expects to collect $550 million – $600 million. He estimates that this will help compensate for the $360 million that the national government will not be providing after January.

During negotiations, Macri withdrew his plan of increasing $0.40 per litre of petrol but did agree to increase the stamp duty. He also attempted to limit the union’s striking power but settled for an agreement that unions will have to announce strikes 48 hours beforehand.

The nine rolling up Piedras (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

There are Buenos Aires bus journeys that inspire, and there are Buenos Aires bus journeys that dull the will to live. The journey on the 9 is one of the latter.

The number 9 has the old-fashioned buses, with antediluvian ticket machines that you have to thump to get your ticket. I get my first palindrome ticket: 000989. I know it’s not a perfect palindrome from the point of view of those who trouble themselves with such matters, but it’s my palindrome ticket and I’m calling a double palindrome.

Getting a palindrome ticket is a meaningful life happening in Buenos Aires. What does it mean? I don’t know.

I go past Del Tigre street and wonder if there’s a street called Ojo del Tigre, or Eye of the Tiger Street. There isn’t. I notice that while all the greengrocers in the city have agreed to sell three bunches of spinach for five pesos, the Frutería Daiana in Pompeya is selling four bunches for the same price. Can you imagine the comparative strength the people of Pompeya must have if they’re eating 33% more spinach than the rest of Buenos Aires? The sons of Pompeya are the sons of Popeye.

The bus driver has a face of a thousand journeys on the 9. He looks like he hasn’t slept for a week and when he does manage to drop off, his wife injects fluid into the bags under his eyes so that they swell up and he looks older than her. It takes us twenty-five minutes to cover the eleven blocks from Esmeralda and Avenida de Mayo to Esmeralda and Santa Fe I amuse myself by recalling the first Argentine joke I ever learnt:

Q: How do you turn stones into emerald?

A: By crossing Rivadavia.

For full enjoyment of this joke, you need to know that the street called Piedras (stones) turns into Esmeralda (emerald) after it crosses Av. Rivadavia, but if you laughed without knowing full background to the joke then full credit to you and your postmodernist worldview.

Waiting for the 9 (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

I get off the number 9 at Retiro and get on another 9 going back to Puente Alsina. I’d like to stay on the bus to see where it goes after dropping off the last passenger. I’m pretty sure there’s a private beach there behind the bus station, where the drivers stretch out on the sand while unemployed starlets give them non-alcoholic cocktails and foot rubs and perform a storming rendition of a selection of songs from The Sound of Music. But the bus driver kicks me off at the last stop, I’ll never know for sure. Let’s just agree that that’s what happens, and move on.

On the journey back I have the arguable pleasure of listening to the phone conversation of the young lady sitting next to me with her dyed orange hair and inauthentic sport jacket. She is providing a friend with the minutiae of a somewhat complicated relationship, and I keep count in my notebook of how many times she uses the world “boluda”, literally a woman with big balls or an idiot, but more frequently used as a verbal crutch by people with self-expression difficulties, in this case pronounced “wolúa”. It’s probably classist of me to say so but it gets easy laughs. In the ten blocks between Marcelo T and Avenida de Mayo she says “wolúa” some twenty-two times, in addition to nine “nada” (which means “nothing” but is to certain Porteños what “y’know” is to David Beckham), six friendly “shut up” which I believe is an international mannerism, although this woman’s shut ups usually come out as “shut up big-balled woman”, four uses of the word “mal” which means “bad” but is used here as “a lot”, and one “too much”, which despite the existence of a perfectly acceptable equivalent in Spanish, many Argentines choose to render in English, and usually as “too match”, to show what idiots they are. But then she gives her seat to an old lady with a walking stick while I’m scribbling down my classist diatribe, so who’s the twat now?

As we go past Parque Patricios, I have one of many moments during this bus thing where I learn something that I would never have learnt had I chosen not to take all the buses in Buenos Aires but instead stay at home playing Scrabble against myself like I usually do. I see a poster commemorating the anniversary of 28 September 1966, when eighteen young Peronists hijacked an Aerolíneas Argentinas plane and forced it to land on the Falkland Islands, where they flew the Argentine flag for a bit before being told to do one. Some of them were killed. It’s a story that causes a strong impression on me. Those were different times, times when you could trust Aerolíneas Argentinas to take off on time and have enough fuel to reach the islands without crashing. I bet the food was better as well. (For those readers who have never had the dubious pleasure of flying with Aerolíneas Argentinas, it’s like Easy Jet only full price.)

Coming to the end of the route, we have to wait five minutes at the level crossing. You don’t often see level crossings in big cities like New York or London, and the city government is working on getting  rid of them as it’s finally dawned that Argentine drivers are too stupid to stop at the barrier. I’ll be sorry to see them go. As a boy, it was always a disappointment to get to a level crossing and find it open.

Granted, I was a nascent trainspotter, but who doesn’t feel that frisson of excitement of waiting for a train to go past? Trains are magical, and if we’re not capable of giving five minutes of our time to admire the passing of these glorious engines, then something is seriously wrong. It’s a matter of reverence. The train is the best form of transport, so it’s only right that the level crossing hierarchy be observed here. They should bring back the trams, while they’re at it. Pulled by horses.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 32.

As today is Rosh Hashanah, I have half an idea to write about the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. But despite travelling on the 19 between Belgrano and Once, the most heavily populated parts of Jewish Buenos Aires, I don’t see any of this. On reflection, I don’t know what I expected to see, lots of men in black hats dancing to “Hava Nagila”, I don’t know. I see lots of colectivos but very little of the colectividad, which is a fine joke in Spanish, rest assured. In the first days of Colectivaizeishon I go out with a vague idea in my mind of what each bus chapter is going to be about. By the third day, I give up on the idea and let the 32 show me its surprises, which are not small in number. They are zero in number.

Plaza Miserere (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

The 32 starts its route in Plaza Miserere. During the second British invasion of 1807 (although many maintain that this so-called “invasion” was a mere misunderstanding, and that it was really just a case of typical Brits abroad, drunk and yobbish perhaps, but hardly an invasion) there was a battle known as the “Combate de Miserere” which took place in the Miserere Corrals, part of which is now Plaza Miserere. While many squares, avenues and streets of this city are named after battles (Caseros, Ituzaingó, Maipú, and something like a hundred more, but I haven’t yet been bored enough on the buses to count them all), Plaza Miserere is the only square, avenue or street in Buenos Aires which did the opposite and gave its name to a battle.

In the plaza, a group of Andeans play a prerecorded version of Abba’s “Chiquitita” on their sound system. I’m about to bemoan the loss of so much culture that in the name of entertainment the natives of the altiplano have now got rid of their centuries-old instruments and songs and resorted to playing ersatz renditions of a Swedish band’s songs over a PA made in China, but it turns out they’re having a coffee break, and they’ll be back shortly to play that Simon & Garfunkel song and “Lambada”.

There’s a school kid occupying my official Colectivaizeishon seat (at the back, next to the door), listening to music on his school laptop (all Argentine state school kids get free laptops, which sounds progressive, until you see the state the state schools are in.) This is the fourth time I’ve seen a school kid using one of these laptops, and none of them have been studying. But then again, like many boys I used to use my own school exercise books for drawing pictures of willies and writing lyrics for my imaginary rock band. “Hey girl, gonna make you sweat, your loving life ain’t over yet” being one memorable line written by this staunchly virginal 14-year-old listening to too much Led Zeppelin.

Parque Patricios (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

In the window of a lottery agency in Parque Patricios I read a sign that says “THERE IS NO MONTEVIDEO”. What happened to Montevideo? What’s filling in for Montevideo while it’s not existing, or is there just a void, a black hole in the south of Uruguay where Montevideo used to be? But if Montevideo is a black hole, is it not that Montevideo continues to exist, albeit in the form of a black hole? Or am I being facetious and deliberately confusing the Montevideo lottery with the city itself? Sounds like a facile explanation.

There’s something about the names Puente Alsina, Puente Pueyrredón and Puente de la Noria that fills me with trepidation. These are bridges towards the unknown, towards the Province of Buenos Aires, with its dragons and stuff. But I’m beginning to think that this attitude is down to my living in a mansion in Belgrano, imagining in the outskirts of town this subclass of delinquents and ne’er-do-wells. So to shake off this perception and prove to myself just how brave I am, I cross Puente Alsina, on foot, no less, and enter for the first time ever the district of Lanús. Check me out. The fact that there are hundreds of people doing the exact same thing as me at this very moment, and without the slightest indication that they are undertaking an act of the noblest valour, takes a little of the sheen off my achievement.

The River Riachuelo below the bridge is to perfume what Diego Maradona is to humility. I try to imagine what this river was like when it was a major waterway, highly navigable, clean and of great importance to the city. Now you get the impression that they could pave it over and turn it into a motorway and not even Greenpeace would give a solitary one. The world’s third-most contaminated river, in 1993 María Julia Alsogaray (Secretary for Environment & Embezzlement during the first Menem administration, when everyone still liked him and his comedy sideburns) submitted a plan to clean it up within 1,000 days. María Julia was missing a couple of zeros, and not for the last time.

Puente Alsina leads you to the town of Valentín Alsina, named after the chap who administered the construction of one of the original bridges. The current bridge, painted in that neo-colonial style that makes you wonder why the neocolonialists had such a thing for the colour mustard, was renamed after de facto president José Félix Uriburu, then renamed Puente Alsina again in 2002. Can you imagine building a bridge, and then a couple of years later they take your name off it and give it the name of an evil military dictator? Then again, I’m pretty sure that with a name like Valentín, Mr. Alsina didn’t get his hands dirty in the actual nitty-gritty of building the thing. That’s the good thing about being an administrator, someone else does all the work and you take all the credit. I should have “administrated” this book, instead of wasting my days examining the historic bridges of Lanús.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 19.

Avenida Melian (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

Most of the buses that go from Saavedra Bridge to Once do so via avenues Cabildo, Santa Fe and Pueyrreddón. The 19 isn’t like other buses. The 19 is a maverick, a bus that plays by its own rules, a bus that knows that the best way to get somewhere isn’t always the shortest way. In short, the 19 is what is popularly known as “vueltero”, meaning that, rather like my narrative style, it goes round and round and back on itself without ever really getting anywhere.

And so we quickly get off nippy avenida Cabildo and head down avenida San Isidro for one block, turn immediately down Arias for a couple of blocks, and so on like that until we get to Once some twenty-five streets later. But it’s a quieter, more picturesque route, and really, when was the last time you were in a hurry to get to Once? Once is so called because that’s the number of times people hurry there before deciding they would do well to tarry in the future. You can’t beat a bit of tarrying where Once is concerned. Plus, the undeniable roundaboutness of this bus route means that I get to go past the premises of one of many former employers, the Buenos Aires Japanese School.

When I started at this school I had an interview with the director of English studies and the school principal, both of them Japanese who had worked in Buenos Aires on a three-year jolly and were gearing up to go back to the real world, or “Nihon” as they called it. (I lied to you just now about why Once is called Once. Sorry. Once actually means “Eleven”, as in 11^th of September.) The principal was an old and very curious fellow. During the interview, he’d ask me questions in English, such as “Where you from?”

I’d answer “Manchester”.

“Ah, sooooo desuka?” the principal would say (I trust you have a rudimentary grasp of Japanese. It’s not that 11^th of September, by the way.) Then he’d nod his head and sit in silence for about thirty seconds, deeply contemplating my answer. He asked me about four questions, and after every one of my answers he’d do the same: “sooooo desu”, head nodding, thirty seconds of silent contemplation, which may have actually been an attempt to recall his basic primary school English. To be honest, I liked this guy’s interview technique, once (that’s once in the usual English sense, not Once the area of Buenos Aires named after the 11th September 1888) I’d got over my own discomfort with these long silences. Can you imagine that kind of silence between three porteños? It’s a miracle if the three of them don’t all speak at the same time. This place, I quickly decided, was the place for me. (11th September, by the way, was when Domingo Faustino Sarmiento died.)

It didn’t take me long to realise that teaching English to Japanese kids isn’t the same as teaching English to Argentine adults. Unlikely though it may seem, the latter group speaks English with all the grace and fluency of Prince Charles compared with the former. After two months at the school, I’d given up on the possibility of ever teaching them to conjugate verbs or form coherent sentences and was concentrating on teaching them all the names of the fruits, which was the only thing they were interested in, apart from calling me rude names in Spanish (Sarmiento was kind of the father of education in Argentina, and advocated encouraging British and American teachers to immigrate to Argentina. He clearly didn’t have my type in mind.)

Japanese School (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

My most frequent lesson was “Fruit Salad”. Every pupil had to stand inside a hula hoop with all the hula hoops laid out in a circle, and I gave each pupil the name of a fruit. The pupil in the middle had to shout out the name of a fruit, and all the students who were that fruit had to swap places and occupy another hula hoop. Hours of fun. Or twenty minutes of fun, which was how long the classes were. If the pupil shouted “Fruit Salad”, they all had to swap places. Oh, the mayhem. This accounted for about eighty percent of all my classes. Somewhere in Japan right now, there are several teenagers who can’t speak a word of English but can enumerate all the fruits you’d care to mention.

End of term brought free outings to the best Japanese restaurants in the city, after which the wives would go home with their kids and the men would go to one of various Japanese karaoke bars. These are secret places and effectively exclusive for Japanese, mainly because even if you or I could find them, we wouldn’t be able to afford the entrance fee and the whisky. And these Japanese drank whisky. In fact, the only drinks available were whisky and water, and in the great Japanese tradition every teacher had his own bottle behind the bar with his name on a label. Before they’d downed their first Chivas, they’d start singing. You have not experienced everything Buenos Aires has to offer until you’ve sung “We Are The World” and “Shima Uta” with two middle-aged Japanese men in a speakeasy in Barrio Norte.

When I left the school in 2006, we went out for sushi once again and I was asked to say a few words, and since I’m rarely the kind of person who turns down the chance to speak about himself to a captive audience, I told them this story:

When I’d started at the school three years earlier, I was told that I’d be teaching my classes in the “prayer room”, which I understood to be a kind of chapel, as we all had to take our shoes off before entering. The room didn’t look much like a chapel, just a big TV and a new carpet, but I knew these Asians to be spartan in their places of worship and thought nothing of it. A couple of years went by until one day I asked Marcelo, one of the few Argentine teachers at the school, if that day’s class was in “the chapel”.

“The what?”

“The chapel. You know, the prayer room.”

“No, boludo, that’s the playroom!”

“So why do we have to take our shoes off when we go in?”

“To keep the carpet clean!”

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 6.

The Six on route to Retiro. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

I’m about to take the 6 in Retiro when it becomes painfully manifest that I have a large project inside of me that has come to fruition and will be needing a public toilet before I got to Villa Soldati, bearing in mind the effect that my exaggerated fear of certain southside barrios have on my digestive system. But I also know that Retiro is distinctly lacking in the facilities necessary for those of us who consider ourselves discerning in this respect, so I go up the hill to Plaza San Martín and by chance find myself right outside the café where, on the day I first arrived in Buenos Aires 14 years ago, I was shown how to get to Av. San Martín and Juan B Justo.

Although this may not sound like much, this was at the time an act of immeasurable solidarity because I’d already spent over two hours looking for this junction, after an 18-hour coach trip from Asunción. It’s hard to believe it these days when there are areas of Buenos Aires that have hostels on every corner, but back in 1997 there were only two hostels in the whole of the city. In those days they were called “hostales”, with a silent h, and the word “hostel” did not come to be pronounced with an aspirated h until 2003, when porteños started to aspire once again. (I’m very proud of this joke and hope you enjoy it too. If you don’t get it, have a cup of tea and read the paragraph again, slowly this time. If you still don’t get, try not to let it trouble you. The world of humour is a vast and varied finger buffet, at which linguistics-based jokes are the neglected fishy bowl in which few people dare to dip their crudités)

One of the city’s two hostels was in Constitución and the other, recommended by the legendary South American Handbook, was in La Paternal, home of legendary blues legend Pappo, although the legendary South American Handbook made scant mention of this. Said mythical guidebook-cum-bible came with a map of the city centre, in which I could clearly see that what I supposed was Av. San Martín was just a few steps away from Retiro bus station. The map finished at Rivadavia so I couldn’t see Av. Juan B Justo, but it was obvious to any arrogant young traveller that by walking along San Martín one could easily get there.

I strapped on my rucksack and started walking. I got to the end of San Martín street without finding the junction with Juan B Justo, so I supposed I’d missed it, turned around and walked all the way back down San Martín, under the February sun (for reasons I’ve never been able to satisfactorily explain, February is summer in Argentina, as is December. August is winter. Crazy fucking Argentines) and with a 30-pound rucksack on my back. I got to the end of San Martín again. Nothing doing. Bear in mind that I was a man (still am, technically) and, far worse, a 20-year-old man, so there wasn’t even the slightest chance of my asking for directions.

An hour later, with San Martín street now well and truly covered, Juan B Justo remained conspicuous by its absence, so I gave in and asked a policeman standing on San Martín and Perón. Don’t be picturing a policeman standing on the rotting corpse of a popular political icon. Perón is the name of a street. I should have also explained earlier than San Martín here refers to the street, and not to the rotting corpse of The Liberator of Argentina, Chile, and Peru, although said corpse can in fact be found at the end of San Martín, buried in the Cathedral.

“No, pibe,” says the policeman. “You have to take a bus.”

I thanked him and walked off grumbling fucking lazy-arse Argentine police telling me to take a bus when I’m already on San Martín. There was no way I was spending  60 centavos on a bus, when at that time for the same sum you could buy a Coke, a pack of fags and an Ugi’s pizza.

Eventually, after two and a half hours, with salt stains on my rucksack from sweating so much, I stopped by a bar in Plaza San Martín to clean myself up, and finally my will broke. I asked the men at the bar how to get to Av. Juan B Justo and San Martín. They didn’t know either, but they got out their Guía “T” and showed me how to take my first Buenos Aires bus. I think it was the 106. It turned out there were two thoroughfares in Buenos Aires called San Martín. They do this on purpose, to annoy the tourists. (The reason why all this is relevant is because I then met my future first ex-wife through this hostel, and lived there for a whole year in 1999. But that’s a different chapter. The book will be far better-written than this, promise.)

San Martin in springtime (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Fourteen years later I find myself outside the same bar, needing another act of solidarity. But the bar changed owners years ago and it now calls itself a “bistro”. “Bistro” sounds like an easy way to fleece you of 50 pesos for a toasted sandwich and a Coke, and besides, everyone knows where the best public toilets are in any place in any city, because they have 27,000 premises in 120 countries (the phrases “turtle head” and “McShit” were bowdlerised from this article by my wife. This was probably a good thing), and the closest one is on Florida and Marcelo T. Intrepid reader, not since Martín Palermo scored his last-minute goal against Peru has anyone in the history of this city felt such relief.

After that, the trip to Villa Soldati and back to Retiro passes without incident. The most interesting thing I see is an advert in the window of an ophthalmologist’s in Once for audigafas, or if you want a bad translation, hearispecs. Hearispecs, in case you haven’t heard, or indeed seen, are spectacles with built-in hearing aids in the arms of the specs. By the time you and I are old enough to need them, there will be spectacles that come with everything built in: hearing aids, false teeth, colostomy bag, comedy moustache and a little chain so you can take off the whole apparatus and hang it round your neck when you want to watch Songs of Praise (for non-British readers, Songs of Praise is a TV programme watched mostly by old people. Feel free to replace this in the above text with a cultural equivalent of your choosing.)

Daniel Tunnard continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 2 – which brings recollections of the joy of youth and a phallic obsession.

Four teenagers with a single haircut get on the bus, shouting and opening a big bottle of Pepsi in such a way that it explodes over the jeans of one of the callow youths. At first glimpse they look like good boys who only drink fizzy pop, until one of them says “let’s do the wine here”. Don’t be thinking that they’re going to take off their shoes and start treading on grapes inside a big barrel on the bus. No, Missy. They’re simply getting rid of half the Pe’si (Argentines of a certain age/class are unable or unwilling to pronounce consonant clusters, hence Pe’si, pi’za and se’tiembre. I may have been influenced by my wife in such satirical language use. She’s a bit of a snob. From Conce’ción.) so that they can pour into the bottle the contents of the carton of Termidor.

The 2 on Avenida Belgrano. (Photo: Carolyn Scorpio)

(Unlike in England, where having a big carton of wine in your kitchen is the height of middle-class sophistication, carton wine in Argentina tends to be the exclusive preserve of children and tramps. It should be noted that these particular children’s choice of Termidor is the mark of a refined palate, given that carton wines Toro and the aptly named Crotta are more affordable. Crotta is an Italian surname and probable founder of Crotta wines. Small tip, reader: when naming your wine company after yourself, check beforehand that your name doesn’t mean “homeless woman” in your adopted country.)

It gives me endless joy to witness how these young people celebrate the simple things in life. “I’ve got ciggies!” says one, welling up with emotion. “Lez gaa naycha rserve” shouts one who wishes to visit the nature reserve but has poor diction. “Lez buy a chicken!” exclaims another. A chicken! Ah, the rebellion of youth.

As you may have realised, unless it is not common practice where you come from for high school students to celebrate the first day of spring by getting drunk in public places, today is Spring Day, or Burial Of Facundo Sarmiento in 1888 Day for the history pedants, and the streets are full of little people who really should be somewhere else. Meanwhile, I’ve been sweating since 7.30am because I put on an over-cautious jacket when I left the house because I didn’t dare go out in just a skimpy t-shirt at 7am with the winter still a nearby and frigid memory, and now I have to carry my jacket around with me all day on seven different buses, like an idiot.

Students enjoying the first day of spring. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

As Spring Day progresses, various groups begin to appear of badly-dressed teenage girls with too much makeup. Such is the cyclical nature of fashion that these teenagers look exactly like my big sister and her friends did in their first attempts to dress up as grownups, some twenty years ago. The boys, in contrast, look five years younger than their sassier classmates. They all look so excited to be out on the town in their little group, laughing at the same inanities, looking on us adults on the bus with a big smile, as if saying “Look at me. I’m with my gang. Feel my self-confidence blossom so fleetingly.”

Wherever I go on this Spring Day, all the shop signs wish me a happy spring, especially florists, who make about half their annual earnings today. Even the kitchen supplies shops wish me a Happy Spring, as if I wanted to celebrate the change of seasons with the opportune purchase of a set of Tupperware containers.

As with every spring, adverts pop up all over the city for Tulipán condoms, insinuating that with the change of seasons the time has come to “stick it in”. This year their slogan is “In spring, we’re all candidates”. Don’t the condom advertisers understand how teenage hormones work? The change of season has nothing to do with teenagers’ urges. Even though I, in the days when my acne was acceptable for my age, finally managed to pop my cherry with the onset of spring, it was after five arduous months of courtship and hormonally-driven attempts, even if it was ten below in the damp back streets of Stockport Students’ Union Bar.

View of the Obelisk from the number 2 bus. (Photo: Carolyn Scorpio)

We’re going down Avenida Belgrano, crossing the Avenida 9 de Julio, when I realise that this is the reason why I wanted to undertake this behemoth project in the first place, because I love Buenos Aires in the spring and the summer. It was at this exact spot that I fell in love with Buenos Aires on my second day in the city in 1991. I was on a bus with another guy from the hostel, we looked to our left as we crossed the 9 de Julio and gasped “Wow, it’s so big!” I can’t remember if we were talking about the avenue or the Obelisk. I think it was the Obelisk. You could leap to the interpretation here that I’ve spent thirteen years of my life in one city because of a phallic obsession. So what? Shakira came to Buenos Aires for the drippy son of a presidential failure, Antonito de la Rúa. There are worse reasons.

Daniel Tunnard continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 1 – Buenos Aires’ first bus, and shares with readers other firsts.

Long line for the No 1 bus in Liniers (Photo: Agus Carini)

The number 1 bus starts its route in Morón (stop giggling), so it’s full when I get on in Liniers. Now, this might sound selfish, but shouldn’t there be a seat reserved for writers? What are we supposed to do, write standing up? It should be a common courtesy to have to give up your seat to any person you see holding an A4 pad and pen. Or a novel over 500 pages, because they’re quite hard to hold open with one hand. I’m going to write to the bus company and suggest they put up signs that say ‘Reserved for Writers and Readers of Really Quite Long Books’ in fancy fileteado letters. I’ll let you know if they get back to me.

Deprived as I am of practicing my trade, I instead read the tabloid-tastic Diario Popular over the shoulder of the man sitting in the seat which in future will be reserved for writers. Here’s last nights news: Banfield regaled their fans with a ‘discreet’ 1-1 draw against Olimpo; Ricardo Fort’s former bodyguard and the Teen Angel went to a telephone vote, in what I assume is something to do with the racy Argentine equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing; and in the classic style of this kind of newspaper, on the page where the photo goes of the young lady showing her boobies, there’s a photo of a young lady showing her boobies. I’m not knocking it, I have fond memories of reading my grandmother’s The Sun when I was a toddler. Some things are the same wherever you go. But has anyone else noticed that Argentina’s equivalent of page 3 girls seem just a little less innocent?

Vélez Sarsfield stadium along the No 1 bus route (Photo: Agus Carini)

Coming out of Liniers, I spot the Vélez Sarsfield stadium. This stadium was the very first thing I ever saw of Buenos Aires, in a video of Queen’s first show here in February 1981, which I first saw as a geeky 13-year old in 1989. It’s fitting that this should have been the first thing ever that I saw of Buenos Aires, because one of the things I like most about Argentina is that, unlike in Britain when I was growing up, Queen are not the sole preserve of spotty schoolboys and plump housewives, but enjoyed by many normal people too. You didn’t hear it from me, but some people even think Queen are cool. Seriously.

If you went to primary school here in the early 80s, classmates would split into two gangs depending on who you liked best, Queen or Kiss. This easily beats my school, where classmates were divided into gangs of people who wanted to beat me up for liking Queen and people who didn’t. I was the sole member of the latter gang, except on those occasions when I was joined by Peter Jackson. Not the bearded film director, the ginger Queen fan from Stockport.

This trip turns out to be one of many “firsts”, if only because I’m trying to find a theme for each of these journeys and then crowbarring this into my narrative. The number 1 bus, as you would imagine, was the first bus in Buenos Aires, taking passengers from Primera Junta to Flores. The number 1 started running on 24 September 1928, when a group of taxi drivers decided to let various strangers travel in their taxis at the same time, hence the name colectivo.

But the last thing this book intends to be is a comprehensive history of South American public transport. I don’t even know if the first bus really had a number 1 on the front. As it was the only line in the city, there wouldn’t have been any need for a number to distinguish it from all the other lines that didn’t exist yet. They probably just stuck a sign up that said ‘Bus’. And then all the people would get on and ask “¿What’s a bus?”, with an inverted question mark because they’d be speaking Spanish, and the driver would say “This is a bus. Hop on, I’ll take you to Flores” and the people would say “Oh OK, eighty centavos, please” because they didn’t have SUBE cards in those days.

So the number 1 didn’t have a number 1 on its front in the early days. It simply was, and it would be a long time before some wit made a joke about its way of not being for a considerable length of time to then suddenly be three times all at once.

Nearby the Primera Junta stop is a street called Puan. Because the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires is on this street, “Puan” has become synonymous with said faculty, so I’ve always had this idea that Puan Street was named after a Señor Puan who was a fantastically philosophical and lettered individual, an erudite, bearded chap with a monocle and pipe and brass-tipped walking stick, whose first name was Juan, so he was called Juan Puan, and his friends used to call his wife Juana Puana, even though her real name was Bernard.

The No 1 bus trundles along the streets of Buenos Aires from Morón to Primera Junta (Photo: Augus Carini)

Sadly, that’s all bollocks. For history, you see, is far more boring, and there never was a Señor Puan. The street is named after a town of the same name in the province of Buenos Aires which gets his name from the Mapuche for “Souls of the dead” (although anyone who’s ever had an Argentine tell them that Montevideo is an acronym of “Mount 6 from East to West” will know to take Argentine toponymy with a fistful of sal parillero). It’s a shame, because if Señor Puan had turned out to be a genocidal, bloodthirsty warmonger, which is where most of the city’s streets get their names from, it would have been tremendously ironic in the context of the Philosophy Faculty and these two paragraphs would have been a scream. But he wasn’t, and you’re left with this impoverishment of wit in its place.

The bus reaches the end of its route in Primera Junta. It was a few blocks from here that I met my future first Argentine wife, on my second day ever in Buenos Aires, in February 1997. She was going out with an Italian but we English are nothing if not forbearing, and when I came back in July the Italian had fucked off and my life was about to change in a way I could never have imagined. I’m just scribbling this reminiscent nugget down in my pad when I look up and see that there’s no one left on the bus. The driver looks at me in his mirror and goes “I’ve finished, ¿eh?”, again with an inverted question mark. Some things never change.

Colectivaizeishon. (n.) The action and effect of taking all the buses (colectivos) in Buenos Aires.

In 1982, AJ Jacobs Sr of New York set out to read the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica. He gave up somewhere around Borneo.

Twenty years later his son (predictable American son’s name coming up) AJ Jacobs Jr, decided he was going to finish what his daddy started. You may like to think of the Jacobs family as a more peaceful, scholarly version of the Bush family. Jacobs Junior succeeded where Jacobs Senior had seen fit not to bother, and in one year read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. All 44 million words of it. To give you some idea of how many words 44 million is, it’s the equivalent of reading the King James Bible, new and old testaments, 55 times. Or Roald Dahl’s The Twits 1,600 times, which would be more fun but less enlightening, arguably.

AJ Jacobs Jr wrote about his humble quest to become the smartest man in the world in The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Man in the World. I read the book in 2007 and liked it so much that I read it again in 2008 and once again for luck in 2009. Then I tried to come up with my own personal Everest.

My Collins English-Spanish dictionary is a splendid and trusted doorstop that I bought with the money from my first translation job. I’ve used so much that the hardback cover came off during a particularly gruelling translation frenzy in 2006. I started reading it from page 1, telling anyone who would listen that I was going to memorise everything in it. I gave up around abayuncar. Abayuncar is something to do with tying up cattle, I forget now. My failure to get past page three of the dictionary was a great personal tragedy, primarily because I had a great title for the book: No Dust Jacket Required. For younger readers, that’s a pun on the name of a Phil Collins album.

I thought of walking every single street in the ‘Guía T’ map book of Buenos Aires, from Acasusso to Zuviría. I counted the streets. There are about 2,160 of them, and at least one is ten kilometres long. Five streets are, strictly speaking, motorways. Many more are streets that you would only walk down if you were very poor or very highly in need of some crack.

I started writing a novel called Encyclopaedia Argentina. It was rubbish.

The number 8 stopped on Rivadavia (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Then I thought about the buses of Buenos Aires. Smoke-spewing death traps driven by speeding psychotics these buses may be, nobody’s arguing with that, but they also have a lot of character. Character in the way that Twiglets and a 1980s Ford Cortina have character, in that they’re shit but there’s still that something about them. Unlike the uniform red buses of London, Buenos Aires buses are run by various small companies, so each line has its own special livery, from the seventies’ retro of the 39 to the pretty red rose on the side of the 65, from the all-green Libyan tribute that is the 70 to the classic orangeness of line 60.

And the bus companies have cool names like the ‘The Neighbourly Slaughter’ and ‘The New Metropolis’ and ‘Argentine Antarctic Company’. Although, to be honest only those three companies have cool names, all the other companies have dull names like ‘Western Transport’, and ‘Line 10′, which operates line 10, and ‘Line 213′, which operates line 53, obviously.

So a couple of years ago I thought to myself: “What if I took all the buses in Buenos Aires and wrote a book about it while simultaneously crowbarring in various unrelated anecdotes, history nuggets and questionable jokes which otherwise individually would struggle to find a coherent home?” Not my exact words, but the sentiment was pretty much that.

This sentiment, I quickly discovered, was a foolhardy sentiment. There are about 143 different bus routes in the city of Buenos Aires, each taking two to four hours to go from one end of the route to the other and back again, unless some major thoroughfare has been closed off because of a protest, in which case it’s anything up to seven hours. And yes, that thing you see in the distance is indeed a small group of men with big flags and a minor grievance. Thus my free time would be spent over the coming year.

So one wintry Wednesday in 2009, I took the Number 1 from Primera Junta, 60 blocks along Av. Rivadavia, got off at Liniers and got back on the same bus going in the opposite direction.

It was pretty boring.

A few days later, I took the 2. That was pretty boring too, as was the 4. The 5 was pretty exciting because it went through one particularly shanty-tastic part of the city, but the 6 was a soul-destroying return to dullness. I remembered the wise counsel of a friend at the start of this odyssey, who said “Don’t get up to the number 7 and give up.” I took the number 7, and gave up.

Two years passed. I wrote a novel about a filmmaker who finds Brian May in his wardrobe and tried to plug it in an article in Argentine daily Clarín, for one of these predictably dull series on foreigners who live in Buenos Aires. The kind where some exchange student from Texas says she loves the beef and the people and the tango but wishes there wasn’t so much shit on the sidewalk. I plugged away at Freddiementary and mentioned only briefly my attempt at taking all the buses. Clarín ran with the headline ‘The Brit who wants to take all the buses in Buenos Aires’. The president has to put up with this sort of thing all the time.

But the response was pretty good and I realised that while there was a very small market for fantasy novels about Brian May, there is a considerably larger market for witty bus-based discourse. So on 21st September 2011, I started all over again. At the time of writing (7th January 2012) I’ve taken 60 of the 143 bus routes. You can read about my adventures, if sitting on buses for anything up to twelve hours a day is your idea of adventure, on a twice-weekly basis here in the Argentine Independent.

The transport secretary, Juan Pablo Schiavi, has reacted strongly today against bus companies and the media who said that a removal of subsidies would mean an increase in the price of a bus ticket of nearly $3.

Speaking to Continental and Del Plata radio stations, he described references to the possible increase in ticket prices published in the media as “media terrorism”.

“To the business sectors that are making declarations” he went on to say, “why are they not interested in cleaning the buses, like the ones on line 93, that relate to this case, why are they not making sure that the SUBE machines are working, rather than worrying about control of the management of subsidies? The state will worry about the ticket prices.”

This comes after the recent government announcement of a plan to take away 100% of the subsidies that currently benefit a number of public sectors. The initiative is intended to reduce public spending. It is estimated that the cut will save 600 million pesos (140 million dollars) a year.

Yesterday, Daniel Mallimaci, president of the Business Chamber of Automobile Passengers (CEAP), warned that if the government eliminates 100% of the subsidies associated with transport, a bus ticket will cost about $4, rather than $1.10, the lowest cost of a ticket at the moment.

“Nobody talked about a price increase in relation to transport.” Schiavi insisted. “We’re not going to do something crazy. These are sensitive issues so we have to talk little and work harder.”