Brontosauri

Every morning I am greeted by a familiar sight that reminds me exactly what my journey to work means. I get to the street corner, the sun hits me and washes me in heat and light, and the buses rumble past. Hundreds. Each clad in its own distinctive, often garish colours. They move like a confused pack, each individual unit with its own thought-processes and desires bubbling beneath the surface, forced to follow the same path as the others by the herd mentality (otherwise known as ‘traffic’). When the light goes green, these lumbering beasts charge forward, stumbling at speed, like a pack of brontosauri thundering across a prehistoric plain towards water. These ancient beasts breathe smoke that taints the air and stains our lungs; without them, we would never get to work on time.

The late ariser or lazy commuter is sometimes forced to take a taxi for expediency’s sake. The taxis are nimble, as they must be, for they are forced to travel in the wake and very thoroughfare trodden by the larger beasts. The taxi sees things from the ground level; the bus driver cannot. They are never friends. The amount of near misses alone between these two species alone contributes to the general chaotic atmosphere in the streets of our great city. We would be lost without either of them.

This week, the government of the City of Buenos Aires, in its infinite wisdom, changed all the bus routes. It happened on a Wednesday, for reasons that are not clear. The change also coincided with the return to work of several thousand holiday-makers who had fled the punishing summer heat. In short, it was timed to cause maximum chaos, and it succeeded. Literally thousands of people headed to where they normally caught their bus home, only to find that the bus stop no longer existed. Directions were given to a new stop, which in many cases was up to five or six blocks away, and never in a straight line. The bus routes were altered completely; the commute had been permanently affected.

I waited for my particular bus, but it was clear that the people in charge hadn’t counted on a) +30 degrees in mid-summer and b) the fact that their drivers were also intensely confused by the changes. After waiting at what seemed to be an improvised bus stop but could easily have been another lane on the busiest avenue in the world, burning gently in the afternoon sun, a bus finally arrived. We climbed on, fighting our way through the already cramped space with our heads held high like divers struggling for air.

The man in charge with steering our particular dinosaur was having a tough time from the off, as we sailed past streets that used to be bus stops to be greeted by furious demands by passengers which he could only counter with ‘but it’s not a stop anymore…’ Moreover, the way he was driving and the route he was taking heavily implied that he had no idea what he was doing, or in fact was making it up as he went along – a supposition that was not removed as he drifted from the uttermost right-hand lane to the extreme left of a seriously busy avenue as if he had just learned to drive. All around one could catch glimpses of similarly confused pedestrians and bus-drivers, as the brontosauri launched into new adventures praying that they wouldn’t hit anyone or each other. Once the journey got going, the new route was actually much quicker than the old, but the great plains of rush hour Buenos Aires were briefly filled with the tuneful moans of irate motorists pounding horns, a sound that seemed as old as time.