Uruguay

As our lovely spanish teachers from Central TAFE are Uruguain, we felt we should dash across the water from Buenos Aires to have a bit of a look at what Uruguay has to offer & find out if all the locals are as gorgeous as the only two Uruguain people we know.

The trip seemed like a simple procedure at first... but proved to be somewhat more problematic than expected. The simple option is to take a one hour boat direct from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento, one of Uruguay's star attractions. However, due to the ailing Aussie dollar, we decided upon the more budget option of taking a 3 hour boat from the town of Tigre, an hour north of BA. For once we planned in advance and investigated the boat options a few days before our departure. I was assured by the woman at the ferry terminal that there was no need to reserve seats on the boat for weekdays... turns out she was wrong. After a super early morning to get to Tigre, we were four people too late to get on the morning boat. This meant a leisurely 7 hour wait for the next ferry. When we eventually did get on the boat, it was a lovely ride through the undeveloped, coastal channels of Argentina and then across the (brown) Rio de Plata (some debate as to what it is) to the Uruguain town of Carmelo.

Pretty shorelines, but would be much better if the water was less brown and more blue!


Once at Carmelo (by this stage it was at least 7.30pm) we made a dash for the bus companies... and found to our delight that despite our 7 hour delay the bus to Colonia was there ready and waiting. However, despite this, we ended up missing the bus by mere seconds due to a lack of local currency to pay for the ticket & our run to the ATM being not quite fast enough. Our trip to Colonia eventuated the next morning and we spent several hours wandering around the seaside town which used to be a smugglers settlement. It is an exquisite little town with cobbled streets and many historic buildings along tree lined streets. However, it is small enough that half a day was ample for exploring its sights and we headed off to the capital, Montevideo.


Streets of ¨Colonia¨

Old city gates of ¨Colonia¨



View from the top of the lighthouse



More transport dramas were to follow with our bus breaking down part way during the trip necessitating us to wait on the side of the road for two hours until another bus arrived. Interestingly, the bus driver managed to get all the locals transported on other vehicles, while all of us tourists were left waiting.

However, despite the delays we did make it to Montevideo and spent the afternoon wandering around the old city. We spent our first night in an extremely noisy hostel. The band upstairs started at 2.30am and went through to 6am. Seven of the ten in our room didn't make it to bed until the band had packed up! This reinforced to us that despite the higher price, private rooms are definitely worth the expense!

Apparently the draw-card of Uruguay is the beaches. Unfortunately, we didnt take our camera out and about on the streets of Montevideo, so the photo below is stolen from Wikipedia... however, we are sure that our photos would have again featured a loss let blue and a lot more brown tones!


Beach in Montevideo