Hello. I´m writing this from Buenos Aires. It is a hot, Sunday afternoon, and we´re waiting for our train tomorrow morning. We arrived back here on Friday morning, from the tiny country across the Rio De La Plata, sandwiched between it´s two massive neighbours, Brazil and Argentina. That country is Uruguay, and what a great place it is.
Getting there was a bit of a fiasco. We took a ferry across the river (50 miles wide at this point! Hardly a river!) but at the check in, the X-ray of my bag looked suspicious. First, my walking pole looked like some sort of sharp pointy weapon. I explained what it was, but they wanted me to send my bag through again. The second time, something even more suspicious appeared on the security guard´s screen. It looked like a gun. I explained I wasn´t carrying a gun, but the x-ray looked so much like a gun, I wasn´t convinced myself! Had I gone Jason Bourne on the Argentinians? An unkowing super spy?
So began the humiliating process of unpacking everything in my bag, whilst the guards chuckled away. They thought the fact I had a head torch, a tent and a tiny frying pan was hilarious. Eventually they were satisfied, and I was allowed on the boat. Amazing that a hipflask and a pack of malaria tablets can look like a Colt .45!
As the ferry rocked slowly across the murky waters, the excitement of entering a new country began. We finally arrived in Colonia del Sacremento. As we walked to the hostel I noticed something...blissful silence. After the 24 hour noisy metropolis of Buenos Aires, Colonia was a welcome break.
We wandered around Colonia´s old quarter, a big draw for tourists. But, although some places get swamped by visitors and so lose what it was that made people want to go there, Colonia has retained it´s charm. Historically it was an old smuggler´s port and thorn in the side of Spanish owned Buenos Aires, and the cobbled streets and old colonial ruins bring the history alive. But, I´m a historian, so I like that kind of thing! I don´t want to bore my audience, however, so I´ll move on.
We spent the rest of our first day in Uruguay relaxing by the seafront, watching the spectacular sunset as house martins swirled above the water and people chattered at nearby cafes. On our second night in Colonia, which was a Saturday and much busier, people actually applauded the sunset, which was a bit bizarre. I wanted to point out that this kind of thing happens every day, but didn´t want to spoil their fun.
So, after two days of small-town relaxation and recuperation, we took a bus to Uruguay´s capital, Montevideo, a city that cannot avoid being compared with it´s riverside rival, Buenos Aires.
Montevideo is smaller, cleaner and more picturesque than Buenos Aires. At some points you can see the sea (or river apparently) on 3 sides. But for some reason, I didn´t like it as much. I still had a great time, discovering the works of Uruguays premier artist Torres Garcia, or strolling along Pocitos beach, and leafing through dusty books in one of the city´s many bookstores (Uruguayans seem to be incredibly well read).
It was also interesting to note the subtle differences between Uruguay and Argentina. Urugayans are more humble and easy going, and drink comical amounts of mate. Litres of the stuff. Mate is basically the bitter herbal tea they drink here, in a little gourd called a bombilla. It is as common in Argentina as our delicious milky tea in England. But everywhere in Uruguay people have a thermos under one arm, and their bombilla in one hand. How they do anything is beyond me? Waiters in restaurants will be drinking it as they serve you, footballers being interviewed post-match will be sucking away at the metal straw they use to drain every last drop out of their bombilla. Even TV presenters had it!
A Uruguayan bloke I met in Colonia had recommended the national dish, Chivito, to me. So, once in Montevideo, I had to try it. I was expecting meat, obviously, but something classy, a delicate balance of flavours, perhaps. What I was presented with can only be described as a heart attack on a plate. It made a full English look like the new diet for health obsessed women. Steak, ham, cheese, egg, olives(?) and a single peiece of greasy, sorrowful lettuce stuffed between two slices of bread, accompanied with a mountain of chips. Of course, I ate it all. And then had another one two days later. When in Montevideo...
It is a shame that we won´t be in Montevideo in February, which is Carnaval season, because apparently here they throw a party that rival´s Rio´s. Urugayan´s definitely love their live music. In Colonia we were treated to a big brass band right outside our hostel, as well as a cool guitar playing singer called Donatto in a restaurant inexplicably called El Drugstore. And we went to Montevideo´s Festival of Percussion, which was the biggest anticlimax ever. Expecting heavy Latin beats, we were subject to a group of pretentious "musicians" banging their instruments one note at a time. It sounded like a zoo had been let loose in a recording studio. One guy gave a standing ovation, everyone else looked like they were trying hard not to cry.
We got some sense of the Uruguayan party spirit in the Carnaval museum, where costumes and masks are on display. The influences come from Africa, with tribal drumbeats, Venetian comedy of arts, with various masks and characters, and indigenous Latin American cultures, with Pachamama (Mother Earth) making an appearance. It is a triumph of multiculturalism, and in the English translation Carnaval was amusingly described as "the free circulation of scandal and noise," which sounds fun to me! I hope we are somewhere equally as exciting and vibrant when Carnaval season arrives.
We were going to go to the Eastern beaches of Uruguay, which are apparently wild, remote, and starkly beautiful. But, many travellers told us it was cold. Very cold. So, not fancying camping in a climate similar to a December in Blackpool, we are back here in BA.
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