Our Uruguayan adventure

Our Uruguayan adventure

   Uruguay is a wonderful place to go for a long weekend.  I’m sure it’s great for longer stays too.  It’s one of those pleasant sort of places where things are easy and relaxed and we found it easy and relaxing from the moment we arrived until the moment we boarded the ferry back to BA.  Our first night was in Colonia del Sacramento.  A small town, with a quaint and well-preserved historical centre, it is heavily promoted in guidebooks and at the tourist offices of BA.  The reality was something of a surprise.  Despite being high season, it felt very quiet and laid back.  No hordes of tourists, in fact with the boat fully booked out for Monday returns I had expected it to be madness but our hostel was only half full.  It seemed like a nice place to go back to for Valentine’s day, three days later, and it was.  We spent half the evening sitting in a plaza listening to the chanteuse from a restaurant that was handing out free bubbly to passers-by.  We had enjoyed a big lunch and we indulged on a dinner of gourmet Belgian chocolate from a little shop around the corner.

   On Sunday we took the bus to Montevideo and spent the afternoon wandering the centre of town, including the Carnaval Museum, which we found out was free on Monday’s about 10 seconds after paying UR$130 for entry.  It was practically empty and provided a good opportunity to cross lines that were not meant to be crossed and pose with some of the costumes.  We also stumbled across a little (free) museum, Palacio Taranco, which backs onto Plaza Zabala.  Really just a beautifully appointed house, frozen in the 1850’s and really lovely to stumble upon during our lazy ramble.  Nice loos too.  Actually, Montevideo had some wonderful finds.  One of the best was the Catedral Metropolitana, on Plaza Constitution.  I have no photos of the inside as we popped into the Sunday service.  It was stunning though, you will have to go see it for yourself.  I can’t recall stepping into a Cathedral so beautifully and tastefully appointed.  I don’t know why it isn’t celebrated in guidebooks and on tourist sites.  Whoever designed it (actually, the internet tells me it was Bernado Poncini of Switzerland who gave it a makeover in 1858) made superb use of colour and light and shade and just the right amount of gold leaf and decorative stonework.  We also spent a lot of time on the beaches on Sunday and Monday, it was so warm that Kizzy went into the water twice.  Blue blue sea, what a pleasure after the muddy brown Rio del Plata separating BA and Colonia.

   We popped back to Buenos Aires for most of the day on Wednesday as we waited for our bus to Puerto Madryn.  We gained an hour as we crossed back into Argentina so we had time to finally find the small scale Statue of Liberty in a park in Belgrano.  We spent some more time camped out in the Recoletta shopping mall using their free wifi to book our accommodation in Puerto Natales and  arranged our travel from El Calafate to Bariloche.  We’re now booked and paid for to travel by bus along Route 40 with Chalten Travel.  As luck would have it we’re now hearing bad things about this journey, but we shall see.  A full review will be given after we make it to Bariloche on 28^th February.  In the meantime, we had our glorious trip travelling “cama suite” with our fully flat beds.  The food was ok, they did serve bubbly after dinner, there were no personal dvd players but we did get to watch Prince of Persia, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Apocalypto in Spanish (with Spanish subtitles) and the first 30 minutes of X-Men: First Class in English.  The seats went fully flat, although we only worked out how to get the feet bit to raise up at about 7am in the morning.  Sadly no photos, not sure why, probably because we were both feeling a bit scummy for photos. 

   We’re now in Puerto Madryn but I think there’s been enough typing for one evening.  Kizzy is now asleep and it’s time for me to go to bed too.  Before I do, it’s Byron’s birthday today (it’s now just past midnight on 18^th Feb) – Happy birthday matey!  Lots of love from Argentina.

Notes on the city

   It’s hard to write about a city when you’re staying still for any length of time.  The observations can seem inane, or overly personal, or heaven forbid: preachy and self-righteous.  After all, how many comments does anyone want to read about the jolt I get every time I see a toddler living on a traffic island?

   Most of our time in BA has been light and amusing.  It has been easy to perplex our Spanish teachers through a combination of bad grammar and terrible punning (which seems to be a very English brand of humour).  Both Kizzy and I are improving - we successfully changed the booking for our bus journey and avoided the penalty charge - in spite of some ongoing frustrations.  We’ve not yet learned the past tense so all our conversation is about the future.  In fact, we’ve now finished our two weeks of lessons so “no vamos a hablar Español en el past-a tense-io”. 

   We have learned a lot of the marvellous ways of Buenos Aires.  They do do good steak here but you need to go to the right places.  We found a simple test last night at the wonderful El Desnivel (I know it’s raved about all in the guidebooks but it really is very good food): when you ask for your steak vuelta y vuelta (properly rare) the waiter thanks you, nodding his approval.  It’s a really nice touch and it was one of the two best steaks I’ve ever tasted. 

   The locals have a love of queuing that far surpasses the British.  This photo is of a queue for a local bus.  That’s right, 65 people (we counted, what else do you do in a queue?) patiently waiting in a precise single file line with no cutting-in or encroaching.  And when the bus arrives they all wait their turn patiently.  It helps that buses are plentiful and cheap.  But the bus queues are nothing compared to the Sube queues.  The Subte is the subterranean metro train system.  The Sube is the new magnetic payment card for Subte and bus travel in the city.  In order to pay bus fares, people horde loose change here (evidently there’s a shortage).  The Sube brings freedom from this, but the queues are madness.  We went to the bus terminal yesterday to buy our onward tickets to Patagonia.  On our way back, no more than 20 min later, a Sube card application point had set up and already had a queue 300m long.  That is over 600 people who have stopped whatever they were going to do in order to queue for a long time to get a bus pass that they plan to use some time in the future.

   Everywhere in central BA has air-con.  Scratch that.  Everywhere in central BA except our hostel has air-con.  (That’s fine, the hostel is roasting but it’s like getting a sauna experience every evening.  I’m so decadent I’ve started indulging in an invigorating cold shower before bed.)  However, it’s all single units that hang off the side of the buildings, generally just below or often through a convenient window.  A 15-story apartment building will therefore have about 45 units hanging off the side.  What this adds to the BA experience is an irregular pattern of dripping water that you encounter as you wander the streets.  It’s marvellously surreal.  For the first week I couldn't work out where these big drops of rain were coming from as I sweltered in the 37˚C heat under bright blue skies.  The one day where we did get proper rain it was torrential and it lasted for hours.  There was no need to look around for the source, it was everywhere.  The sort of rain that obscures your vision as you try to avoid the spontaneous rivers on every street and footpath.  We figured it was just one of those things but our mate Sean popped over to Uruguay the next day where in Montevideo “the cataclysmic BA weather” had made the news, so I guess it was worth getting excited about.

   BA has been a lovely home for two weeks (although it is nice to have finished school!).  Tomorrow we sail to Uruguay for a weekend in Colonia del Sacramento and then Montevideo, before coming back to BA on Wednesday to catch the deluxe cama suite bed bus down to Patagonia.  The first leg is 18 hours, but we’re told it’s “better than flying first class!”  Admittedly that’s from someone whom I suspect has never actually flown first class.  Nevertheless, we’re looking forward to Uruguay and very excited about the bus!