We Should Have Flown

In continuing with our altered itinerary, we headed to Uruguay. After traveling for almost three months, we figured that crossing into Uruguay would be a breeze. On the contrary, it turned out to be a big pain and resulted in another epic 28+ hours of traveling and sitting on buses.

We first had to travel south from Puerto Iguazu, Argentina on an overnight bus (that showed english-language movies and served wine with dinner) heading towards Buenos Aires. We got dumped off the bus at 5am, a few hours north of B.A., in a random town right next door to Uruguay. Turns out, to reasons that are still a mystery to us, we couldn't cross into Uruguay from here. We then had to take a bus 2 hours back in the direction we came from in order to access the correct border crossing. Here, we had a wait for a few hours to catch one of the three daily buses into Uruguay. We got on board, crossed over and found ourselves at yet another bus terminal. We bought seats on a bus to Montevideo, not knowing that we had changed time zones, and our bus was pulling out of the gate. All the while the ticket agent was yelling at Brett in spanish and pointing frantically at the bus. Once we put it together we threw our bags on board and hopped on. But the day doesn't end there... About 2 hours into the trip, we made a stop at a service station and sat there for over an hour, while mechanics worked on the bus and all the passengers sat sweating and uninformed. Finally we took off again, but had another 3 hours before reaching Montevideo. We found a hostel and luckily for us, dinner doesn't get started in Uruguay until 9 or 10 pm.

We knew absolutely nothing about it, only that it has no mountains, and boasts about its red meat. Turns out, Uruguay is pretty nice. We first checked out the capital, Montevideo and then headed to the beach.

Montevideo was a big westernized (we were so ready for that part) city. We wandered around lots of great restaurants and beautiful old buildings. We treated ourselves to a nice thanksgiving dinner, steak for Brett and a fancy vegetable dish for Sarah...and of course a bottle of red wine.

We then headed to the posh beach resort town of Punta del Este, apparently a popular vacation spot for jet setting beach goers. No, the two of us didn't exactly fit in. But the beach was a nice change of pace. We soaked in some sun (one of us more than the other), relaxed and got alot of reading in.

After Punta, we traveled back west through Montevideo, and to the small town of Colonia, on the southern shores of Uruguay. Colonia is a really old, cute town composed of cobblestone streets and good restaurants with views of the ocean. There wasn't much to do there, so after two days we jumped on a ferry to Buenos Aires.

Even with all of the hassles we had getting into Uruguay, we still had a great time, and were really thankful that all our epic bus travels were behind us. But next time we´re paying up and flying...

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