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Published: January 24th 2013
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Our last shore day and this cruise has come to an end all too soon. On your first day out of the embarkation port you feel you will be gone forever, but the time flies by so quickly. Tied up at the main Montevideo pier at 0800 and were off the ship in a flash (after hitting Jimmy). Big surprise last night…. As part of Steve’s “Ultimate behind the Scenes” ship tour yesterday, we returned to our room from an awesome guitar performance to find a REAL high-end fleece robe, a chef’s apron, and photos of the adventure. Steve keeps his photos; you can guess who gets the remainder of the stuff…. Now we need to figure out how to get all of this crap back home!
We hit the beach early for our last tour day. Steve found his WWII history stuff regarding the Graf Spee right along the dock at the harbor…. A range finder and anchor from the German WWII pocket battleship. We sailed in right past her grave last night.
Montevideo is a beautiful city with extremely friendly people; something we have come to realize is pretty much common throughout South America. People here are
all very approachable and want to talk with the people coming off the ship. They have tons of questions about us, where we have come from, where we live, and how far we have traveled. Steve met an old man who has family in Palo Alto and attended Stanford University as a young man – Carol just laughs because Steve will talk to ANY BODY! While Ecuador and Peru are quite poor, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay seem to have their cosmopolitan areas as well. We are surprised at how much the currency fluctuates in these countries, and the price of fuel is consistently high for folks here, but everything else seems to fall into line with their economy, as well as ours to some degree. Cell phone use is about $30 a month in these areas, but a 2-liter bottle of soda is about the same as it is at home, as well as a bottle of wine or beer, clothes and shoes. The weather is getting warmer by the day, and we hear Buenos Aires is hot and humid, so almost back to Central America again after a trip to the deep freeze for 10 days. Make sure you
check out the photos from “Salon Oshito,” which gave us all a great laugh. We were all taking photos and the person working there must have thought we were nuts. We got a ton of walking in today, as we traveled from one end of the city to the center, and then across and back out to the harbor area. Two highlights of the day are our trip to the Uruguayan National Mint, a tremendous sample of expensive architecture, and the Museo de Carnaval, which is full of cool voodoo masks, garish costumes and other artifacts from the huge celebrations they have in all South American countries.
The Scurvy pulled away from the docks at 1730 and we made our way out of the very small and narrow Montevideo harbor and into the Rio de la Plata. We enjoyed a last dinner with our friends in the formal dining room, and it was a pretty quiet ship tonight, as everyone prepares to disembark in Buenos Aires tomorrow at 0900. Unfortunately, some idiot had all of the ship’s ATM machines turned off at 1700 this evening, so all of the people attempting to get cash for gratuities for their stateroom
stewards were standing in lines and trying to figure out what to do. The ship’s purser and the casino refused to hand out cash as well, so there are a LOT of pissed off people on this ship tonight. We loaded and tagged our luggage (wow, did we REALLY buy this much crap in only one month????) for removal from the ship and stood on our balcony during the night, watching the lights from our large ship glow in the waters of the Rio de la Plata, and then hit the sack for a busy day tomorrow.
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