The Most Gorgeous Town I Have Ever Seen!

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As a diversion, we also spent a day across the border in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, a short ferry ride across the river from Buenos Aires. The town was founded in the 1600s by the Portuguese, and the historic district is now a UNESCO heritage site. The transport there was a tourist attraction in itself, the Buquebus ferry. It had a huge duty-free shop, a cafe, hundreds of tourist-class seats and an enormous but empty first-class section. We arrived quite early at about 7.30am, long before the town awoke. We wandered around the old historic district for the most part of the morning, taking far too many photos of the gorgeous Portuguese architecture. The shopping was also excellent, although expensive and touristy. I bought a few things for myself and a scarf for Mum... strange seeing as it was the middle of summer in both Uruguay and Australia!

We had a fantastic lunch, with views out over the river at an old pub. I was apprehensive at first, since the menu presented to us offered all sorts of goat meat dishes, with little else to choose from, save the ubiquitous milanesas (schnitzels). We ordered a goat meat platter for two and enjoyed every last morsel. It was quite tender, and not at all strongly flavoured.

The lovely and helpful lady in the tourist bureau had given us several brochures which all described a historic bullfighting ring several kilometres from the centre of town. We caught a local bus out to the site, annoying the bus conductors because we (rudely, in hindsight) hadn't bothered to change our Argentian Pesos to Uruguayan ones. After some positional and navigational issues, we found the bullfighting ring, only to discover that it has been deemed structually unsafe and was not open to visitors. We did a lap around the ring, since we had made the effort to get there, then tried to get another bus back to town. We had to wait quite a while, and became stickier and stickier in the humidity. It was a welcome relief to finally sight a bus going in our direction, we alighted and flopped down on the seats for a quick rest.

Unfortunately on the day we travelled to Colonia, it was muggy and about 36 degrees, very much like Mt Isa weather on a summer's day. So we had faded during the bullfighting expedition and were forced to sit in the ice cream shop by the time mid-afternoon rolled around. After that we had a short nap in the plaza and then paid a modest fee for the privilege of seeing the view from the top of the old lighthouse, before boarding the Buquebus ferry back to Buenos Aires.

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Photos

A Typical Cobbled Street
How cute is that little Fiat!?

Attention to Detail
The details in the historic district are beautiful, such as these cute street signs

Bullfighting, anyone?
The much-hyped and inaccessible bullfighting ring