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Published: September 19th 2012
Yesterday we planned to catch the ferry from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento, just a short one hour ferry ride across the Rio de la Plata. We bought the tickets the night before, woke up to a slightly windy day with a forecast of rain, nothing unusual as they had forecast rain for the last 3 days and we had not had any.
We had breakfast checked out of our hotel, weather is cloudy but fine. Bussed down town and then walked to to port. Got there an hour and a half prior to the sailing at 1100. Checked in went through immigration and got stamped out of Argentina and then into Uruguay all while in the boat terminal, weather is now over cast and slightly windy nothing to worry about... Or so we thought.
We sat in the terminal with loads of other unsuspecting people. People were lining up to get on the ferry, we sat and waited, they put over an announcement in Spanish and then English for people to get through immigration and make their way through to the terminal so we thought it can't be long now.
And then we waited and waited
everyone was lined up. At 1230, the time the ferry was supposed to leave. An announcement was made in Spanish, everyone groaned and sat down, but there was no english to follow that announcement. So we sat there and waited then we heard someone ask another passenger in english what the announcement was we found out that there was bad weather on the river and we could not safely leave the port so there would be a delay.
So we thought we should investigate... Walked further down the terminal and looked out over the river and it was black on the other side of the river, with huge whitecaps out just over the breakwater. Hmmm this was going to be a rough ride!
Again we sat and waited and waited and waited... At 3:30pm Renee went looking for information and found quickly that there was none. Then a young guy started yelling out and people were getting excited, then came over to us and some other tourists and told us they were going down to clap around the immigration and try and get the manager to come out and tell us what was going on.
This succeeded
One the ferry the first time...
We had a feeling it would be rough...and they told us we could get on the boat... The weather had not improved and if anything was now beginning to get bad on this side of the river. So everyone including us got on the boat and sat down and waited and waited. We were beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that we were not going anywhere.
At 5:20 they announced that the boat was cancelled in Spanish, luckly infront of us was an American who was fluent in Spanish, who told us what was going on. If it had not been for him things would have been a lot worse! Today showed us how inadequate our limited Spanish was.
The cancellation meant we all had to get off the boat back through immigration where the crossed out the stamps we had got today and then we had to line up and wait to get tickets reorganised.
We got in line at 5:45 and waited. We got to the counter at 9pm. Surprisingly there were no angry people in the lines people talked kids played. When we got to the counter we found out we could get tickets for tomorrow which we decided to take. Then we had to get in another line... By the time we finished it was 1030pm. 11 hours after we had first got there...
We were surprisingly not in the worst spirits, Renee did have a few tears over the last 5 hours, but not many.
So we were forced into another night in BA. Hence today we have had time to set this up. We are booked on another ferry this afternoon. So wish us luck in getting there today we have seen images of flooding up river and trees down.
We will let you know how we go!
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Alex
non-member comment
Good luck!
Sounds like quite the adventure! All that waiting in line must have been painful. What did you spend your time doing? I've just looked at this on a map - a 50km ferry or a 850km bus trip! Hopefully the weather is better today!