Punte del Este, Uruguay and Rio Grande, Brazil

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Having passed the half way point in our holiday, we left Buenos Aires ...a beautiful city, and headed back to Uruguay to start our homeward bound cruise. Punte del Este is a peninsula with golden sandy beaches and very up market resorts. A very calm, attractive place. Then oh so very different we arrived sailing up the Rio Grand past fishing villages to the town ...a very working class Brazilian port. The people were very friendly and we found an optician to mend Brian's glasses ...after he sat on them! The chap laughed when Brian acted out what had happened and repaired them free of charge- all without a word of Portuguese except for obrigada ( thank you). I said the town was like arriving in Middlesbrough and driving into to Redcar! We called there to re-fuel but not somewhere I could recommend. ...but at least it wasn't your usual tourist destination just a real working port...appenrently the second largest in Brazil after Rio. Today we are at sea heading further north towards the Equator so getting warmer again. Our next port of call is Ilheus, Brazil where we have a trip to a cocoa farm planned. So hope we see more cocoa than we gave coffee...it's obviously not grown near the coast because so far we have seen very few coffee plantations. Life on board continues its normal hectic schedule. It was a tug of war today across the pool with the different departments competing all bets were in aid of the RNLI - quite appropriate on a liner! We are still attempting to understand Bridge and I am enjoying water colours. There never seems enough hours in the day and I am certainly not getting bored! We do spend some time relaxing and reading too and enjoying the live shows each evening the singer tonight said that it's getting more unusual to have a live orchestra which we have for singers and dancing. So, love to you all from somewhere off the Brazilian coast.

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