Montevideo

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Wednesday 26th January
Montevideo, Uruguay

The ship docked very close to this nice peninsula with it's mixture of old and new towns. Tiled pathways and Spanish looking buildings and several monuments, antique shops, leather and woven merchandise shops, museums and sidewalk cafes. Montevideo is home to nearly half of Uruguay's population and was quite busy on the day we went.
We started our ambling at Independence Square, which held a nice statue of Jose Gervasio Artigas in it. We worked our way around the craft stalls and shops with lots of very well crafted leather items. We stumbled across a museum of an old colonial house which was lovely inside with it's huge White Walls and courtyard garden.
Our mission today was to find Murdo a shop he could buy a new lens for his camera, so we made our way to the main shopping street. This was a very long street and it's shops were made up of what looked like lots of mini -markets, which we went in and out of to mosey. We realised this maybe a bit of a dodgy area when they made you lock up your bags in lockers and give you the key before going into the shops!!!
On our travels we came across a lovely spectacle, positioned right at some traffic lights. It was a little water fountain, we thought that's an odd place for it so close to the junction, but when we got closer we found it even more delightful, it was decorated with hundreds of padlocks. The story was that if you wrote your name and that of your lovers on a lock and secured it to the rail of the fountain your love for each other will be locked for ever!! There were locks from all over the world. I thought this was great and we spent the next half hour looking in all the wee stalls for a padlock.... However it was sad because we could not find one and had to give up on that mission. Me and Murdo thought someone is missing out on a great business opportunity there !!!! We did however find a Nikon shop where we bought Murdo a lens. We returned to the ship with a happy chappie to off load our newly acquired goods.
After lunch we ventured out again, just ambling around all the old side streets taking in the world as it passed by. We found a stationers shop where I bought a huge drawing pad and coloured pens to begin the task of writing out the family tree incase we were lucky enough to find relatives in Punta Arenas. In the book Dolina and Donald gave us for our wedding called 'Return to Patagonia' we discovered that Murdos dads Aunty and uncle moved from Lewis to Punta Arenas in the late 1800's and their children and grand children supposedly still lived there. We were excited to read this as we realised we will be making a stop there. We hope we can work out a way of tracking them down and even take a visit to the graveyard to find Christina and Donalds grave.
We had a nice day and were well worn out when we got back.

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