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Published: January 25th 2013
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On what was meant to be my last night in Montevideo a Swiss guy that I had befriended at the hostel and I decided to head down to the beach to check out the sunset. As we walked the 4 blocks between the hostel and the beach these three guys asked us for the time. Patrick replied to them in Spanish as we walked by without stopping. After about 10 meters I looked back behind us and the three guys were following us. To Patrick I went "we're about to get mugged". Next thing I knew two of them are grabbing at my bag and tugging it until the strap breaks and it comes off. They then go and help the other one who is fighting with Patrick for his iPhone. As I was waiting for them to finish one of them noticed my necklace and came up and took it off me. Local people were yelling at them to stop and coming towards us so the boys took off. Patrick managed to hold onto his iPhone and just lost some cash whereas they managed to get my iPhone, sunnies, cash, headphones and even more annoyingly an adapter piece that lets
me plug my cameras SD card into my iPad that is never usually in my bag.
Afterwards we went and made a police report for my insurance company. However they wouldn't give me a copy of it. They said that as it was a Friday night that it wouldn't be entered into the computer until Monday and I could collect it then. As I needed to leave before then they said that I could go into any police station in Uruguay and they would be able to print off a copy for me no worries.
Earlier on when I was in Colonia de Sacramento, myself and another guy had tried taking cash out one night with our mastercards and for some reason they wouldn't work, yet our friends visa would. The following day however the guy was able to get cash out and when I arrived in Montevideo I had no problems getting cash out. A couple of days later however when I tried again at night I was unable to get any money. I had decided that this must just be a night thing and when I was in Punta del Este a
couple of days later I tried getting cash out during the day and once again it wouldn't work. By this stage I was getting mildly concerned as most of the hostels here make you pay with cash and if that was going to be the case in Punta del Diablo then I wasn't going to have the money to pay for my accommodation. But more on this later.
While I was in Punta del Diablo I had one of the staff from my hostel come with me to the police station to collect my report. The police station however was clearly in a time warp from 50 years ago and only managed to have one phone line with a phone/fax combo, let alone a computer that they could print my report from. We asked them to call ahead to Chuy, which is the border town I would need to cross into Brazil from, to ask if the report was available there. It turned out that 5 days after the report was made Montevideo still hadn't actually bothered to enter it into the computer. Great.
So the following morning I headed off to Chuy with
the hope that my report would be ready, but with the expectation that it wouldn't and I would be stuck in the middle of no where for a couple of days. Surprisingly after about half an hour and a few language barrier issues they produced my report. Somethings however had been lost in translation and my iPhone 4S had become an iPod 45. Although I kept asking them to change it, I don't think that they knew what the difference was and seeing as my original report slip from the police in Montevideo says that its an iPhone 4S hopefully my insurance company feels like being nice and using common sense when processing my claim.
Now back to my cash issue. The hostel in Punta del Diablo let me pay with card so I figured that I was in the clear. Oh was I wrong. I stamped myself out of Uruguay, went into town and crossed the Main Street which suddenly put me into Brazil. After walking about 2kms to go to immigration and get stamped into Brazil I tracked down the bus terminal and luckily there was a bus that night to where I needed to
go. Unluckily however was that the ticket was 1800 and I had 1400 on me in cash. I went to the one and only ATM in Chuy and it once again would not work with my card. Oh God. Desperate times then called for desperate measures and I took out the $50US that had been given to Matt and I by Erica and Graham as a going away present. While it was a very thoughtful gift, and quite cute, they had decided to cut the note in half so that when we reunited we could stick it back together and buy ourselves a drink. The fact that it now has a line of sticky tape down the middle however means that no one will accept it to change it. So there I was standing in the middle of the street in the pouring rain wondering what the f I was going to do. There was a greater western union bank in town so I could always get mum to send me money if it came to that, but given the time difference mum wouldn't be able to do that until some random hour of the morning and I'd have no
where to sleep. Luckily though, Brazil was on the other side of the street and what has turned from Chuy to Chui has one bank with one ATM that willingly accepted my card. Crisis adverted. Now I just had a 7 hour wait until the bus was due.
All in all I really liked Uruguay. Although I was mugged and had major issues with cash and getting my police report, hardly any of the guests in the hostels spoke English and it was almost more expensive than Australia, all of the towns were really pretty, I stayed in some really nice hostels with beautiful pools and amazing beachfront views and met some really nice people. It was also so good to finally get back to floating in the ocean - even if I am still on my quest to find a beautiful beach.
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