The boat we took, Buquebus, was not your standard fairy. Taking so many people across only a few times a day, the boat was massive. It had your standard on deck hang out areas, complete with bar and blaring music. Below deck was three levels with shopping, an arcade, several bars, a cafeteria and live music. There was plenty to do for the three hours it took to get from Buenos Aires to Colonia. However, we remained on the deck most of the time.
Hasta luego, Buenos Aires!
I didn't want to go to Uruguay for the day just to renew my visa, so we made a long weekend of visiting several different cities. I paint brushed crude arrows on this map of Uruguay. It is the route of our trip. Click on it to make it bigger.
The majority of the photographs that I took on the trip were in Colonia. There was little else to do here. Colonia was a very small tourist town and site of structures dating back to (you guessed it) colonial times. It was first colonized by the Portuguese, who were quickly thwarted by the Spanish. This may explain my impression that it was very much like St. Augustine.
[Above] The old lighthouse with ruins of something colonial. We think it might have been a convent? Either way, this is the image on every postcard from Colonia. Where I lack in actual knowledge of Colonia, I tried to make up for with nice photographs of the place.
Keep in mind, we're not to the ocean yet, just the wide mouth of the Rio de la Plata, which Uruguay and Argentina share. Below is the sunset on the river.
From Colonia, we took a bus to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. We only spent time in Montevideo to catch the bus to La Paloma (the beach) and then to catch a boat back to Buenos Aires. I imagine you get to know very little of a city by hanging around the bus station and the port, but that was the extent of our time there. I liked what I saw and what I saw was pretty much like a smaller Buenos Aires. On the whole, we also saw more antique cars. This was exciting for Francisco, but as I am a girl, I could do little but take a few photographs and say, "that's nice."
The main event was La Paloma, a small beach town that I picked randomly on the map. The major beach city in Uruguay is Punte del Este. Punta del Este is very big and ritzy, attracting tons of tourist and Latin American celebrities. I would still like to go; the pictures look pretty cool. But I thought if we could get out to a smaller place on the beach, we might have a better time this trip. So we went to La Paloma, which turned out to be perfect.
I only took this one picture of our hostel in La Paloma. Unlike Colonia, I had much more to do here than take pictures, like lay on the beach all day. We stayed in a little hostel on the beach, employed with surfers who drove Francisco around looking for the best surf. We finally ate seafood, which to our dismay was just as crappy as in Buenos Aires. I should do a separate post about the issue of good seafood ANYWHERE. Another time, another time...There were lots of people camping in the heavy woods that were around. Some beaches had lots of rocks and tide pools and some were sandy and crowded with people playing a form of bocce ball with discs. Some beaches were covered in dead, stinking mussels that wash on the beach with each tide. There was a lot of variety for such a small place and I would go back in a heart beat.
The trip back was a bit stressful, as finding transportation back to Buenos Aires from Montevideo on a Monday was nearly impossible. Should anyone be in the same position, I would recommend booking your return to BsAs from Uruguay ahead of time. We ended up taking another Buquebus back from Montevideo. This time, the boat was small and fast, making about twice the distance in the same amount time as the big boat to Colonia. This boat was considerably smaller and much more like an airplane (we couldn't go on deck). It did, however, have a duty free store selling Clinique products and liquor, both of which I always need. Not to get into too many details, but we had the opportunity to buy liquor that was about half the price it would normally be in the States and Buenos Aires.
A nice end to a nice trip to Uruguay. On the whole, there was little difference between Uruguay and Argentina, besides a currency that was around 22 pesos to every 1 U.S. dollar. And perhaps Uruguay was a bit more relaxed, as hard to believe as that may be.
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