Sunday, April 30, 2006
Uruguay
...why?
Uruguay is a bit of a backwater as far as South America is concerned, as, on the surface it´s fairly dull: uniformly flat - the largest "mountain" is only 423 ms high, that´s about 3.5 times the height of Highgate Hill - and the majority of the country has been cleared for pasture or farm land, punctuated by the odd cluster of palms or small plantation of firs.
From a touristic point of view the only places thought to be worth visiting are along the Rio Plata or the Atlantic coast, and you have to wonder what lurks in the interior: there´s a town called Trienta y Tres (33) simply because it´s on the 33rd parallel, even the most dull towns usually warrant a saint's name rather than just a grid reference.
However, there´s so much more.
Colonia
A short ferry ride from Buenos Aires, Colonia is Uruguay´s touristic highlight, a, for the most part, intact colonial fortress town, interlaced with over-photograhed cobbled streets and ancient houses...so I took a picture of the sewage works, which is probably less frequently shown than most sights. On the last night the heavens opened spectacularly, so I headed to the capital the next morning. (Montevideo is the third capital I have visited in a row where I have had to glue my glasses back together).
Montevideo - Good Friday, Bad Weather
Since I saw The Battle of The River Plate I have had some romantic notion of visiting the city and sitting purched on crates watching for a ship to make a break for the open sea, just like the reporter in the movie... Although I had to make do with standing on end of the harbour wall amongst a gang of crab fishermen on a cloudy day it was a great feeling being in the city.
While the guide books mention that there's little of the colonial architecture left to see, they fail to mention that you can see in the architecture times of growth and prosperity, like layers of overground archaeology. Hidden amoungst the highrise blocks of the 70´s are spectacular examples of turn of the century, between the wars and post-war buildings. Why some bright spark hasn´t come up with running architectural tours to Montevideo is beyond me.
...or for that matter throughout the country. The coast is dotted with small towns where no two buildings seem to be the same, despite the standard single story box like construction. In Argentina and Chile you so often see out of town developements of row upon row of identical houses, but for whatever reason not here.
The Atlantic Coast
I left Montevideo to escape the rain only to find myself in an utterly dreary Punta Del Este over the Easter Weekend. It was here that I decided that it is almost impossible to eat anything in Uruguay without it being covered in mekty* amounts of cheese, some more cheese, and in case you feel like a bit more, more cheese.
* Mekty is a mispelt and misused Norwegian word I've decided to introduce to the English language to mean overpowering/over-the-top, as in "That shirt is well mekty man". In reality it´s spelt "mektig" and means overwhelmingly sweet. Before travelling to Latin America the only Norwegians I had ever met were A-ha, when I worked at Warners, but since I´ve been here I´ve met 7.
I moved onwards to Punta Del Diablo which is an amazing little town that reminds of a festival site, and where I met two extremely different people. Firstly Nigel, who I would have writen-off as an imbacile if it weren´t for the fact that anyone who gets from Mexico City to Montevideo on a bicycle that looks like it was found in a skip deserves credit of some sort. However I think he must have been kicked in the head by a horse when he was in his early teens as he is the only person I have met who has ever, in all seriousness, said "come the revolution you´ll be the first up against the wall" when relating the tale of one of his run-ins with various authority figures. I did try to suggest that perhaps, however flawed they may be, an attempt a some kind of "truth and reconciliation" program would be better in the event of sweeping social change, rather than wholesale slaughter of the oppressors, but he seemed unconvinced. That and the fact he looked like Rick Parfitt from Status Quo, and wore hot-pants that would make Kylie blush, and you might understand why I was reasonably relieved when he left the day after I arrived.
The second was Ernesto. If memory serves me well, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea in Cuba, but you could imagine him sitting in Ernesto's "restaurant" guzzling whatever booze was on hand. Ernesto must think of himself as a bit of a Hemingway character having named his restaurant "El Viejo y La Mar". However I seem to remember Ernest could be an utter w**nker at times, while Ernesto showed nothing but the utterly open and generous character, shared by all the Uruguayans I met, to myself and my travelling budy for that part of my trip, Gromit (who always carried an inexhaustable stash of crackers, hence the nickname).
When the weather turned we made a move back to Montevideo and then onwards to Paraguay. I left knowing that someday I will come back to explore the coast more thoroughly, and perhaps even 33 and the rest of this great little country.
Pythons...
Obviously having been so close to the border, it wouldn't do not to pop over to Brazil ("Hello Mrs Sartre how's your Jean-Paul"... see the Iguazú entry below). We caused utter chaos at the border control, having got ourselves stamped out of the country, Gromit and I went to Choy (Uruguay) to get a bus to Choí (Brazil) only to find out that actually the border is the mainstreet and you don´t need to get stamped out. The imigration man got as close to "slightly vexed" as any Uruguan probably ever does, when two hours and an all-you-can-eat lunch in Brazilian Choí, we presented ourselves back at the border post requesting a new entry stamp. Actually this was all a bit of ruse to sort out our rather messy passports: Gromit needed to swap from Aussie to British to avoid visas for entry into Paraguay and Brazil, and so I took the opportunity to straighted up the stamps that said I´d entered Uruguay a month before the Argentinan stamp said I had left Argentina, and, in reality, the day before I had.
Something to think about if you visit:
Uruguay has a reputation for being cheap but actually compared to Argentina it is expensive, although this is obviously based on tourist prices in tourist areas.
Context:
The minimum wage is 6 Uruguayan Pesos per hour (about 15p), the teacher I met did two jobs and took home about Ur$5,000 per month. In Punta Del Este a Vodka Tonic costs Ur$300, a hostel in Montevideo is Ur$275 per night. Meals on the whole came in around Ur$300 per head, including the cheese.
Uruguay is a bit of a backwater as far as South America is concerned, as, on the surface it´s fairly dull: uniformly flat - the largest "mountain" is only 423 ms high, that´s about 3.5 times the height of Highgate Hill - and the majority of the country has been cleared for pasture or farm land, punctuated by the odd cluster of palms or small plantation of firs.From a touristic point of view the only places thought to be worth visiting are along the Rio Plata or the Atlantic coast, and you have to wonder what lurks in the interior: there´s a town called Trienta y Tres (33) simply because it´s on the 33rd parallel, even the most dull towns usually warrant a saint's name rather than just a grid reference.
However, there´s so much more.
Colonia
A short ferry ride from Buenos Aires, Colonia is Uruguay´s touristic highlight, a, for the most part, intact colonial fortress town, interlaced with over-photograhed cobbled streets and ancient houses...so I took a picture of the sewage works, which is probably less frequently shown than most sights. On the last night the heavens opened spectacularly, so I headed to the capital the next morning. (Montevideo is the third capital I have visited in a row where I have had to glue my glasses back together).Montevideo - Good Friday, Bad Weather
Since I saw The Battle of The River Plate I have had some romantic notion of visiting the city and sitting purched on crates watching for a ship to make a break for the open sea, just like the reporter in the movie... Although I had to make do with standing on end of the harbour wall amongst a gang of crab fishermen on a cloudy day it was a great feeling being in the city.While the guide books mention that there's little of the colonial architecture left to see, they fail to mention that you can see in the architecture times of growth and prosperity, like layers of overground archaeology. Hidden amoungst the highrise blocks of the 70´s are spectacular examples of turn of the century, between the wars and post-war buildings. Why some bright spark hasn´t come up with running architectural tours to Montevideo is beyond me.
...or for that matter throughout the country. The coast is dotted with small towns where no two buildings seem to be the same, despite the standard single story box like construction. In Argentina and Chile you so often see out of town developements of row upon row of identical houses, but for whatever reason not here.The Atlantic Coast
I left Montevideo to escape the rain only to find myself in an utterly dreary Punta Del Este over the Easter Weekend. It was here that I decided that it is almost impossible to eat anything in Uruguay without it being covered in mekty* amounts of cheese, some more cheese, and in case you feel like a bit more, more cheese.* Mekty is a mispelt and misused Norwegian word I've decided to introduce to the English language to mean overpowering/over-the-top, as in "That shirt is well mekty man". In reality it´s spelt "mektig" and means overwhelmingly sweet. Before travelling to Latin America the only Norwegians I had ever met were A-ha, when I worked at Warners, but since I´ve been here I´ve met 7.
I moved onwards to Punta Del Diablo which is an amazing little town that reminds of a festival site, and where I met two extremely different people. Firstly Nigel, who I would have writen-off as an imbacile if it weren´t for the fact that anyone who gets from Mexico City to Montevideo on a bicycle that looks like it was found in a skip deserves credit of some sort. However I think he must have been kicked in the head by a horse when he was in his early teens as he is the only person I have met who has ever, in all seriousness, said "come the revolution you´ll be the first up against the wall" when relating the tale of one of his run-ins with various authority figures. I did try to suggest that perhaps, however flawed they may be, an attempt a some kind of "truth and reconciliation" program would be better in the event of sweeping social change, rather than wholesale slaughter of the oppressors, but he seemed unconvinced. That and the fact he looked like Rick Parfitt from Status Quo, and wore hot-pants that would make Kylie blush, and you might understand why I was reasonably relieved when he left the day after I arrived.The second was Ernesto. If memory serves me well, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea in Cuba, but you could imagine him sitting in Ernesto's "restaurant" guzzling whatever booze was on hand. Ernesto must think of himself as a bit of a Hemingway character having named his restaurant "El Viejo y La Mar". However I seem to remember Ernest could be an utter w**nker at times, while Ernesto showed nothing but the utterly open and generous character, shared by all the Uruguayans I met, to myself and my travelling budy for that part of my trip, Gromit (who always carried an inexhaustable stash of crackers, hence the nickname).
When the weather turned we made a move back to Montevideo and then onwards to Paraguay. I left knowing that someday I will come back to explore the coast more thoroughly, and perhaps even 33 and the rest of this great little country.
Pythons...
Obviously having been so close to the border, it wouldn't do not to pop over to Brazil ("Hello Mrs Sartre how's your Jean-Paul"... see the Iguazú entry below). We caused utter chaos at the border control, having got ourselves stamped out of the country, Gromit and I went to Choy (Uruguay) to get a bus to Choí (Brazil) only to find out that actually the border is the mainstreet and you don´t need to get stamped out. The imigration man got as close to "slightly vexed" as any Uruguan probably ever does, when two hours and an all-you-can-eat lunch in Brazilian Choí, we presented ourselves back at the border post requesting a new entry stamp. Actually this was all a bit of ruse to sort out our rather messy passports: Gromit needed to swap from Aussie to British to avoid visas for entry into Paraguay and Brazil, and so I took the opportunity to straighted up the stamps that said I´d entered Uruguay a month before the Argentinan stamp said I had left Argentina, and, in reality, the day before I had.
Something to think about if you visit:
Uruguay has a reputation for being cheap but actually compared to Argentina it is expensive, although this is obviously based on tourist prices in tourist areas.
Context:
The minimum wage is 6 Uruguayan Pesos per hour (about 15p), the teacher I met did two jobs and took home about Ur$5,000 per month. In Punta Del Este a Vodka Tonic costs Ur$300, a hostel in Montevideo is Ur$275 per night. Meals on the whole came in around Ur$300 per head, including the cheese.
# posted by Barney @ 3:00 pm 
