Uruguay is a small country. Well at least that was our thoughts when we first planned to spend some time here doing language school. What we found however is there a so many small places, not far away, that could keep you out of mischief for months.
We started off looking for a beach holiday prior to starting language school. Firstly we headed to Punta del Este. Think Surfers Paradise. The town is situated at the point that separates the Rio Plata and the ocean. It is full of high rise buildings and cold beaches caused by the shadows of the buildings. Later we found out that most Uruguayans would head slightly north or south of this place and it is normally filled with Argentinians and other foreigners.
It does however have a cool hand sculpture growing out of the beach, and its close to a couple of spectacular ares such as the Casa Blanca and the beach towns of La Barra and Jose Ignacio
Hand Sculpture
Casa Blanca
Sunset from Casa Blance
Not to mention a fabulous beach restaurant in Jose Ignacio that we could help but check out..
We also found a funky bridge just outside of La Barra but no-one we talked with could explain the reasons for this
After a few days here among the buildings, we headed another 2 hours north to the town of Punta del Diablo for the Easter weekend. This tiny beach side town is normally packed with Uruguayans in summer and the Easter weekend is typically the end of the tourist season so many come back for a bit more sun, drinks, and empanadas. Whilst on our first day there we found all of these things, the remainder of the time we found a whole lot of rain and wind making beach going difficult.
It also meant that I have not taken any picture to share with you of this place. And after this wet weekend we headed to Montevideo to start school.
A couple of weekends later we thought we'd head out into the country side and found a little farm stay about 2 hours west of Montevideo where we could chill out for a couple of days, do some walks, and maybe some horse riding. Our bad luck of rain continued though and we spent a little more time indoors and eating than planned....
Colonia cheese fondu
But when they were serving up Fondu from a local cheese we weren't complaining too much. The rain spoiled some of the plans to go horse riding but we found some gaps in the weather to explore the local farms on the way into the nearby "Swiss" town.
We also were able to go meet some of the farm animals and check out the local farm.
Whilst not quite the weekend planed it was awesome to get out into the country and explore a bit. If we had planned a little more time in Uruguay we would be keen to explore more of the countryside. As it was, for our last weekend in Uruguay we were keen to go to Colonia del Sacramento. But more bad weather followed...
At the same time Ecuador was struck with the horrendous earthquake, a massive storm passed through Uruguay. An combination of unusually warm weather in Brazil and unusually cold weather in Argentina lead to torrential rain as well as tornado that wiped out a small town, displacing around 5000 people. The rain also lead to significant river rises which the flat country doesn't cope well with and large number of roads were flooded. So even though we had started our travel to Colonia, we were turned around an hour from our destination. Sadly, we would not get to see Colonia on this trip.
We finished our last week at school and started the next chapter of travels. Heading north into the desserts and mountains of northern Argentina and Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. 28 975 Km (14011Km Flights, 7876Km Sailing, 6973Km Bus, 97km Hiking, 18Km Horse riding)