Uruguay 2009, part 16: This is the end, my friends

Available in Spanish: Final final 

This is the last post about my Uruguay vacations. I'll make it short because it's been a month and a half since I got back and other things are happening in real life.

As I explained before, there were no Paysandú-Colón-Rosario bus combinations at convenient times. Surprisingly for neighbouring frontier towns (one of which is the second city in its country), there aren't frequent bus routes; maybe the people who move between them are few and/or they do it by car.

That being not our case, we had to get up early and take a stroll with our backpacks up to the Paysandú bus terminal. The bus departed on time, but when we reached the international bridge we had to wait more than half an hour for some guy to take a few glances at each of us as he counted our heads, and for the migrations and customs officers to check our identity papers.

Drawing up a comparison with the more finicky but also much more efficient bureaucracy between Buenos Aires and Colonia, I couldn't help but conclude that it all comes down to money: if you travel on the Buquebús, you're served by shirt-and-tie, smiling employees who try to make things easy for you so nobody gets delayed; if you travel by bus, your time is worthless and the customs staff will waste it as they see fit.

We finally got to Colón and, of course, the bus for Rosario had gone twenty minutes ago. It was 9:30 and we'd have to wait for the next one... departing some time after 2 PM. The ghost of Valle Edén's nightmare reared its head, but in the end it wasn't such a big deal: Colón's bus terminal was relatively cool, there were toilets, a bar, and benches. In a languid state we let the hours go by, and weren't totally fed up by the time our transportation arrived.

We crossed Entre Ríos from east to west — a geographical ode to boredom — until we reached Victoria. Then a leap of six hundred metres over the Paraná, and we were in Rosario, some five hours after leaving Colón, and almost ten after departing from Paysandú. It was still day. My mother and my brother had come to welcome us back. As if trying to forget that this was the end of our vacations, we said goodbye quickly, quickly, and went away, each of us following their own path.

And thus is finished the story of our travels in Uruguay.

Uruguay 2009, part 15: Paysandú

Available in Spanish: Paysandú

Paysandú's basilica

After the evening deluge, Tacuarembó felt much cooler, but we didn't have the chance to take a last look at it, since our bus to Paysandú was scheduled very early. While it was still dark, we phoned a taxi from the hotel, and twenty minutes later we were already on our way west — and asleep.

Three hours later we woke up in Paysandú, Uruguay's second city, department capital, port on the Uruguay River, and border town. It was a sunny, windy, nice morning. It took us almost no effort to locate the address of our lodging place, a big single-story house turned hotel, opposite the main square and not far from the bus terminal. If as the beach rhythm grew farther away and our "big city people" habits returned, this was a step in the right direction — we had a room where five people would've fit, a large bathroom, and even a little patio.

I'd been to Paysandú, briefly, years ago (on an afternoon escapade) but I didn't remember much of it, so we'll have to go over it. In order to do that, however, we were first in need of breakfast, which we'd been unable to have before leaving Tacuarembó. We found a bar (it was called "El Bar") and we asked for white coffee and medialunas. Now I saw that the menu listed both medialunas and croissants, and the latter were much cheaper; the waiter gave us a weird look when we ordered medialunas "with nothing" (he checked), and my suspicions were confirmed when he brought us two huge crescent-shaped pieces of pastry, of the same kind (but double the size) of what's known in Argentina as medialuna — they were the kind we'd seen used for sandwiches in supermarkets throughout Uruguay. Nobody asks for "croissants" in Argentina; we just have medialunas.

After such copious breakfast (which, I'll hasten to add, didn't prompt any protests on our part) we went on a tour of the nearby touristic spots: the basilica church, rather modest from the outside but quite nice inside, and with a large bronze bell dated 1689 exhibited near the front door; the small museum honouring Leandro Gómez, the brave (and suicidal) defender of Paysandú during the siege of eighteen-twentysomething, at the main square; and the municipal history museum, with a diorama showing the area of the ancient battle where Gómez fell before my supposed far-removed relative, General Venancio Flores, with the help of Brazilians, on his way to conquer Montevideo.

We had some light thing for lunch in the hotel, and took a nap. Then we went to the bus terminal to buy our tickets in advance. I had the slightest hope that we might be able to get a direct ticket to Rosario, or an acceptable combination, but there was no such thing. The bus leaving Paysandú for Colón (Entre Ríos) reaches its destination, provided there are no delays, at exactly the same time as another bus leaves Colón for Rosario. And of course, there are always delays.

We still had the afternoon. Since the weather was fine, we decided to walk: map in hand, we went from one square to the next, we passed by the old train station, and we reached the river. We wandered along the coast. The port, which I had known in a state of abandon and open to the curious visitor, had been reactivated and now rejected us with fences and guards. The spot indicated in the map as a prime place to watch the river was also closed. We went on until we found a small beach, and there we sat down to rest, looking at a few children who played in the water, against the light of the sun near the horizon. We felt the weight of accumulated fatigue and didn't want to go back.

Marisa wanted to phone home to let her parents know about our return time, but we couldn't find a single public phone available at that time. The evening had arrived suddenly and Paysandú had shut off. My legs were wobbling from tiredness. At that moment Marisa realized she'd kept a whole lot of Uruguayan pesos... It was pointless, of course, to look for an exchange. So we made an opportunity out of it, and decided to spend that money on dinner as we hadn't had during the whole trip, a copious, hot, well-made restaurant dinner.

And that's how we said goodbye to Paysandú.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 14: Valle Edén

Available in Spanish: Valle Edén 

On the day after our arrival, Tacuarembó continued to feel asphyxiatingly hot and humid. We woke up deliciously later that many other days, with no appointments for the morning, and once in the street we walked with resignation following the shaded parts of the sidewalk.

There are two museums in Tacuarembó: the Historical and the Geoscience Museum. None of them is notable, but they were OK for a brief visit. None had air conditioning. The lady who sat (in supreme boredom) at the reception of the Geoscience Museum made a note out of that, while she guided us around a room where labels made her explanations wholly unnecessary.

Near noon we headed for the bus terminal to wait for the bus that would take us to Valle Edén, 23 km from Tacuarembó, a recommended touristic spot which promised lots of green, water and cool, besides being the seat of the Carlos Gardel Museum. Said museum showcases abundant proofs that Gardel, the most famous of all tango singers, was born in Tacuarembó, the bastard son of a promiscuous military man, and not in France... although those proofs are only considered clearly true by the people of Tacuarembó.

The bus came on time, and after about 40 minutes it left us at the entrance to Valle Edén, under a sky pouring sunlight on us. First mistake: the museum is one kilometre from the entrance; if we'd asked for it the bus would've taken us closer. The walk we had to endure was the first step of the realization of what would become painfully obvious later: that Valle Edén was not a summer paradise, unless you have a fast means of transportation (and with A/C).

The museum was an oasis of coolness, a house with lots of pictures and copies of historical documents about Carlos Gardel, and tango in the background. We tarried there, on my part without any interest in the hellish outside. Once the tour was over, we sat down to have lunch beside the museum, under some trees. We visited what's left of the Valle Edén train station, where a couple of locomotives are abandoned, giving the visitor a false sense of security (a train came by at full speed a while later). Then, map in hand, I went and inquired about the paths to take in order to reach the curiously named places noted as attractions.

There's nothing, nothing in Valle Edén that is close to anything else. The nearest touristic spot was about 7 km from us, maybe feasible for people in better shape or in more moderate temperatures, but not for us two. We didn't recoil from the challenge, though. Following the directions given to me by a local guide, we started walking toward the Gruta de los Chivos (Goats' Cave), but soon we realized that either the map or the guide's tips, or most likely both, bore no relationship to reality. We went back to the starting point, beside a rocky stream, shallow and full of green mud (described in the touristic brochure as having "crystal-clear waters") and near a suspended bridge (which we dared not climb).

By then it was clear the one good idea I had when we decided to try Valle Edén was insisting that we take two litres of cold water with us, despite its weight and the fact that it meant forfeiting our afternoon mate. There's no need, I guess, to note that anyway drinking hot mate at 40 °C was not a priority. We were sweating just by sitting down. And sitting we would have to stay, because the only bus back to Tacuarembó would come after 7 PM. And it was 2.

Faced with the prospect of a five-hour wait in that open-air sauna (which was mercifully getting cloudy), we exhausted all conversation topics, including how the hell we'd gotten there and why the guy at Tourist Info didn't explicitly tell us not to go. It was truly very very hot (I can't help repeating that) and we had to be careful with our water.

For a good while we considered going up to the road and hitchhike. But we hadn't seen any hitchhiking in Uruguay, least of all in Tacuarembó. Maybe it wasn't customary, maybe here in the deep interior of the country nobody had that custom. The road didn't look very crowded to us. And beside the road there wouldn't be a lot of convenient waiting places in the shade. We decided against hitchhiking. What to do then?

I'd brought a book, mostly because I had a lot of room in my backpack, thinking maybe we'd lie down in the cool grass in that paradise which Valle Edén had promised to be. I took the book out and started reading, but right away I realized that Marisa, who hadn't brought her own book, would get even more bored watching me read. So I asked her if she wanted me to read aloud. And that was, I think, the second good idea I had in Tacuarembó. The book was Desert Memories, by Ariel Dorfman, an Argentine-born Chilean exilee settled in the United States, and it was about his trip in the north of Chile for a close-up investigation of the history of the towns that sprang up in the late 19th century and early 20th beside the saltpeter mines. Not only was it entertaining and moving, but ideal for travelers like us, ideal to forget the heavy heat, to spend the hours, to stop after a couple of paragraphs and chat and discuss.

At one point when the time to return was still far away and not even the book or the conversations it prompted were enough anymore to keep us calm, we rose and went towards the road. We'd escaped from the dead hours and from our own tempers and we even had some water left, which we now took in little sips. The weather was better as well: the sky was gray and gusts of promising cool wind blew. I started to fear a storm would fall upon us.

At about 6:30 the bus came by, headed for Tambores, the end of its route, from where it would have to return and fetch us. From that moment on the wait became easier. One hour later we saw the same bus come towards us, we signaled it, got in and sat down, so happy.

With almost chronometric precision, it started to rain as soon as we neared Tacuarembó. We had no food for the night, and I had to phone a woman in Paysandú to confirm our reservation for the next day. We ran along the streets; sweating from the day and wet from the rain we went to a supermarket to buy some stuff, and managed to find a public phone. The whole night was a deluge, and thus the coolness we'd wished for the whole day finally came.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 13: Tacuarembó

Available in Spanish: Conociendo Tacuarembó

Church of St. Fructuoso, Tacuarembó

How did it cross our minds to go to Tacuarembó, in the depths of Uruguay, closer to the south of Brazil than to the Atlantic coast? It was a purely geographical matter: the goal was not to stay all the time in the coast, and not to return the same way we had come. Tacuarembó isn't a place of international tourist attractions, unless you're a true fan of Carlos Gardel (I'll explain that in due time).

Anyway, Uruguay suffers from the same type of macrocephalic disorder as Argentina, only even more pronounced; if Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area hold between one third and one fourth of the Argentine population, half of the Uruguayan population (which is only one tenth of that of Argentina) is concentrated on the Montevideo Department. That is to say that all roads lead to Montevideo. Or, to make a long story short, there's no direct route from Rocha to Tacuarembó. The traveller who wants to reach the gaucho heart of the country has no other recourse but to go first west-southwest to Montevideo and then wait for another bus to take him north-northeast to Tacuarembó. You go to a place 365 km away (as the crow flies) but you have to travel some 560 km, including a few tens of kilometres going on the opposite direction as the one desired.

So despite our intentions we did go back on our steps, although our stay in Montevideo was much shorter; by a fortunate coincidence, the bus that took us away from a cool night in La Pedrera at 6:30 left us in Tres Cruces, Montevideo, four hours later, and less than an hour before the departure of the bus to Tacuarembó.

The trip was rather long: about five hours (that's long for Uruguayan standards). Half asleep, we entered a flat, green country of scattered cows and sheep. Map in hand, but with no real knowledge of actual geography, I tried to guess at and remember the names of towns and cities we were passing by. I knew we were going to cross several department capitals and a great river... We got to Durazno (what a beautiful name, I thought¹) and then, much later, when I'd started to lose hope of seeing running water ever again, I saw a bridge, a watery expanse, and bam, in a matter of seconds we'd crossed over a blue river, its banks lined with trees, and there waving at us was a huge yellow sign with the black silhouette of a bull, the mark of the most famous of tonic waters in both our countries (when I was little I believed "tonic water" was just a non-commercial way of saying Paso de los Toros).² Of course, of said tonic water only the brand is left, acquired by a multinational consortium which surely claims to be making it "with the same coolness as ever", or something like that.

¹ Durazno means "peach".
² Paso de los Toros is the second city of Tacuarembó Department. Its name means "bulls' crossing", referring to the ford on the Río Negro beside which the city is located. It's also the brand name of a soft drink originally made there and still sold widely in Uruguay and Argentina.

Coming to Tacuarembó and getting off the bus was literally a thermal shock. From the marine coolness and the Montevidean air conditioning we had emerged directly into the subtropical weather of a land-locked city. And it was 4 PM, and in the Tacuarembó bus terminal there was no A/C. We went to the tourist office, where we were informed that touristic spots in Tacuarembó are located outside the city and in no way made easily accessible to visitors by bus.

Unraveled and sticky, we marched, backpacks over our shoulders, into the city center and towards our hotel, which turned out to be a curious but eventually satisfactory mix between disarray and amplitude. After the almost forgotten days in the confusing barracks that was the hostel of La Paloma, and the couple of days in the cozy but too little room in La Pedrera, with its doorless bathroom, this was paradise. We had a shower and, braving the awful heat outside, we went out for a walk.

Laguna de las Lavanderas (Lavenders' Lagoon)



Multicolour bridge

Tacuarembó is a village — a village of fifty-odd thousand, scattered, but a little town anyway, with summer afternoons empty until sunset, lots of young guys in motorbikes, a big square in the middle, a main street on each side of the square and a church just over there. If even walking in the shade hadn't been exhausting, I'm sure we could've enjoyed it more. As things went, there wasn't much to see, so we took the road towards the only tourist attraction we could reach on foot, the Lavenders' Lagoon (Laguna de las Lavanderas).

Even if a picture is worth a thousand words, one has to note that those words can be lies. The postcard images of the Lavenders' Lagoon showed a beautiful watery mirror surrounded by greenery and shade; only by coming close you would notice that the calm water was in fact stagnant. There was indeed much life and green stuff there, but it felt yucky just thinking of touching the water with the tip of a toe.

We fled, therefore, and back in the city, after crossing a bridge painted in bright, desaturated colours (the multicolour logo of the Municipality of Tacuarembó), we got into a cybercafé, and after that we went looking for a place to eat. We shared a huge sandwich and a beer in a bar, sitting next to two young foreign tourists of Anglo-Saxon speech habits and backpacker looks, who for some strange reason (such is the way of globalization) had ended up in this same little corner of the planet as us.

We were in front of the main square, which was filling up, and beside the main street, buzzing with little motorbikes and scooters. I'm emphasizing the bikes because it seems to be a common feature of middle-sized towns where public transport is scarce or nonexistent; in Chilecito, La Rioja, we'd observed that each and every youth seemed to have a motorbike, small or big, old or new, but always a means of transportation for their own use, relatively small and inexpensive, so as to be free from the alternative of a long, slow walk vs. an expensive taxi.

In Tacuarembó, of course, the boys came in motorbikes or bicycles carrying their thermos and mate, showing a kind of manual dexterity I couldn't hope to imitate; they parked at the square, turned on their music, chatted and drank mate. None or almost none of beer or wine or alcoholic drinks, which in Argentina and in squares and in every public place where young people gather tend to mix and turn inevitably into insolence and violence. It was still early, sure, but these guys seemed to be ready to stay, and neither boys nor girls looked any less happy or entertained than their Argentine counterparts, who (rather sadly) claim or assume they need some alcohol blood content to have fun.

These observations having been made, and with a few good, cold glasses of beer in our bloodstream, we wrapped up dinner and went back to the hotel to have some rest.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 12: Cabo Polonio

Available in Spanish: Cabo Polonio

Cabo Polonio is a projection of land that enters the sea, surrounded and almost completely covered by huge dunes. A few years ago it was rather difficult to reach. Today you still have to get off your bus or car, get into a large off-road vehicle, and shake around at low speed for half an hour along a sandy path. The difference is that before (I'm told) there was only one big four-wheel drive truck which departed from the middle of nowhere and came to what was then a fishermen's village without drinking water or electric power, occasionally inhabited by hippies and other adventurous types; while now there's a whole fleet, a small emporium of vehicles, on an open space with ticket vending booths and public restrooms, and at the end of the road the little village has turned into a still picturesque and rustic but also populous place, with decent lodgings and even a seafood restaurant.

The day was splendid, threatening none of those clouds or those cold winds that had been visited upon us on previous occasions. We took the bus headed for Barra de Valizas and left it a few kilometers before that; there we boarded our 4x4 truck, named El Mamut (the Mammoth), together with a couple dozens of people, and slightly compressed atop its bulge we went down the sandy, wavy road, until we were able to see, far off in the distance, some dunes and a beach of uniform colour, some scattered houses, a turquoise-blue sea. The Mammoth drove along the shoreline for a while, turned left, and let us go in a place no different from any other.

We daubbed ourselves on sunblock (which in the long run would turn out insufficient) and a few steps from there we sat down to eat our sandwich lunch. Even without much wind, the sea looked fabulous; in the distance I thought I saw some surfers. Off the beach you could see some islets with little dark spots on the bare, glittering, surf-beaten rocks: seawolves, aparently gathering just to be together and bask in the sun all day. Beyond, on our side of the coast, there were more rocks and a lighthouse. We headed for it to try and down our meal.

On our way we found a corner where the rocky floor went down up to the sea, and a fenced-out area. A few metres away, some twenty sea lions,* black and brown, glistening with salty waterdrops, were dozing off. You couldn't really say they were active animals in any sense. One that looked like a maned male emitted faint bellows while it lifted itself on its forefins, and somewhat apart a pup scratched itself, oblivious to the rest of the world.

* I don't know if this is the proper terminology. In Spanish these are lobos marinos ("sea wolves") rather than leones marinos ("sea lions"), but the names are often mixed up in actual usage. In any case the ones in Cabo Polonio must be South American Sea Lions, Otaria flavescens.

We retraced our steps up the rocks and went to the lighthouse. The climb left us breathless (120 steps!) but the effort was rewarded: from up there our eyes could span not only the ocean and the two islands full of sea lions, but the whole cape, with beaches on both sides and the immense, saffron-yellow dunes in the distance. (I assembled a panoramic picture there which soon, I expect, will be hanging in my room's wall in its full 5-foot-wide glory.)

The sea was inviting. We'd had enough of walking and climbing stairs. We rushed into the beach, towards a place with fewer people around, and went into the water. (As in other occasions, I stayed there much longer than Marisa and went back several times. It was by far the best beach we'd experienced during the whole trip.)

Sunset was upon us. The distant beach was becoming empty and promised peace and a glorious view for meditation. We set ourselves into motion again, the sun burning us from the side, and soon reached the point where the dunes come a few steps close to the sea and there are just lonely beachgoers looking  for silence stay. I climbed a dune and looked around. It would've been easy to go down the other slope and climb again and get lost in this fine, hot sand, but I had to hurry back to the beach, where Marisa was waiting, taking those typical I'm-at-the-top-of-the-world tourist-waving-from-afar pictures.

We'd gone towards an end of the cape, which looked far away but not impossibly so, and we hadn't even gotten half-way there, and the lighthouse and the village houses were barely visible already. It wasn't too late, but it wasn't a good idea to wait. When, half an hour later, we rode back on one of the Mammoth's companions and then had to wait for our bus 45 minutes beside the road, we resented not having used up to our last minute in Cabo Polonio; but such is the cruel fate of the tourist who depends on his feet and on other people's means of transportation.

Exhausted on our return, we somehow dragged ourselves to a supermarket and bought mosquito repellent and a quick dinner before falling into deep sleep. There were to be no more beaches for us. Our tired eyes tired and our deep-tanned skins were saying goodbye to the coasts of Uruguay; the next day, before the sun was out, we'd be on our way to Montevideo.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 11: La Pedrera

The day we arrived in La Pedrera marked one week of our journey, and like many other times before and after, it felt incredible to me that so much could have happened in such a short time.

We had already called Janneo, the owner of our hostel in La Pedrera, to reassure him and promise, swear that we wouldn't fail him. Even then he hadn't felt extremely sure, and when we came into his front yard, almost at noon, he greeted us with genuine joy and noticeable relief, and proceeded to make us comfortable in our room at once. It was good to finally have a place for ourselves, with a private bathroom where you didn't have to wait on a queue to take a shower or pray for hot water to come out, and without other people's luggage scattered on the floor.

The room itself was little (the bed took up most of it), but well-lit, painted white, with an immaculately clean bathroom (separated from the rest only by a translucent curtain). Its sliding window was also its entrance.

Breakfast wasn't provided, and there was no kitchen available either, which somehow stretched the definition of a hostel and made the price less acceptable; but after three days of living in a tight space, it was paradise. We went out, therefore, to look for lunch, and since we were in good spirits, we splashed out: we sat at the table of a nice little restaurant, beside the main street (filled with sun and sand) and had a good meal with a cold beer.

If La Paloma can be termed a city, La Pedrera is definitely what you'd call a little town. The only paved street is the main one, which leads straight to the sea, which anyway isn't far from anywhere, in one direction or another.

Marisa had a vague reminiscence of the place from a visit long ago. It had changed only a bit; many luxurious homes had sprouted near the coast, there were certain facilities on the previously empty beach, and the visitors weren't all adventurous youth but also elderly people and families, including a good proportion of Argentinians. On both sides of the main street, populated by trucks and full of beach-goers, there were bars, restaurants, bakeries and takeaway food stores, besides a couple of little supermarkets and a few artisans' spots.

After downing our food as best we could, we went down to the sea. Again we had to endure wind and clouds. My secret hope of witnessing a storm over the sea, however, wasn't fulfilled.

We stayed for a long while, until it started getting uncomfortably cool. We returned to the hostel, had a hot shower to rid ourselves of the cold, the sand and the tiredness, and went out again to fetch dinner. We had empanadas. Marisa, evidently not in her highest moment regarding food, almost couldn't sleep. I didn't do that well either, since (as in Montevideo) mosquitoes attacked.

While we were in La Paloma he'd been unable to arrange a trip to Cabo Polonio, and here in La Pedrera we were all set to go the next day. Nice trip, I thought — me without sleep, and Marisa with her stomach turned into a knot... But finally our tiredness got the best of us both, and when we woke up, with the whole town still drowned in the silence and coolness of morning, we managed to get started with the help of coffee and tea, served in a baker's shop which was evidently used to early birds.

We only had one more beach day ahead...

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 8: Arrival in La Paloma

Disponible en español: Llegada a La Paloma

On the morning of February 4 we said goodbye to the Montevidean hostel that had given us lodging for three nights, to the streets of the Old Town and to the expansive capital metropolis. The trip that followed lasted too much and, to my disappointment, we barely got to see the sea at any point. First the suburbs of Punta del Este passed by; then almost two hours later we entered Rocha, the capital of the Rocha Departament, and a while later we got off the bus at the luminous terminal of La Paloma.

As is already automatic for us, we asked for a map and inquired about our hostel, where we headed on foot. Due to reasons of availability, first, and then also of price, in La Paloma we'd had no other recourse but to book places in a shared bedroom. My hostelling experience in that regard was more or less varied, but it hadn't prepared me for this: a mixed room with five twin bunk beds, low and not really firm-looking, with the thinnest mattresses ever seen, and some tiny lockers, all of which filled up with people in a very short time. People who choose to sleep in mixed, low-price shared bedrooms tend to come along with lots of luggage and make room for it liberally (that is to say, there were huge backpacks thrown around the middle of the room, all the time).

The place had a reduced staff, not to say two people (in all shifts, not always simultaneously), and it was reduced also in two very, very major aspects: the bathrooms and the kitchen. The latter was so small that two people couldn't get in it at the same time, and the equipment was scarce, though fortunately it worked OK. As for the bathrooms, they were few and logically they weren't (always) clean, since among that many people there's always one or two that are dirty and careless. For my first shower I got cold water; for the second one, I was cautious enough to get up early, before the hot water ran out.

We men at last have the advantage of being quick; some of the women managed to hog the shower for themselves for half an hour or more, which led to the formation of queues (ask Marisa about that). Naturally they then emerged from the bathroom as if just come from the beauty parlour, which confirms to me that we men are sometimes too lazy to take our time, although in cases like these being negligent actually helps. (My self-portraits of those days are unpublishable, showing how I completely let fo of the routine of combing my hair, shaving and choosing the right clothes, as soon as I left Montevideo.)

I don't want to trash the hostel completely, though, since there were some good things about it. Firstly, it was cheap and the location was very convenient. Secondly, thin as they were, the mattresses were sleepable. Breakfast wasn't just abundant but varied: coffee (black or white) and croissants or biscuits with jam, or juice and slices of fresh watermelon, all of it freely available on a covered pool table for unlimited servings. Outside there were chairs so you could have breakfast facing the streets, and inside, a great patio shaded by a dense vine (a haven for the sunny hours) and a hammock.

I'm speaking ahead of the facts, though. The first day, as I said, we arrived after a long trip, so we quickly dropped our stuff and went to eat lunch at the closest place we'd spotted: a little bar across from the bus terminal, where we were served a sandwich of something that was a beef milanesa in name, though not in looks or texture, and which came to us addled in sticky, antique oil. My chronic digestive troubles made no appearance, which is a clear sign that work not only isn't healthy but should be actively advised against by medical professionals.

After prudently waiting for the meal to go down, we went to the beach. It was our first encounter with the sea proper here in Uruguay (as I've said, in Montevideo the river is practically a sea, but not technically), and off I went, according to Marisa "just like a kid", which is perfectly understandable if you ask me. She likes the sea but basically to look at and listen to it; I have to get inside the water and if possible be beaten, dragged, rudely rocked by it in order to feel it.

My little secret, here, is that it was the first time I went to the sea. As a kid my family never went on vacation (as so many Argentine families) to Mar del Plata or any of the all-too-popular beach resorts in the coast of Buenos Aires; as a teenager we had no vacations at all; when, as a grown-up, I had my own job and the ability to make use of my own money, it never occurred to me to look toward the ocean, but rather I turned to the dense forest or the mountain or the desert. So there I was, 32 years old and for the first time treading on the soaked-up sand, feeling the foam come and go over my feet, the cool shock and the rude welcome of the waves, the salt in my mouth. If I ever get used to it, I'll stop being a kid before the sea and I'll be just one more guy in the beach... but that won't happen soon.

The wind blows all the time in the shore, and it wasn't easy staying in the beach waiting for the sun to dry you off. We went back to town, wandered here and there, bought some food, went to the hostel, grabbed some warm clothes. Then we went down to the beach again to watch the sunset and stayed there, two lovers looking at the sun and the surf, exactly like countless couples on countless sunsets must have done since the world began.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 7: El Prado

Disponible en español: El barrio del Prado

Church of the Carmelites

We spent our last day in Montevideo visiting the neighbourhood of El Prado, a residential area, very quiet and very old, full of trees, with houses from days of long-past splendour.

The night before, after having a big time eating shellfish and fried calamari, walking several kilometers and skirting disaster on our return by bus after midnight, we were left exhausted. Some of all that must have had an effect on Marisa, because she woke up early with a major stomach pain, feeling very weak and certainly in no shape to go out for a walking tour. Fortunately it turned out not to be (as she feared) a gastroenteritis. Nothing could be done except to get her to rest, something for the pain, lots of liquid and nothing to eat.

The plan of touring some more of Montevideo in the morning was discarded, and I started to fear that we would have to call a doctor, but Marisa would have none of that. So I left her where she was and took a bus to Tres Cruces to get our tickets for La Paloma. The day was cloudy and just a little too warm. I went and returned in an hour and a half, tops, and I saw Marisa was much better. She had something light to eat and we decided we'd try to go to El Prado in the afternoon.

It took us almost 40 minutes to get there, on a bus going first towards the city center, and then north; we traversed unknown neighbourhoods and completely lost our bearings, but somehow managed to get off the bus just one block from where we should. Our informant had given us an exact location to begin (the intersection of Agraciada and 19 de Abril), and a detailed route to follow as well. Probably not in that order, we saw the old houses and tall plane trees of Avenida 19 de Abril, the Church of the Carmelites (one of the few truly large churches I saw in Montevideo), the weird storehouses of the Rural Society, the Miguelete Stream, a great park with a huge pergola and a rose garden (without roses), the Hotel del Prado, the Botanical Garden, the presidential residence, a museum, and thrown in with all that, little houses of archaic style and mansions that went from the austerely severe to the Disneylandish.

We ended up in a bar called Los Yuyos, which must be famous, and which owes its name to the traditional herbs that are added to the caña and the grappa served there. We had no occasion to try such stuff, of course; just a glass of orange juice and a hot sandwich (to the list of things I missed in Uruguay, which started with icecream, let's add carlitos and ketchup).

Marisa at "Los Yuyos"

We had walked about three hours and the tour had taken us to the far end of the neighbourhood, a long way from Avenida Agraciada, the only street that we knew for sure could get us back to our hostel. The idea of crossing the whole barrio again wasn't something we were looking forward to. We were so lucky, though, that only a couple of blocks from Los Yuyos there was a bus stop and the bus took us to the Old Town.

Evening came and my one concern was finding a bed to crash, but Marisa (who had obviously recovered and wasn't sleepy) found Hannibal (i.e. the sequel of The Silence of the Lambs) on cable and decided to watch it whole, so my half-sleep was punctuated by screams, bullet shots and a variety of scenes with guts and brains flying around.

And that's how we said goodbye to Montevideo. Next stop: the beaches of La Paloma.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 6: The feast of Iemanjá

Disponible en español: La fiesta de Iemanjá

On the evening of our second day in Montevideo, we set up our stuff to go to the beach (for the first time in Uruguay) and to watch what promised to be somewhat of a novelty for us: an umbanda ceremony honouring Iemanjá, the orisha of the sea.

For those unaware of it, the umbanda religion is one of many cults which, after coming to the Americas with the African slaves, underwent a process of adaptation, growth and merging with the dominant Catholic religion. Among the multiple variants of voodoo (Haitian and Louisianan), the Cuban santería and the Uruguayan candoblé, the umbanda religion (which comes from Brazil, with its center in Bahia) is one of many with a pantheon of minor gods and goddesses, known here as orishas (written orixas in Portuguese), and which incorporated and assimilated the characters of Catholic saints and others. This fusion of diverse religious traditions is known as sincretism.

The names of orishas come from the Yoruba language (whose dialects are spoken by some 22 million people in Africa). Iemanjá is what people in Uruguay call Yemayá, the orisha who governs the sea. On February 2 she is honoured with dances, singing and offerings of flowers and fruit on the beaches of Montevideo, where her devotees come along with thousands of curious people.

We'd been advised to go to the beach known as Playa del Buceo because the place, although it attracts fewer people than others, also attracts fewer choripán salesmen and peddlers of the sort, who (kind of) take away some colour off the ceremony. The ceremony should begin after sundown, we were told, but we went a lot earlier to check out the sea/river and try the sand and the water. Buceo is the neighbourhood's name; the beach with that name is next (going west) to the well-known and extremely posh beach of Pocitos.

Playa del Buceo

We got on a bus that left us a couple of blocks from the beach. Through this, incidentally, we found out something weird about Montevideo... By asking the hostel staff how to get to Buceo's beach, we wanted to be pointed towards a bus that wouldn't pass very far away from it, one that would leave us on the general vicinity; when one travels for half an hour in a big city it's no big deal to get off and walk five or ten minutes. But the hostel guys seemed intent on giving us a bus that would almost literally dump us on the sand of the beach, and even more so, on some specific point of it, and they would refuse to understand our lack of precission. Later, when we asked the driver about the best place to leave the bus in order to go to the beach, he was very concerned and disturbed, as if we'd taken a bus that took us on the opposite direction and he had no way to tell us the bad news. This happened to us again. It seems that the people of Montevideo tend to be that precise when giving directions; maybe they're used to there being buses that take you from all places to every other place without need to walk much.

But I digress. We got off the bus, walked a couple of blocks, and there was the sea (technically it's still the Río de la Plata, but it's so blue, so full of waves, so salty, that calling it a river is pedantic). The beach wasn't crowded at all; we dumped our stuff on the sand and, first one and then the other (with our Argentine fear of insecurity still in our heads) we took a splash. Then we dried off in the sun and sat down to wait.

And they came. Several women, fewer men, no more than eight or nine, all dressed in white, the men with a cylindrical cap, the women with great kerchiefs like turbans, except for a guy who brought a percussion instrument (a hand drum, maybe an atabaque) and a woman dressed differently from the rest, with a long light blue dress and semi-transparent cloth of the same colour. The dark, wrinkled man with the drum started beating on it with a contagious rhythm; the woman in the sky-blue dress seemed to direct the ceremony. They brought a little wooden boat to the sand, set up candles on it and a great bundle of white carnations inside it, and then all the people dressed in white danced: first only revolutions around the boat, then rotations on themselves, with light steps, barefoot. A chant rose, and then another. Some turned and spinned with their eyes towards the ground, others waved their hands in precise, strong ritual gestures. Every now and then one of the women fell to the ground, prostrated and kissed the sand, then got up and went on with her danced and sung prayer.

The gathered public looked on calmly, in a circle, no more than two or three dozen people. The dance finished. The woman in blue gave some instructions, and the little boat was lifted and carried by the devotees to the shore. They entered the water and one of the men went on, pushing the boat through the waves that splashed up to his chest, until it sank or was lost to sea. Iemanjá had accepted the offer.

Later, when we were leaving to walk along the beach, we ran across another group of devotees. These were different: they wore colourful dresses and they carried flower and fruit (watermelon) offers, and some coloured cloth standards with figures we couldn't make out. They came walking and singing along the seaside road, and they were headed for Buceo beach. We didn't follow them, except with our eyes. The sun was setting.

Finally we arrived in Pocitos, where we decided that so much sun and walking were enough, and sat down on a little restaurant. We ordered a beer and had shellfish empanadas and rabas (fried calamari). Marisa was very tired, and I as well, but I persuaded her to get back to Buceo to check if something else had happened, since our Montevidean insider had told us the real show happened by night. We retraced our steps. Upon nearing Buceo beach again, we saw in the half-darkness a motion of people, plus some mysterious dots of lights in the sand.

As it turned out, countless makeshift altars had been erected, ornamented with veils and garlands and Christmas lights, statuettes and figurines and coloured candles; many groups of umbanda devotees were there, singing and dancing or laying hands on people. In the sand there were many holes, dug by hand, each containing one or several lit candles, protected from the wind, and many families were still coming, bringing their thermos and mate, and starting new holes. There was definitely a good vibe on that evening, cool and full the murmurs of the sea.

The time to return came and then we discovered we didn't know how. We'd lost our reference points. We went to wait for a bus at the closest stop we saw, but it never came. We were nervous and tired. We looked and walked around until we found the place we'd come from in the afternoon. Bingo! It was (apparently) the right place. The bus came, and it broke ten minutes later in the middle of nowhere... Ten minutes after that another bus came — not the same line, but it was close enough (again we had to explain the driver that yes, we did want to go to the Old Town, but no, it was no problem for us if he left us three blocks from there). We got off near the Citadel's Gate, I think. Five blocks of coolness and dark, and finally rest in our hostel.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 5: The Port's Market and the Breakwater

Disponible en español: El Mercado del Puerto y la Escollera

Second day in Montevideo. We had a plan to explore the coast and the atractions of the Old Town (the Ciudad Vieja), where we were staying. First we walked up to Rambla 25 de Agosto, where we were greeted by some imposing buildings but mostly containers and other not-so-touristic sights.

A typical bar in the Port's Market

Following that way we arrived in the Port's Market (Mercado del Puerto), an immense old storehouse full of little bars and restaurants, dark but not gloomy and pleasantly cool, with huge skylights to let the sun in.

It was fascinating, if a bit expensive (in Uruguay everything's expensive for Argentinians, even more so if it's about having a good meal of fish or shellfish, or an asado). We didn't stop there for long. The Market is surrounded by shops offering art and crafts, very picturesque yet more city-like (and in agreement to my taste) than in small-town Colonia.

We kept walking. Sunlight was pouring on us, but wind blew some of it away. We ventured onto the Escollera Sarandí, a breakwater that emerges like a massive spine or narwhal's horn from the end of the peninsula where the original Montevideo was founded, into the river-sea. There were some port employees and others there, most of them fishing, sitting or standing on the big blocks placed on both sides. We'd been told, for safety, to go to the Escollera at a reasonable time of day and to avoid displaying our nice cameras around too much, but I didn't have any reasons for alarm (our Uruguayan correspondent might not have known that we live in an insecure, big city, and that through bitter experience we've acquired a certain sense of danger and opportunity). Montevideo, I must say, isn't quite a wonderful view from the Escollera, especially at noon, as the skyline of the Old Town and beyond isn't very impressive (I'm not saying it has to be either).

We spotted some birds, some bugs scuttling among the ever-wet rocks, and a few muddy little crabs. The fishermen seemed to be carrying on with their task more for fun than anything else, judging by the scarce, diminutive catches I saw.

It was a stimulating stroll to start checking out Montevideo, but the heat was overwhelming, so we came back and shut ourselves inside the hostel. The afternoon and the evening awaited us with the promise of witnessing a religious ceremony outside all of our previous experience: the festivities for Iemanjá.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 4: Carnival in Montevideo

Disponible en español: El Carnaval de Montevideo

Palacio Salvo

Our first day in Montevideo was better than expected, without taking into account the easy and safe arrival, the cleanliness and everything else. It was the first day of February and, contrary to our fears, the weather was ideal. A nap was required, yes, but after that we were able to go out to the sunny afternoon and wander around the Old Town, here and there taking pictures of the typical icons: the Artigas mausoleum, the Palacio Salvo, the architecture surrounding the main square.

The really good stuff, however, was a change of schedule due to a rain we didn't witness. As it turned out, the opening ceremony of the 2009 Carnival season had been put off because of bad weather a few days ago, so that day we'd have the chance to see it. The hostel staff proposed that we go together, at 5:30 PM, and get a good place somewhere along Avenida 18 de Julio, which was already closed to traffic and where you could see long rows of wooden chairs and palcos that looked like gigantic baby playpens (all of which could be rented at reasonable prices).

Marisa and I followed the group but then, deciding we'd found a good spot already, we left them. We stayed at the corner of 18 de Julio and Rio Branco St. (I remember that detail not because I'm some sort of memory freak but because we stood there beside the sign with the street name for two hours).

It's unusual, as I understand, for the first Carnival parade to start during the daytime. That also was good for us. First, of course, we had to wait for the police and the organizers to free up the avenue, for the comparsas and the murgas to line up correctly, for the peddlers of canned foam and cotton candy and confetti to leave (they never left completely). After that there came a couple of buses rolling side-to-side to make room, and then they began coming, one, two, ten, fifty carnival groups, each with their own outfits or banners, on foot or atop carriages with varied ornamentation, dancing or singing or doing choral parody.

I've never been too fond of Brazilian-style carnival or the modest copy of it that is en vogue in several parts of Argentina, with gigantic carrozas and a predominance busty women covered in artificial feathers. I acknowledge their effort but I'm not interested in it, except technically. The Montevidean carnival is different, since in Uruguay murga and parody troupes, which represent the true spirit of carnival (transgression, role inversion) are featured more prominently. You also get to more of, let's say, real people. I saw almost nothing of sweaty, muscled male dancers or hot brunettes displaying their natural gifts for the public; there were "queens" waving from their vehicles, but most of the participants were just people, young and old, fat ladies, middle-aged gentlemen singing, guys dressed as ladies, everyone with their own colours, with elaborate costumes, lots of face-painting, whirls of brilliance and sequins, and always a smile for the kids that clapped on the sides. This carnival had more mocking and parody, and yet more innocence, than what you see in the corsódromos.

If we had arrived one day later, we would've missed it. If we had come to see it on the scheduled date, days before, we would've missed it as well.

One after another came cabezudos, cumbia singers with flamboyant hairdos, a huge flag of Peñarol and a huge Argentine flag, a group of guys clad in gold with boxes, bottles, cages, umbrellas and a whole assembly of props on top of them; a smiling bishop, a king of spades, groups marching at the rhythm of a batucada, a parody of firemen on a mini-firetruck that sprayed Seltz water over us, ladies with curlers... Two hours went by, and necks were already hurting from looking west, and faces burned from receiving the sun on the same side all the time.

It was dusk. With the last lights we went walking, going up the river of colours towards its source and beyond, after the Citadel's Gate, where we found thousands of people, hundreds of troupes waiting for their turn to join the parade. The printed schedule of the carnaval listed (if I recall correctly) some 250 groups; we'd only watched about fifty. So we only saw one-fifth of the first day of the 2009 Carnival of Montevideo. That was enough to call it a day. We left to find something to eat, and then to rest.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 3: Montevideo, the first impression

We arrived in Montevideo after noon. The city seemed to me big, expansive, with suburbs slow to appear. There are no huge highways or stacked road bridges. Montevideo (with its metropolitan area) has a population of 1.8 million, half the whole of Uruguay, almost twice that of Rosario and two thirds that of Buenos Aires, but it didn't look dense or complicated to me.

After a good while rolling down avenues and more avenues, the bus came to a brick-wall building, made a couple of turns and got inside. Terminal Tres Cruces ("Three Crosses Terminus") is relatively small. After the rather disordered Mariano Moreno bus terminal of Rosario and especially after the horribly filthy Retiro, Tres Cruces impressed me as surprisingly simple, clean and easy to navigate. There wasn't a single piece of paper or a plastic bag on the floor, or even one motor oil stain on the platforms. Neither were there people asking for coins to take your luggage from the bus, and I'd almost bet that the taxis waiting beside the exit weren't all members of a taxi mafia (as in Rosario). In fact, Tres Cruces is also a shopping mall, and as such the shop owners have an interest in making the potential client feel comfortable.

We crossed a street, asked around, and finally got on a bus that took us to the neighbourhood known as Ciudad Vieja (the Old Town), where, with the help of a map we'd gotten at the Tourist Office, we made our way quite easily to our hostel.

What I saw of Montevideo during the three and a half days I was there is almost enough to forgive Uruguayans for their inability to make decent icecream. Some might protest that I only saw the city center and the most touristic parts of the city, but at some point one has to acknowledge that's an excuse. Montevideo is infinitely cleaner than Rosario or Buenos Aires. During my whole stay, which I spent walking around the Old Town, the Center, the port zone, the neighbourhood of El Prado and a couple of beaches, I didn't spot one single pile of dog shit on a sidewalk, or a single garbage dump, or one overflowing trash container. I also didn't see people littering the floor, or pedigree dogs defecating on the public space before their masters.

The traffic also deserves a mention. To begin with, Montevideo car drivers don't look like madmen behind the wheel. They don't show the typical Argentine histeria to be the first to arrive anywhere. In Argentina, when you cross the street, you need to be fully aware you're risking your life. In Uruguay drivers seem to realize that between a walking person and a car it's the former who'll get the most damage if they have a violent encounter, and they slow down to let you pass, or at least they don't show a clear intent to run over you. In Argentina, you can often perceive that the driver is choosing between murder and jail and only refrains from the former to avoid the latter.

Public transport is another thing. Montevideo's buses are such that you get in, pay to a guarda (who sits apart from the driver) and that's it for the rest of the trip. The bus is clean, the guy who sells you the ticket always has change, and no-one ever fires up his or her MP3-enabled cellphone with trashy cumbia or reggaeton. Above all, one doesn't get the distinct feeling that one's about to be insulted or mobbed by another passenger any second, or that the driver is ready to kill if someone honks the horn.

I can't speak about taxis because they truly were unnecessary to us. We went around and around by bus, and only once, late at night, we thought of taking a taxi. It turned out we were just waiting on the wrong spot, for the wrong bus. Besides, in Montevideo you don't get the official fiction that buses work during the evening. After midnight it's almost impossible to catch one, and everyone acknowledges it.

You need some time outside the big city, in Argentina or wherever, to notice the awful load of barely-repressed aggressive instinct we carry around here, and which I didn't see in Uruguay. I repeat that this is my personal experience, and it's partial and limited, but the contrast was so stark and shocking I can't but note it. And I'm talking about Uruguay, which is almost an estranged Argentine province. They're not Swiss or Japanese or come from another planet where people are "better"; it's evidently us Argentinians who're doing something wrong.

On the other hand, and this must have lots to do, in Uruguay I didn't see the terrible amount of poverty or the obscene show of wealth you see every day side-to-side in Argentina. Some child asked me for a coin, and I saw many poor-looking people walking in Montevideo's downtown. Surely there are poor people in Uruguay, and surely someone will tell me they prefer insolently visible poor as in Argentina rather than invisible poor, or poor rendered invisible by society, as supposedly there would be in Uruguay. What I know is that you can't hide all poverty, and that in Montevideo I didn't feel sick witnessing armies of dirty children abandoned on the streets by the parents, asking passers-by for small change or washing the windshields of brand-new luxurious SUVs, and I also didn't see mothers with malnourished babies on every available space in the city center, begging before shops filled of imported goods or overpriced clothes.

All of the above might sound rather unpleasant on my part, and the truth is it is unpleasant, and probably more than one Argentinian with less-than-average IQ is thinking, if I like Uruguay so much, why don't I move there; and the answer is, I wouldn't mind doing it, and it would probably be better for my mental health, but practical and sentimental reasons keep me from it.

And because this post was unpleasant but necessary to me, I've poured all these impressions into it, until the last drop. One can't get to know a country or a city in a couple of weeks on vacation, but if truly the first impression is what counts, then I can't say almost anything bad about Montevideo or Uruguay in general. The comparison inevitably puts Argentina under a bad light. Whatcha gonna do...

I initially intended to write about Montevideo's Carnival, one of the first bright experiences of this voyage, but I had to let go of all the above. The next post, I promise, will be more cheerful.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 2: Colonia

A Colonia street


Another street in Colonia


Little boats on Colonia's port


A wooden sculpture by Ricardo  Pascale

We arrived in Colonia del Sacramento on the sun-filled noon of Friday, January 31. They made us disembark through a long tube with many turns; we were led to the customs office, and there, mysteriously, all the forms we'd had to fill in to become temporary immigrants into Uruguay were rendered unnecessary by a simple gesture and the words "keep going, keep going" from the guy who checked the luggage. So we took our bags and entered the country just like that, though we were still looking over our shoulders in case some official was coming after us.

The hostel we would be lodged in was a few blocks from the port and on an upward slope, but we managed to get there with our heavy stuff (Marisa was carrying a long backpacker's backpack; I'd taken a wide military-type backpack with a steel frame; both also carried extra bags). The hostel was an old house with lots of tile floors, flowers and shade and quiet.

We had only booked one night in Colonia, so that afternoon we spent touring the older part of the city, wandering along cobbled streets, visiting the port, the small beach of the Old Town, the remains of the ancient wall of the fort, and lighthouse, which we climbed right before sunset. We watched a kart race on General Flores Ave., which was closed to other traffic and full of people: a noisy and at first sight very dangerous event that seemed to us rather alien to its context.

Colonia is, no doubt, but also sells itself as, a picturesque place, away from noise and modern urban decadence, and beautifully preserved. The tourists, mostly high-class porteños and middle-aged foreigners with delicate skins, are after that. Young backpackers and traveling artisans you will find, too, as everywhere else, but these belong to a different kind. We young Argentinians from the inner country, on a budget and without any chance to take away anything (not leather, not carved wood, anything but photographed memories) were also a little alien there.

Here, on our first day in Uruguay, we found out that ice cream is not the forte of this country. What was served to us on a corner of Colonia was a half-melted mass of cream with little flavour and too much colouring, which cost us twice what a larger, much tastier ice cream would have cost us in Rosario. (Rosario, in case you didn't know, is the National Capital of Artisan's Ice Cream. The title sounds pretentious, if I may say so as a native, only until you taste the ice cream that is made in other places.)

The next day we only had time for a brief final tour, on a cool morning, along the coast of the river-sea. We were ready and set for the two-hour trip to the capital, Montevideo.

To be continued...

Uruguay 2009, part 1: Rosario-Buenos Aires-Colonia

People waiting to board, Buquebús terminal in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires


A boat of the Buquebús fleet, similar to ours


Marisa before the immensity of the Río de la Plata


The lighthouse of Colonia del Sacramento, as we came close

I begin my travel chronicle with the well-known disclaimer for whoever has had a different experience or thinks I'm overgeneralizing. These vacations were mine and Marisa's, and the experiences and impressions I'll recount are undoubtedly very personal and very partial. One can't get to know a country in two weeks, or even a city. Therefore, anything I say about Uruguay must be read as if preceded by "As far as I saw it...".

That said, I begin my tale, and I have to go back a little. My original idea was going to Uruguay via the most direct route for us, by land through Entre Ríos and from there to Paysandú or Fray Bentos. I would've liked to check out Gualeguaychú, which I saw years ago for a few hours, and Fray Bentos, with its (in)famous pulp mill. Fray Bentos is also where Borges chose to locate the story of Ireneo Funes, "the Memorious". But the news about road and bridge blocks by the Gualeguaychú Environmental Assembly were disquieting. It wasn't in our plan to begin our vacations stuck in the frontier.

Marisa then came up with the idea, which I seconded immediately, of going the other way, which was longer and more expensive but nicer and safer. We researched it a bit and finally booked passages on the Eladia Isabel, a boat of the Buquebús company, to go from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento across the Río de la Plata.

The trip to Retiro Station (BA) took us about four hours. We arrived at the hypertrophic capital of our country about three hours after leaving Rosario, and from Greater Buenos Aires to Retiro we spent some 45 minutes. Then we had to wait half and hour to enter the huge bus terminal, located wall-to-wall to a huge villa miseria, full of peddlers of dubious merchandise, its tarmac cracked or lost to negligence and time. How a capital which prizes itself on being the Paris of the South has a bus terminal that is so unnecessarily complicated to get into or out of, so ill-placed within its urban environment, and so filthy, escapes my comprehension.

We got off the bus, grabbed our stuff to guard it against unseen thieves, hailed a taxi, and were left on the Buquebús terminal in Puerto Madero, suddenly transported to another world, similar to a squeaky clean and very congested airport. We went through the embarkment paperwork, had coffee, and then boarded. The boat moved away from the coast slowly, and as we went far into the Río de la Plata I could see why Juan Díaz de Solís, the first European who found it and surveyed it, called it "Mar Dulce", that is, the Sweet Sea. It was an infinite expanse of earthen-brown water, with a few boats at the limit of one's vision looking like a gray cardboard figurine. Thus three hours passed, until we saw a few green islets and finally the white lighthouse of old Colonia.

To be continued...

I'm back!

Just a short note to let you know that I came back to Rosario from my vacations in Uruguay yesterday afternoon, and I'll be delivering my usual travel chronicle through this blog as soon as possible. For the moment you can see the pictures I'm uploading to Flickr at the set Vacaciones Uruguay 2009. It's good to be back!

Mid-vacation

Folks, this is just a brief note to remind you that I'm still on vacation in Uruguay. We've been to Colonia and Montevideo and now we're in La Paloma, on the Atlantic southern coast of Uruguay, enjoying the beach and the sound of the sea. We've spent some very nice days in all of these places. Colonia was picturesque, if full of Argentinians. Montevideo surprised us with beaches that we hadn't seen advertised anywhere, and with its cleanliness. La Paloma is simply beautiful. If everything goes OK, we should be in La Pedrera in a couple of days.

Bye-bye for now, from the other side of my pond.

George and Hugo, sitting on a tree... NOT!

Picture by Beatrice Murch

Everybody surely knows now that George "Lame Duck" Bush was touring South America and that Hugo "Red Danger" Chávez scheduled a tour for himself just to bother the intrepid Leader of the Free World (did you realize already how pathetically obsolete that sounds?). Chávez gathered a picturesque following here in Argentina: a couple of folk singers, the former human rights fighter Hebe de Bonafini, thousands of lumpen after the banners of some radical leftist groups, and possibly a few hundreds of genuinely interested, truly anti-American folks. The Kirchner administration, which is friendly to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, distanced itself as much as possible from this crude display. Everybody likes a little chanting against imperialism or a little American flag burning, but this was a bit ridiculous.

Bush, in the meantime, was being received in Uruguay, across the Río de la Plata, with angry demonstrations. Same as in Brazil and in Colombia. Uruguay is courting disaster, I think, by welcoming G. W. Bush to discuss a free trade agreement. The U.S. is clearly trying to use Uruguay as a wedge to break the Mercosur; the (by now only nominally) leftist presidential administration of Tabaré Vázquez, opposed by part of its own party and its own constituency, must be trying to use the U.S. to ring some alarm bells in Brazil and Argentina.

Uruguay is understandably enraged by the Argentine government's lack of action regarding the outrageous blockade of the international passes over the Uruguay River due to the conflict of the cellulose plants. Signing a FTA with the U.S., however, would violate the Mercosur's statutes, and send Uruguay into the voracious maw of the world's largest economy, with little hope of surviving (as an independent country, that is, as opposed to a cheap-labour agricultural colony).

Brazil's Lula can be all cozy with Bush because Brazil is a huge country with many resources, including a lot of land where sugarcane and corn can be grown, later to be transformed into ethanol for fuel-hungry U.S. motorists, if only the U.S. would lower its import tariffs and drop internal agricultural subsidies. That won't happen — a Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress won't stop subsidizing the American corn farmers.

Uruguay, on the other hand, doesn't have anything the U.S. cannot get elsewhere, which is why most analysts say that Bush's visit was either useless or a provocation. Going to Colombia was simply a political gesture of support to his puppet Álvaro Uribe (when George says that the U.S. send a lot of aid to Latin America, remember most of it comes in the form of weapons for anti-drug squads in Colombia).

Both Hugo and George are gone now. George didn't even say "Argentina" during his tour, and of course didn't set foot here. In the supposedly friendlier countries he visited, he had to send a small army before him, and his presence caused massive disruption. He hadn't come so close to Argentina since the disastrous Mar del Plata Summit of the Americas, in November 2005, and it's quite likely that he won't waste any more of his time this side of the Equator until he finishes his term (unless he visits Australia, maybe, to check whether water flushed in a toilet rotates the other way — though he doesn't seem to have such scientific need for empirical tests of anything).