Avoid Montevideo in winter, on Sundays and on non-festive public holidays…. If only we had heard this advice before we arrived on Montevideo on a cold, winter’s Sunday on the day before a public holiday! Uruguay’s capital was a ghost town; all the shops were closed, no one except us were on the streets and there were barely even any cars on the road. It was our first taste of what Sundays are like throughout most of South America. In contrast to Australia, which usually has shops, restaurants and bars open with lots of people about, the ‘day of rest’ is taken very seriously here. I wouldn’t have been surprised with this in small towns but it actually felt a bit eerie in the nation’s capital.
Our first two days were spent pretending we were the only ones in the city (which wasn’t hard to do), trying to stay warm in the freezing weather and complaining about how expensive everything is in comparison to the other countries we have visited. Even being in Brazil during the World Cup where things were up to 3 times the higher than usual, I still think Uruguay was more expensive. There is a joke amongst travellers in South America that everything has two prices, one for the locals and one with a ‘gringo tax’ added on. Usually the difference isn’t that big and compared to prices back home it’s still a lot less; so you hardly even notice it. But I think the lady who was washing our clothes was having us on when she tried to charge us equivalent of $30 AUD for our 8kgs of washing that fit into two loads. (As a side note: it’s almost impossible to find a laundromat in South America where you can wash your own clothes, you always have to give it to lavandarias for someone else to wash and dry it for you.) After we laughed at her suggestion we realised she was serious and were going to go elsewhere until we remembered that nowhere else was open and we needed it done that day. In the end she relented slightly and gave it to us for $20 AUD which I still thought was a bit steep but we had completely run out of clothes and didn’t have another choice.
Not wanting to leave Montevideo on a bad note, we tried to make the most of our last day. The Old Town is the most picturesque, so we spent the day strolling through its streets, past the Plaza Independencia (home of the Artigas Mausoleum where the body of José Artigas, Uruguay’s liberator lies), admiring from the outside Teatro Solís (beautiful theatre built in 1856 with a sun design on its front) and visiting Palacio Estévez (originally the offices for the President, it is now a museum with government artefacts from that time). We finally ended up for lunch at the Mercado del Puerto which is a real must. Housed in a warehouse type building, it is filled with numerous restaurants all selling basically the same thing, a large variety of meats. Each restaurant has its meat displayed on a sizzling barbeque leaning on the wall, giving you a view of what you could be potentially eating. The smell is tantalising enough to turn a vegetarian’s head, who can at least enjoy the selection of wines that accompany the meats.
In the afternoon, we decided to hire bikes for UR $250 ($12.50 AUD) for four hours and ride along the Rambla, a riverside cycling/running path. The track passes beaches where it would have been possible to swim, had it been warmer. Mostly flat, it’s a beautiful ride unless you are on a gear-less bike and overestimate your cardiovascular ability like I did. There are very clear markers along the way showing you the distance you travel, and once we got to the 20 km mark I knew I couldn’t go any further because we still had to go back again. After a stop off for some delicious empanadas (baked or deep-fried pastries filled with meats, vegetables or cheese) in the affluent neighbourhood of Carrasco, we started back to the CBD. I was going well for the first ten kilometres until an extremely strong head wind started. This combined with fatigue and no gears on my bike made the rest of the journey near impossible for me. I was close to tears, sweating profusely and swearing when we finally arrived back to our hostel.
Although not usually a fan of night buses, I was happy to get on one that night and leave Montevideo behind. Our original plan was to head further north up the coast but after speaking to some locals who mentioned that everyone deserts the seaside towns in winter, we decided to cut short our time in Uruguay and head back over the border to Argentina. One day I hope to give Uruguay a second chance and go in summer to witness first hand the stunning beaches and coastline that people rave about!
Every Country 