Before I talk about Uruguay, I forgot to mention something I learned in the Mexico City Airport, my bike is heavier than I thought. My bike box with my panniers thrown on top was 50kg. That is roughly 110 lbs before food and water. With my body weight, bike, and panniers added up, it is at least 300 lbs! I will drop some weight in Buenos Aires before I continue.
I rode roughly 28KM into the centro and found a mildew smelling hotel for 400 pesos (20 US$) a night. When I arrived in Montevideo, I quickly realized that my Spanish skills were back to where they were when I crossed into Tijuana. ´Y´ and ´ll´ is pronounced with a ´Sh´ sound. For example, Playa is now Pli-Sha and Pollo is Po-sho. There are a handful of other accents I am working on straightening out as well.
Montevideo is a town of over one million people, but the city is only worth a single day´s visit or maybe two if you have laundry to do. There is one main drag with nightlife called Mitre. This is the only place to get late dinner other than pizza or hot dogs in town.
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| I did a bad job showing this, but the UR money is really huge. |
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| Random Statue, Similar to the DF Glorietas all over the place but not nearly as big. |
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| Yerba Mata is a wildly popular drink. The way it works: buy the Mata (glass made of dried fruit shown here), fill the Mata with three fourths Yerba Mata (which is like a coarsely ground tea), pour in cold water on the edge, let soak for 2 minutes, pour in hot water on the same edge and drink the Yerba Mata. It takes three sip to empty the Mata but just refill the hot water and repeat. |
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| Graffiti next to the Rio de la Plata |
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| Horse Statue in the Middle of Plaza Indepencia. It is because I took this photo that I was mugged. |
So as I was taking the photo of the horse, a kid comes up to me and asks for a Peso. I say no. He comes to my other side and asks again. I turn and look at him with a second more stern no. He obviously came around my other side to check my pockets. I took a firm grip of my camera and sure enough he grabbed the cord and tried to pry it from my hands. He was unable to do so. He runs off, and I begin to walk towards my hotel through the plaza again. 15 seconds later there is a girl yelling all kinds of things I can´t understand with another girl trying to hold her back. The aggressive girl is spitting in my direction but fails to hit me. As I am watching her actions, another kids runs from behind me. I am unaware of the kid. It reminds me of the scene in Jurassic Park where the guy about to get eaten by the Velocirator realizes they work in teams. In any event, the kid takes a swing at the back of my head with a red motorcycle helmet. I heard his footsteps just before contact and make about a quarter turn so the blow was directly to my left temple. I am pretty dazed and run out into the street and stop the first car. No one seemed interested in helping. I go to a hotel where the security guard had seen the whole thing. He calls the police. The police come and basically ignore me. I am really pissed that a kid just tried to knock me out to steal my stuff an no one cares. I definitely learned that I need to be more careful about looking like a tourist. I know when I am walking through a bad part of San Francisco at night alone, I keep my head down and walk fast and no one bothers you. If I would have done the same, I would not have had the headache for two days and a possible concussion.
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| Punta del Este is in the distance. The city is like Can-cun with Vegas style gambling for South Americans. Hotels line the both shores and the prices are more expensive than San Francisco. I get to my hostel covered in salty sweat. I take a shower and am still covered in salt as their shower was is from the ocean (Thanks - Tas D´Viaje) |
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| Partying at 6am at Moby Dick with Americans from the hostel. Ex-communicated Mormons are my favorite people to party with because they have a lot of catching up to do! We left at 7am and the place was still packed. |
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| Everyone takes a photo of this so I joined in |
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| My long lost Atlanta fan. Actually, she didn´t know who the Braves were or where Atlanta was for that matter. |
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| You can tell how long a car has been in Punta by the amount of stickers. Apparently it is okay for people to apply corporate stickers to your rear windshield. I saw people actively doing this in broad daylight. I imagine people would go crazy if the same was done to their car in the States. |
I left Punta and returned to Montevideo on the same road. I have dinner, but a ticket to Buenos Aires, and pass out in one of the deepest sleeps I have ever had. I wake up over 12 hours later and can still barely move. I finally get out of Montevideo and when on the road still in MVD a major storm rolls in. In a matter of 2 minutes, it goes from calm to brisk wind to torrential downpour. I am soaked head to toe and take refuge for an hour until the storm calms. I put on my jacked I bought in San Quintin, Baja California and put it to the rain test. It failed and will now go in the trash. After the rain stopped, I was greeted by major head winds.
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| The flags were going crazy. People could barely open the door to get in the store due to the wind. I battled this for close to 10 hours and barely made over 100KM. |
The sun is setting or has already set, and there is 10 minutes left of light. I pull of the highway and go down a random road. I start scouting for places to camp, but everywhere is fenced off with barbed wire. I find some hay bails, hop the barbed wire, and decided to find another location since the grass is really tall, which makes me feel uncomfortable. It is pitch black now, and a guy on a motorcycle approaches me. He asks me a few questions then offers to let me camp. He actually takes me to another persons farm. I meet the farmer who is only wearing a bikini style pair of underwear and he allows me to pitch my tent on his porch. The farmer (whose name I never understood) gives me a steak and cheese from his cow, and tomato and potatoe from his garden. He told me he has 10 children that grew up here and had never left the country of Uruguay. The house is as meager as it gets with a caved in roof, no running water, and trash everywhere. In the night, the winds were blowing and knocking out apples from his tree which were crashing onto the tin roof above the porch. Between the cold wind, hot sleeping bag, and apple on tin crashes, I did not sleep like I did in Montevideo.
I gather my belongings and head to Colonia del Sacramento. I ponder most of the day if my online purchase actually went through. I booked a ticket for 2pm because I expected to be in Colonia a day earlier and would make the morning to my time to explore. Plans don´t always work out as I make it to the ferry port at 1:40 or just in time to go through immigration and catch my ferry. The ticket cost me $50 for an hour long boat ride. I paid under $100 for a 12 hour ride in Mexico. I felt like I had been robbed by a legitimate company worse than the little punk kids.
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| Even though I never got to explore it, I have one photo of Colonia del Sacramento from the Buquebus Ferry |
I have now made it safely into the depths of Buenos Aires!
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