Private dining at devils point, Uruguay

The longer you are on the road for the more blasé you become. We've tried hard not to make too many errors on our trip but our arrival at Punto del Diablo, after a 5 hour bus ride from Montevideo, indicated that the plan we came up with while we were hungover in Colombia about 3 weeks ago, may have not been made with access to as much information as we needed.

The first minor issue we were aware of, it is now Autumn here, we noticed it in Buenos Aires, and certainly in Montevideo (where we got caught in a couple of massive downpours) but it was even more apparent in Punto del Diablo as it was cool, cloudy and the wind was gusting strongly. This change in the climate had lead to a more major issue, the tourist season was over. This was starkly indicated to us as we disembarked the bus by a number of the restaurants in the centre of the fishing village being boarded up for the winter!

Colonia de Sacremento.

The last stop on our brief Uruguayan excursion was Colonia de Sacramento. This is a UNESCO world heritage site on the banks of the Rio Plata which was originally set up by the Portuguese to smuggle things into Buenos Aires. It's main function has changed a bit since then but people still flood across from buenos aires on a regular basis with Several ferries a day crossing the river.


Colonia is now more of a holiday location with many people from Montevideo and Buenos Aires owning the beautiful river front properties. The other reason the Argentinians were apparently flocking there was because in Uruguay you can withdraw dollars, which is now impossible across the river (driving the exchange rate sky high) the downside being that the queues at the cash points are usually long and people tend to spend at least 10 minutes in the booth (we waited an hour in a queue of 5 people!). At the time this seemed pretty crazy but for reasons I will cover in my next blog it now makes sense.

Montevideo, it's a long way from Iguassu

So, we're in Uruguay! No idea why, I guess we fancied another couple of passport stamps and trying out a different mode of transport.

Whoever said it was better to travel than arrive has never tried getting to Montevideo from Iguassu. It was not a great deal of fun, it involved an 18 hour bus to Buenos Aires (which arrived at 6:30am) followed by a ferry the following morning at 9.

Now had we been less panicky travellers we could have tried to get from the bus station to the ferry port on the same day, but our tickets indicated that we should be at the dock 2 hours before departure as that is when boarding starts.