Misadventures in Uruguay

If everything went as it was supposed to, there just wouldn't be surprises.

Yes, that's really what it looks like. Wow!

Colonia, Uruguay. A simple boat ride away from Buenos Aires, Argentina. A day trip, paid for and thrown in as a perk for paying for all my University fees at Belgrano together. Lunch included, bus transfers, the whole she-bang. 

Easy, right?

...

...riiight.

Laura, who put our travel package together at tripnow on the sub-floor of Universidad de Belgrano, was sure to warn us - in Spanish AND English so we wouldn't confuse the message - to get to the boat at least an hour in advance. Well, the boat left at 8:45 on Saturday morning.

Two very sleepy girls left the house at 7:30.

...and an hour-long bus ride later to Puerto Maduro, a couple miles away in the city, two very nervious girls fast-walked in what they assumed was the direction to Darseña Norte, the northernmost public port on Buenos Aires' waterfront.

Some sketch neighborhoods and vehicle-access only on-ramps later, the same two girls (let's just call them Malia and Nikki, for fun) arrived at the ticket counter at 9 am and exchanged their once-precious passages on the fast boat (duración: una hora) for passage on the slow boat, departing at 9:45 (duración: tres horas).

If only that were all.

Well, I made it on a boat.

Our one-legged pigeon friend. He's a survivor.

Buenos Aires skyline with the Argentinian flag waving mildly in front.

A tiny section of the Buenos Aires skyline - this city is home to 7 million!

Malia y yo, Uruguay-bound

The nice thing about the slow boat being a three-hour ride is that it allows for sleep-deprived travelers to take a little mid-morning siesta. Especially needed for some, because the boats here are not like the ferry boats in, say, San Francisco Bay or Puget Sound, and you feel the motion of the ocean, if you get my...drift. :)

Once in Colonia, we took a short transfer ride (already paid for as a part of our package - easy, right?) to the center of the "old town" and suddenly found ourselves amongst cobble-stoned streets where modern cars drove no faster than 10 mph (or whatever that is in km/h, yo no sé) and the trees were filled not with cawing crows but rather with squawking brothers of the cockatiel, brilliantly green and blue and a sight prettier than those damned old ravens back home. If one of these came knockin' at your door, you'd probably go with it willingly. (Sorry, they're also really fast in flight, and don't allow well for pictures.)

Premier vista de las calles de Colonia

Una plaza histórica

Malia chillin' by the water

That is some brown water. They say it's because of the minerals...

La costa de Colonia

If the sun blinds you, it almost looks blue ;)

So, after wandering the colonial coastline a bit, we ended up gauging that we'd have just enough time for lunch, a bus tour, and then our walking tour. Lunch was already paid for at restaurante Columbo, so off we went...

Caesar salad = mayonnaise and anchovies, raw...

...and that's the before face. The after face was censored.

...you saw the appetizer. Needless to say, it didn't sit too well. Main course delivered some very dry, very plain meat, and we split before dessert, paying just under $4 for our bottles of water. Each.

A street drum-march

The colony is alive and well..

Before too long we both had stomach- and head-aches from the food at lunch. We headed toward our bus tour departure point a few blocks away. As the bus pulled out, we realized two things. One, the nature of the bus tour is to last for the better part of the day: designed with ten stops, it allows passengers to disembark at their subjective points of interest and re-board the next bus to come along in the next half hour. Being that we didn't have that kind of time remaining, we didn't get off at a one of them. 

Two, the bus tour would take longer than half an hour, and it had left half an hour late. Which calculated to a time that would deny us the opportunity to take the walking tour later. As soon as the bus was rolling, Malia conked out. This is the nature of our travel relationship: I worry about where we are, where we are going, and how we are going to get there (eg: which is our stop), and she relaxes. 

Finally, we disembarked back in the old town and set off on our true Uruguayan mission: ATMs dispensing US dollars. They are a thing of the past in Argentina by federal mandate, and dollars are a precious monetary commodity, which allows us to sell them, sometimes even to citizens, at a blue-dollar rate in exchange for pesos. However, if you take your good, hard-earned US dollars and exchange them in a bank or try to withdraw pesos directly from an Argentinian ATM, you will receive the falsely-inflated "official" exchange rate that the government has to offer, $5.36 pesos per dollar. (The true parallel-market, or "blue dollar" rate, is currently somewhere near $8 pesos per dollar. It was $10 in May and is currently on it's way down, but this is normal. If you're curious, or would like more information about the blue dollar rate, please visit dolarblue.net.)

Así que, we found ourselves in Colonia, Uruguay, on our first true weekend since our Argentina trip began, to pull out more US dollars and receive a better exchange rate for pesos in Buenos Aires, thus lowering the cost of our whole trip in general.

...

Well, we found a bank.

Rather, I found a bank, and not just one, but several.

We went in to the private ATM booth. We pulled out our...oh, wait...Malia pulled out her debit card. I pulled out my...

my...

...passport? credit card? pocket lint?

Yup, that's right. Mission to accomplish? Purpose of the whole trip? ...Nestled safely in my purse, at home, in Belgrano, Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Se me olvidó todo.

With my money no longer accessible to me without an atrocious fee and precious few pesos remaining to my name, this poor beggar went to the beach to watch the sunset. For free!

Hahaha I love this! See below:

I'd been looking for that door ;)

El puerto privado para las yachts

#tomarelsol #laplaya #ithinkhashtagsarestupid #butdidn'thaveanyotherideasforthiscaption

Beautiful sunset, nice to hear the waves lapping instead of traffic

We made a friend. Gratis!

Sea-worthy?

Pintoresco, for sure

Chau, Colonia!

Well, we got to take the fast boat back home.

...If only that were all.

After passing back through Argentinian customs on the Uruguayan side and arriving well more than an hour early for our boat, Malia and I were, ahem, mis-led (read: Nikki didn't stop to ask questions) through a rather long and circuitous route to a boat that was, ahem, not ours. Coming back, we were stopped by...customs! Who we pled our "dumb traveler" case to and they let us back into the terminal WHERE, by a stroke of luck, the elevator dropped us off at the beginning of a line that had been forming for well on an hour and a half. 

Only, we didn't realize that we were at the beginning of the line. So while we blissfully enjoyed the benefit of free VIP WiFi inside the terminal, two not-so-understanding Argentinian gentlemen behind us proceeded to hit me in the elbow (apparently, tapping the shoulder lightly is not the culturally accepted way of getting one's attention here) and complain about our position in line. 

Ignorant of our crime, but annoyed at their approach nonetheless, we had to find our way past blocked security to regular terminal seating. Eventually, we were more than happy to hop on the end of the line. What's the rush to get onto a boat big enough for all of us, anyway?

Well. Well. It turns out, the slow boat from the morning is also the big boat. The fast boat, which were taking home as per our original tickets, is much smaller and does not have quite such a luxury of seating choices.

To get any seating choices, however, security has to let you on the boat. Which they were not so inclined to do, in my case, as my brilliant duo of customs officers had somewhat failed to do their job. Uruguay had very nicely stamped me out of their country. Argentina had apparently looked at my passport and passed it back to me...with no stamp. Which turns out, doesn't look so good to the border patrol when you try to re-enter the country.

Being as Malia and I were the absolute last people to board the departing boat, security had to very quickly usher me back through customs and get me proper stamp-age to re-enter the country. We flew back on to the boat, the doors closed, and we were off...to a hazard of bodies sprawled across the floor and any available nook or cranny. Malia and I finally found seats (separately), but they came at a high price: kicking, screaming kids on all sides.

The trip to Uruguay had been, all-in-all, somewhat flawed. Scenic, but not as relaxing as it could have been. Fruitless, in the case of withdrawing money. Injurious, in regards to our stomachs. Different from Argentina, not so much, actually. Another blank visa corner of my passport stamped? Yes. 

I counted. I have 26 more entrances and exits in foreign countries awaiting me.

Here's to them.

:)