The last week of September we visited Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, which was something of a milestone for me since Uruguay is the 15th country I have visited, and the 6th new country we have been to on our trip. While our stay in Uruguay was brief, and we only saw Colonia, which is a small town, it still felt special to me. I’ve loved traveling and seeing new places for a long time. When I was younger I passed up a number of opportunities to travel to foreign countries, because I was “too busy” building my career in software, and I’ve always regretted not taking those opportunities. In a lot of ways our entire trip this year has been making up for missed opportunities from the days when I placed too much value on my career and not enough on my lived experience. Don’t get me wrong. My career hasn’t been all bad, and all the years of work definitely helped make our travels this year possible. That said, if I could do it all over I think I’d have traveled more and sooner.
Our trip to Uruguay was a break from our extended stay in Buenos Aires. I’ll write more about that later. For now, let me just say that we were ready for a change of scenery, and we took advantage of the proximity to Uruguay to take a vacation from our vacation. It turns out that from Buenos Aires you can take a quick ferry ride to several spots in Uruguay, namely Colonia del Sacramento, and Montevideo. Colonia is the closer of the two, only an hour and fifteen minutes by ferry, and it’s a very small town that is designated a UNESCO world heritage site, so we figured why not get away from the big city to check it out.
The ferry to Colonia was impressive. After spending so much time in Guatemala on Lake Atitlán I kind of expected a giant lancha, or possibly something like the ferry we took from Belize City to Caye Caulker. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This ferry was more like a mini cruise ship with multiple cafes, and even a duty free shop on board. We couldn’t tell exactly how many passengers it held, but I’d bet it was close to a thousand, and they had space for some number of cars onboard too. The crossing was way more comfortable than any plane trip we’ve taken this year.
The historic center of Colonia is the definition of picturesque. Its streets are all cobblestone, with some more drivable, and frankly walkable, than others. The founders of Colonia built some pretty shitty roads, and I assume the more passable ones were newer, but then again seeing how well the Inca fit stone walls when they cared about a place, maybe some of the streets were just made by sloppy workers? Colonia was, at various stages, occupied by the Portuguese, and then by the Spanish, before Uruguay gained independence. There are impressive ruins of the sea walls built by one or the other of the two foreign invaders to defend Colonia from the sea. Since Colonia is a coastal town in the Plata river delta these defenses were likely heavily used, but I’m pretty fuzzy on the history there, so don’t take my word for it.
The day we arrived in Colonia was cold (50-ish), cloudy and very windy. So, we kind of froze our butts off wandering the historic district and taking in the sights. We also stopped to talk to a very nice local man who runs a Mexican restaurant, where we’d hoped to have lunch. He was quite chatty and it was fun for me to get to exercise my Spanish, which is greatly improved, although still very far from being fluent. Sadly, he only accepted cash, and we hadn’t been to an ATM yet, and also he didn’t seem to be all that open. So, for lunch we tried Chivito, the national dish, a steak sandwich with a fried egg on top, Farrah skipped the egg to avoid the negative repercussions of her egg allergy, so I guess she just had a steak sandwich? I’m not sure if we got the best version of Chivito you can have, but to me it wasn’t terribly impressive. Not bad mind you, but nothing to write a blog about. Even though I’m doing just that.
Later that afternoon we sat in a nice little cafe enjoying a bottle of Tannat wine, and watched the sunset. Tannat is a grape I was unfamiliar with, and which seems to be a specialty of the wineries in Uruguay. The sky was still a bit cloudy, but it was still a nice sunset, and we realized we hadn’t just sat and watched one since we left Belize six months ago. It’s funny how we’ve already started to reminisce about the earlier parts of our trip. We finished the day with dinner at a nice little restaurant that had a blazing fire, which was a nice change for the cold and wind.
The next day we woke to weather that was, if anything, worse than the day before. Rain was forecast for most of the afternoon and the high was only in the upper 40s. We figured that would be fine because Colonia has eight or nine museums in the historic center, so we assumed we’d be inside most of the day. Unfortunately for us we visited every open museum in town in about two and a half hours. Some of the museums only had two exhibit rooms, and the big ones had upwards of nine. So, by about two in the afternoon we were looking at each other wondering what to do with the rest of the day.
We settled on stopping by a local grocery store to buy a cheap yerba mate set, we’d recently acquired a taste for the drink in Buenos Aires, and left our setups at our apartment there. So with our mate in hand we went back to the hotel and spent the afternoon drinking mate and reading. Sometimes on cloudy or rainy days there’s not much better than curling up with a good book and a hot beverage. We finished our day that evening by going out for a very nice steak dinner at a restaurant called Charco, which is situated on the shore. While we were in the restaurant it poured rain, and we were glad to be in a cozy spot with a good meal and a nice bottle of wine. Thankfully the rain stopped before we walked back to our hotel.
On our third and final day in Colonia we finally got some nice weather. So, after a nice breakfast at a small cafe we took a nice long walk along the shore. The beaches along the Colonia shore were beautiful. Very pleasant, calm, and not very busy. So we walked for several hours taking in the sun and scenery. The most entertaining bit of the walk was when we came across a dog who appeared to be trying to fish. It’s methods looked like they could use refining since it mostly spun in circles while alternating between biting at the water and barking in frustration at the fish, I assume, for not holding still.
By the time we got back to the Colonia historic center we had just enough time to have a nice lunch before we had to catch our ferry back to Buenos Aires. And that’s the story of our visit to my 15th country. I hope to return to Uruguay some day to visit Montevideo and Punta del Este, which I’m told is very near wine county in Uruguay. It was a brief trip, and a nice break from the big city, but it only whet my appetite for seeing more of the country.