Two People 361 Days Six Continents: Montevideo, Uruguay

What's This All About?

Welcome to our blog! We were recently married and are now preparing for a year-long, around the world trip. This blog will feature our preparation and, of course, reports from the road.

Here is our current itinerary:

- October 16: Quito, Ecuador

- December 5: Lima, Peru

- December 21: Buenos Aires, Argentina

- January 28: Santiago, Chile

- February 23: Queenstown, New Zealand

- March 28: Sydney, Australia

- April 5: Bangkok, Thailand

- June 22: Hong Kong

- June 26: Shanghai, China

- July 19: Johannesburg, South Africa

- August 15: Barcelona, Spain

- August 18: London, England

August 21: Denver

Those are just our major stops for our RTW plane ticket. Within each of those regions, we will use local transport to visit many more countries. You can see a more detailed list of some of our potential destinations here.

As our itinerary becomes clearer, we will post updates!

Friday, January 8, 2010

Montevideo, Uruguay

We were able to find relatively inexpensive plane tickets from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, saving us a lot of time on buses. So we decided to use our new found time to visit Uruguay. Montevideo is a short three hour ferry ride from Buenos Aires.

We arrived in Montevideo and decided to walk the short distance to our hostel. Immediately we were struck by how quiet and empty things seemed compared to Buenos Aires. It seems as though much shuts down following New Years and we saw many shops and restaurants with signs that said they were re-opening on January 17th. We don't know if the weather plays a role, but we did experience one day of driving rain. It was, however, a nice change of pace.

We stayed in the Ciudad Viejo or Old Town. Our hostel was right in the heart of the bar district so the relative quiet of this time of year was perhaps a blessing. Things in Montevideo (and perhaps all of Uruguay) are much more expensive than Buenos Aires or anyplace else we have been in South America.

The Old Town is charming and the Plaza de Independencia, a block from our hostel, was very nice. We were mostly taking it easy and we spent a hour or so every morning at coffee shop in the neighborhood that we really liked.

We wandered the streets and ate at a few local restaurants -- those that we could find open -- on the first day. The Uruguayan people are very laid back and extremely friendly. We enjoyed our time with everyone we met.

One of the main advantages Montevideo has over Buenos Aires is the fact that there are several beautiful beaches right in the city. We spent one day lounging on the beach at Pocitos. We may have spent a bit too much time on the beach as we came away a bit sunburned. But we relished this time in the sun as we knew we were headed to the infamous Patagonia weather.

Our time in Uruguay was short... too short! We really wish we would have had time to visit coast towns such as Punta del Diablo. Punta del Este is a very popular international resort destination, but Punta del Diablo sounded like it would be more our speed.

We headed back on the ferry and then had a flight from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos in Patagonia. A 15 hour bus ride from Rio Gallegos to Ushuaia brought the total to 40 straight hours of travel. I'm going to bed!