Back where it all started

From Montevideo I rode East along the coast road to Punta Del Este.

It is a small country so nowhere takes very long to reach. I was amazed when I got there, I was expecting a small quaint town but found a Miami lookalike!

For a country with so few people I am amazed that it can support so many apartment blocks. This one has two pools on the glass fronted balconies (either that or they have a serious plumbing issue)!

I later found out, it is not the locals but the Argentinians and to a lesser extent the Brazilians who come here for about 2 months a year. It makes it even more incredible that the revenue from 2 months per year can make these places viable.

Lunch by the marina was nice but for a while I thought I was going to have to get my credit card out to pay for it, Uruguay is very expensive! I have probably spent in a week what I would have spent in a month elsewhere. As nice as it is here I am glad to be going to Buenos Aires where it is cheaper. Who would have thought it?

 

I wanted to have a look up the coast before returning to find an hotel. As I was leaving town I passed a "poor relation" to the "Hand in the Sand" in the Atacama Desert (below):
I assume they didn't have the budget. You can see my near perfect timing with the camera again!
Oh & if you are asking why don't I check the pictures before moving on? Well I have gloves, glasses, tinted visor and clear visor to cope with.......I just can be bothered.

The coast is beautiful yellow sand with dunes and the Atlantic rolling in. 

I rode north for about an hour and there are buildings pretty much along the whole coast, naively I thought it would be a wilderness. The property market must be lucrative because I saw more than one Sotheby's sign outside plots ripe for development. Someone told me that land prices have doubled in the last 2 years.

 

On the way back in to town I remembered to take a picture of this road bridge. I am sure there is no reason they built it like this other than for aesthetics. It is good fun at speed and makes your tummy go funny!

After one expensive night in Punta I rode back through Montevideo to Colonia. The road (called the Rambla) through Montevideo hugs the shoreline and must be the best ring road of any city in the world. It flows quickly and you pass beaches the whole way. Friday had a lot more people on the beach so I suspect Sunday would be worth a look.

 Being a port town I assumed Colonia would be a rather ugly place. Again, I couldn't be more wrong. It is a small, quiet town with cobbled streets and a nice marina/yacht club.

It was Sunday and many men were out with their fishing rods, none so charming as this old boy in his sun hat, jacket and cane with a piece of line tied to the end.

 I didn't see him catch anything but I don't think that bothered him at all.

There are 5 sailings per day to Buenos Aires (a slow boat takes 3 hours and the fast Cat 1 hour). I booked on the Cat but I wished I had taken the slow boat (there is no deck to walk on the Cat so you are stuck in side). I had a nice chat with Jorge, an architect on his way home after checking on his holiday home in Uruguay. He spoke very good English as he had been at University in London......some years ago. He had travelled in the 70's "when we were all hippies" he said.

The bike was strapped down next to cases of Johnny Walker Red Label - not quite the same as people in hammocks on the Amazon.

I also finished my book "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck. I was limited for choice when buying English books and I really didn't expect to enjoy this American novel but it is excellent. (Sorry Wilks, I know you are bored with my book reviews).

All the formalities of exiting and entering Argentina were smooth and I made sure I had the correct paperwork this time! So my last ride of the tour was to find my apartment in Palermo. I knew roughly where it was but before I had gone 100 meters a chap on his BMW 1200 pulled alongside at a red traffic light. A quick chat and yet again I had a personal guide to my front door.

Alejandro by coincidence is another architect! The nice thing was that I could give him my two off road tyres (strapped to the back of his bike with my cargo straps that had done the whole journey). I certainly don't need them and I wouldn't have paid the extra weight to bring the back so it was nice that they have gone to a good home.

I have a nice apartment for at least a month (Palermo district of BsAs) in which time I will bump into some friends from when I was here last and organise shipping the bike and then myself back to the UK.

So apart from getting the bike to the airport that is it as far as the biking goes. I will write a couple more blogs if anything fun happens here and I will do a summary post when I really am finished here.