The second stop on our weekend road trip takes us to Cabo Polonio, a small hamlet on a peninsula about 3.5 hours north of Montevideo.
The words “Cabo Polonio” make the eyes of our co-travellers (co-workers, co-livers) light up. ‘I just want to gothere,’ they say emphatically. They are younger than us, and better informed. But what is there, what is it, in and about Cabo Polonio?
A lot seems to be about what there is not. No electricity (only the lighthouse is on the national grid; all other places rely on generators); no running water (rain water is collected instead); no roads; no cars.
To get to Cabo Polonio, we need to abandon our cars and climb up into a giant 4×4 double-decker open-air lorry bus that wobbles us through a seven-kilometre strip of dunes to Cabo Polonio, a haphazard scattering of loosely-built shacks, some of which have the word ‘Hostel’ painted on a free bit of wall, like an afterthought.
The sky is a deep light blue when we get off the truck bus and instantly experience a loss of direction. We are staying at hostel Narakan and, without strategy and for no obvious reason, we find it. Our double room is the size of a double bed plus a small squeeze strip. No shelves, let alone wardrobes or hanging spaces. Rustic. We simultaneously feel young and our age.
That afternoon, we walk along Playa Norte, which is bright and windswept. We also wander through the hamlet and encounter a lot of colour, splashed in unselfconscious shapes, happy and playful, even on odd un-owned objects like public rubbish bins. We begin to see what there is, here at Polonio, apart from absence.
As the sun starts to lower, we follow it on Playa Sur, which is less wind-stirred than Playa Norte. At the far end of the beach, we spot a house (of a kind) and meander our way towards it over what is not a path. It turns out to be a semi-peculiar, semi-spectacular mix of a family home, a bar, a building site and the base for a menagerie of cats and dogs. A bench perilously close to an ominous gaping hole in the wooden floor boards on the terrace looks out over the sunset. The owner, a man with a face so soft and open that it pierces my heart, brings us home-brewed artisanal beer, which is nicer than expected, and some simple snacks. We sit and nibble and sip and watch and talk a bit of Spanish; we already know that this is a travel moment we will cherish.
Later, back at the hamlet just before the darkness begins to wrap around us like a thick blanket, we eat by candle light in a tiny bohemian room full of improbable objects. A heeled Cinderella pump sits on our table; the table itself is less than a foot high.
Later still, we get lost trying to navigate our way back to the hostel in the inky dark, on and off unlit dirt roads. It cannot possibly matter because we happen to look at the sky and are well and truly blown away by the stars – how can there be so very many, how can that protracted splash of white mystery be the Milky Way? Did we eat a magic brownie? We did not.
We find our hostel by accident. On our way we spotted groups of people huddled around impromptu camp fires, but by the time we get back to base the wind is spreading embers, and Yannou, the young Frenchman who has found his spiritual home in Uruguay, has lit the stove inside. We chat to a couple from a Dutch university town who are researching the use of pesticides in Uruguay.
The walls of our hostel are flimsy and entirely in line with our sombre anticipation, the place is full of noises and voices through the night. In the morning, frazzled, we visit a large sea lion colony at the foot of the light house. We are almost beyond wonder; the sea lions are both comical and magnificent.
At some point during our short stay, we learn that a government rule stipulates that houses in Polonio can only be built out of local recyclables, like driftwood; a good preservation rule that is also, clearly, being ignored by some. And we’ve noticed, with a mixture of disappointment and relief, that we get a mobile phone signal, and data, throughout the peninsula; and that the spartan room at our hostel has nothing except USB ports. We’ve scowled at a car or two. And the cost of our beyond-basic wooden cabin at Narakan hostel is £75 – more than what we paid the previous night for a good deal more frills in overpriced tourist resort Punto del Esta.
So utopia, no. More a place like no other we’ve been to, in transition like everything else, hopefully without losing its absence.