Tag: Uruguay

When we told our friends that we would be travelling to Uruguay, they tended to be mildly surprised. Why Uruguay? And where is it? 

We had to look it up on the map too.

Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America (after Suriname) and doesn’t have the wow and splendours of its neighbours Argentina and Brazil. Apart from its beaches! Most of Uruguay is pretty flat and the country has more cows than people (about 3 million people, god knows how many grass-grazing cows…).

But there’s more to Uruguay than meets the fleeting eye. 

For instance, according to Wikipedia, it ranks first in Latin America for democracy and peace, and first in South America for press freedom, size of middle class, prosperity and absence of terrorism. ‘Egalitarian’ is probably one of the best ways of describing Uruguayan society.

Uruguay is also Latin America’s most secular country. Laicidad,the separation of church and state, goes back to the 1860s but was enshrined in the constitution in in 1916, when references to God were removed from the parliamentary oath and religious references were dropped from the names of cities and villages. Religious instruction is forbidden in schools. 

It is true that a cross was erected near the bus station in Montevideo when pope John Paul II came to visit. But The Guru’Guay Guide to Montevideo, written by a local (Karen Higgs), tells us that many Montevideons are still annoyed about this.

Public education has been free and compulsory in Uruguay since 1870, and university access remains free.

95% of Uruguay’s electricity comes from renewable sources, and fresh drinking water is available throughout the country.

AND if you pay by credit or debit card in shops, bars or restaurants, 20% gets quietly, automatically refunded, because you are a tourist, after all, not a Uruguayan tax payer. 

Being a tourist means you don’t have a weed entitlement either, but that seems like a fair trade-off. Uruguay was the first country in the world to completely legalise cannabis (the legislative bill passed in 2013), with the government taking charge of the entire supply chain, from crop to distribution. Each Uruguayan citizen is allowed to grow six cannabis plants.

So you can buy magic brownies in Uruguay, but what Uruguayans really love is dulce de leche (think sweet, milky, creamy) and puré de patatas. Comfort food supreme!

For all these reasons, and many more, we think Uruguay is a gem that bigger better-known countries (like the US and the UK) could take some pointers from… 

After four and a half hours on the bus, we approach Punta del Diablo with some apprehension. In 2008, Lonely Planet drew attention to it as a place worth discovering. Will it have been ruined in the past 10 years, thanks to No-longer-so-lonely Planet? And what has the diablo got to do with it?

Perhaps the devil likes colour. It’s the first thing that strikes us about Punta del Diablo: wooden houses painted in unabashed, strong colours. On our first walk, I feel like a five-year-old: look at that red! Did you see that blue? Some of the colours are pleasingly crazy.

Or perhaps the devil, who must be lazy, likes beaches. The area abounds with long, energising half-moon bays. We walk them in all kinds of weather. It should be hot and sunny at this time of the year (early summer), but it isn’t. It drizzles, it rains, occasionally it pours; we are grateful for merely cloudy. One night we wake up to thunder claps so loud it sounds like god is banging her fist on the table in fury. 

The tourist season may be around the corner, but during our stay Punta del Diablo is quiet. We sip mango juice; we watch the foam on the waves. We become a bit obsessed with frogs as we stroll the unpaved roads gashed by heavy rainfall. There is very little traffic but we spot a large number of frog bodies, flattened out like pancakes, all in the same unmistakable shape. The ones that have escaped the devil’s wheels are oblivious: they hop along merrily in the middle of the road. We try to guide them to the soaked grassy edges (to repair our karma after killing mosquitoes in the night) but they don’t get it. The sound of their excited conversations is everywhere.

We are in the northern corner of Uruguay, close to the border with Brazil, staying with a small family from Argentina. The house relies on solar energy and hums with family, neighbours and friends joining us for early-morning yoga, breakfast, an impromptu afternoon guitar jam or a wander through Santa Teresa national park (which has over two million trees). Nobody is in a hurry, and time begins to feel a little fluid. Ewan joins an impromptu life drawing session; I get a haircut, because I must, at the only hairdresser’s in Punta del D. His salon covers a couple of square meters in his front garden, he does not speak any English, he needs to warm up some water to wash my hair, it is going to cost me 300 pesos (about £7) – it is a recipe for disaster… But he cuts with flair and I leave with a spring in my step.

Our week in Punta del Diablo is long and short. We spot various old VW beetles and spray-painted camper vans and wonder if this is where all the ones we’ve been missing in Europe have travelled to. The relaxed vibe is contagious. We love the place. We hope it stays just as it is, and that Lonely Planet never mentions it again.

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.