Uruguay

Here’s the key moment from my Uruguay trip; the moment in which the trip became something of an adventure:

It’s 4:45 a.m. and I’m lying half-asleep on a coach bus winding its way along the Atlantic coast from Montevideo. I’ve been told that the bus will arrive at Fortaleza Santa Teresa, my destination, at around 7 a.m. and that I’ll have to walk five kilometers once I arrive until I hit the camping areas by the beach.

So when the bus stops at 4:45 a.m. I think to myself, there’s no possible way this could be Fortaleza, but an extra-cautious spirit propels me to ask, and turns out to be well heeded. So along with two other people, I’m dumped out on a traffic circle in the middle of what I’ll find out later is a national park, with an 8 a.m. rendezvous at the area’s one restaurant being my only instructions for finding my friends.

They’ve told me in which campground they’re staying though so I ask for directions from the other people who’ve been dropped off with me, and start what I assume will be a five kilometer walk. Five minutes later, without finding any campgrounds, I’m on a barren beach—stars glistening, waves breaking. I walk up a few of the paths that spread over the dunes, but they lead to nothing more than a “No Pasa” sign and a lot of dead-ends.

Realizing at this point that the directions might have been wrong, I trudge back up to the traffic circle and start following the road signs which lead me in an entirely different direction, and have me in the middle of a sprawling camping area within minutes. My hope had been to surprise my friends, find their tents, and ideally have them wake with me sipping a mate while sitting besides the perfectly smoldering cooking fire I’d have made for breakfast. The darkness and the scope of the campsite, though, rendered this fantasy impossible.

So with nothing to do and exhaustion setting in, I decide that I’ll sleep for a couple hours and that the beach is a far better place to do that than the concrete deck of the restaurant. (I should add at this point that I had some fears that I got off at the wrong stop even though all the beach names were the ones I expected to find and the restaurant was right in the traffic circle, as I’d been advised. Those facts added up, but the length of the bus ride and the fact that I never had to walk anything close to one kilometer much less five left me wary.)

As I walked toward the beach, a trickle of drunks were rising from the just-closed bar and after walking a suitable distance away from the few stragglers, I laid down my pack, took a moment to savor the surroundings, and fell asleep. I woke up about an hour and a half later with the sun rising in my eyes and sand flies pecking at my legs. Rising to walk back up to the restaurant and the traffic circle, the drunks had all vanished and had been replaced by a grandfather and grandson out of an Uruguayan Norman Rockwell painting, carrying finishing rods down to the rocks.

I met up with my friends as planned, had a wonderful three days on the beach complete with roaring campfires (the last of which was my attempt to challenge Final Campfire) and excellent food (crab meat tamales were a special highlight). If you ever have the opportunity, do as I did, and go camping with a chef.

A couple extras:

My New Year’s resolution is to drink more mate. I don’t have a mate gourd and have at this point relied entirely on Argentines for my mate consumption. I’ve been here for three months now, it’s high time to get right this essential part of Argentine life.

I didn’t bring my camera to the beach, but I happened to be there with a number of very serious photographers. I’ll get their pictures and put them up within the next couple of days.