Uruguay - the little country with the big steaks

We decided, after hearing how super relaxed Uruguay is from various travellers, to make a detour to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.  It was the best border crossing so far - the immigration offices were right next to each other in the ferry building in Buenos Aires, we didn't have to queue at all and it was just so easy.

But what really blew us away was our pocketknives.  Nowhere in the ferry building were there any don't-have-sharp-items-in-your-carry-on-luggage signs like airports all over the world have.  So much to our surprise, after we had checked in our pack backs, we found ourselves being stopped at the x-ray machine upstairs.  The security guys cheerfully told us to get the ferry people to deal with it, so rather glumly we handed both pocketknives over to the check-in manager, who wrapped them in a sticky luggage tag and handed us the receipt end.

On the crossing we joked about how you could hold up a ferry with a pocketknife, but we knew our chances of seeing  them again were minimal.  Ben had decided exactly what kind of light weight multitool he was going to get as a replacement when we arrived in Colonia.

Amazingly, incredibly our knives were waiting for us in the manager's office!  This immediately endeared Uruguay to us, an impression that I'm happy to say remains with us.  Uruguayans are friendly and helpful!  They'll help you on the bus if you are surrounded by back packs and consulting your map!

We stayed at a hostel on the edge of the historic part of town - cool, funky building, nice guys running it, but we were a little old for the late night activity that went on.  Thank goodness for earplugs.

Baffling room under Independence Plaza.
The soldiers are real!  I thought they were statues for the first five minutes - spooky.

Montevideo was fun to explore on foot.  There was the mystery room under Plaza Independencia (obviously something important to do with their independence, but we never found out what), more horse riding statues, lovely old buildings, pedestrian only streets . . .

And the markets.  After months of markets full of the same stuff (various forms of llamas, brightly coloured blankets, knitted things in abundance, essentially stuff that we really didn't want) it was a pleasure to wander through a market of antiques (well mostly antiques, who knows how genuine any of it was).  If we had a house I would have been verrrry tempted with some of the cool stuff we saw.

'Digital cameras?  Pfft!  Who needs that newfangled rubbish?!  This is what you really want.'

All sorts of interesting things gathered together

Cool old facades

Finally we made our way to the port, where we had been assured we should have lunch, due to a building full of parradillas - barbecues.  This was not the place to be a vegetarian - huge banks of meat everywhere in the smoke filled space.

Ok, I think there are some peppers in there, but mostly it's just meat

Finally we chose somewhere, mostly because the waiter showed us the raw cuts of meat, sat down and waited for our steaks to arrive.  It wasn't cheap, even by NZ standards, but it was worth it.

The perfect Uruguayan lunch - rib-eye steak, fries and red wine

Montevideo has a esplanade all along the river front.  On Sunday afternoon we hired bicycles so we could buy bus tickets, find lunch and then go for a relaxing peddle.  Certain things were relaxing; the near perfect flatness of the city, the almost complete lack of traffic on the side streets, the lovely day.  The bicycles themselves however, were not so relaxing - mine peddled fine by had the world's worst seat (hard and broken).  Ben's had the world's second worst seat (that also wasn't high enough) and something terminally wrong with the bottom bracket.  I think it will be our only bike ride ever that I will get to be in front for most of it.  Plus Ben's bike had a basket on the front . . .

The river doesn't look so bad in this light

Not sure you'd want to eat anything that came out of the river here . . .