Cabo Polonio & Santa Teresa National Park

After our fancy extravagant evening in Jose Ignacio, it was time for something totally different. We were headed to Cabo Polonio, an off-grid village that’s only accessible by 4x4 or on foot. This tiny little town is served by the local ‘bus’. Think of it more as a kind of safari-style truck than a normal bus though.

In order to visit, you can leave your car parked at the visitor centre where you get the tickets. It’s fairly expensive to park here and it is billed every 24 hours. In order not to pay for more than was necessary, we left our spot in Jose Ignacio late that afternoon. I had checked the bus times and we planned to time it so that we could sleep at the visitor centre, visit the village and return before 24 hours were up. Then we could leave the car park and drive a short way down the coast to stay for free at the beach once again.

With this in mind, we arrived in the car park around 6pm and parked up in their allotted ‘motorhome’ spot. In theory, it wouldn’t have been too bad value for money. Supposedly there was both electric and water hookup as well as toilets. However, the electricity wasn’t working which was a bit of a shame. I’m always up for a bit of free power. Still, we had arrived with not much time to do anything anyway so we filled up our water tanks and headed to bed.

The next morning, we bought tickets for the bus. It was a little bit of an expense at nearly £20 for a short ride, but we climbed up onto the top deck and sat at the front. The old motor chugged into life and we were off through the sand dunes. For a bus, it was definitely a fun one. We enjoyed having the pressure taken off us. There’d be no breaking the camper today. No digging it out of the beach. Sometimes it’s really quite nice to be driven.

The tracks that crossed the dunes to the beach were thick, soft sand. Apparently these dunes regularly change shape and position with the wind and so building a permanent road out wasn’t a good option. It was more fun anyway to bounce our way over the dunes through a small forest and arrive at the town by driving down the beach itself.

We clambered down off the truck, with several hours to explore before the return bus left. The little place reminded me of the island of Sark, which we had visited a long time ago with my parents. A few token dirt roads were here or there but there were no passing cars or traffic. The only power cable I could see ran directly to the lighthouse. I suppose they didn’t want to chance that with solar alone. The rest of the inhabitants though, were off-grid.

Despite that, we were still able to pay with card, something that came in handy when we realised our camera was low on battery. We headed to a nearby tiny restaurant and had a cocktail and a game of chess while the camera charged up.

With some battery power, we could now head out to the lighthouse and take some photos of the sea lion colony on the rocks below. While they had previously been hunted here, they were now protected. In all different shapes and sizes, they lay strewn across the rocks below, a noisy afternoon chorus.

After petting the local stray cats, of which there were many, we headed up onto the grassy slopes behind the beach where the houses were. Each little house was independently decorated. Most had their own little solar setup and for water there were wells dotted all around. We spent some time wandering among them, enjoying the individuality of it all. After the lines of expensive metal gates and white concrete, it was refreshing to see somewhere that had no concept of straight lines at all. There were barely even paths here, just short clipped grass kept down by the local wildlife.

Boasting around 100 inhabitants, this tiny place made a living off tourism. There were many opportunities to stay in little hostels as well as lots of little restaurants. It would have been a nice little off-grid experience and a step away from the modernity of the rest of the country. It seemed though that the lack of amenities was more of a selling point. Don’t come here expecting it to be any cheaper. A lunchtime dish will easily set you back $25.

When we were done, we hopped on the bus and headed back. We paid for our parking, packed up Ruby and headed a short way around the coast to where we could park on the beach for free that night.

Our tour of the coastline was coming to an end, but we had one final point to visit: Santa Teresa National Park.

The town next to this is named Punta del Diablo and we parked up on its outskirts, looking out over the park. After many days of moving on nearly every day, we found ourselves staying for longer than we planned in this spot. We had a little dead-end road nearly to ourselves, aside from the odd fisherman. Locals in Uruguay did not party like the fellows in other countries. We had yet to be woken up by a thudding bass at 3am, even at the weekend. It was quite refreshing really.

We spent the next few days here, enjoying our spot. We walked into town to the shop one day, picking up some dogs on the way. At first we thought they were strays, but they seemed too well behaved. They followed us around the town for a while. Just as we were about to start heading back to the van, a pickup pulled over by the side of the road and scooped them up.

While we could have packed up and moved around to visit the park, I worked out that it was only a short walk from where we currently were. Deciding that the cats would enjoy the extra freedom, we left them with the van and walked over.

We hiked along the back of the imaginatively named Big Beach, watching kayakers catching waves and skirting around our first sighting of a penguin. Unfortunately deceased. Then we turned inland into the forest. It was currently the end of the low season and so the services here — toilets, shops and camping — were all shut. Workers were around though to carry out some maintenance and it had the distinct feel of somewhere that would open up imminently. For now, it was all ours and we had a beautiful day for it.

I had decided it would be nice to hike to the mirador. There wasn’t all that much to see here, but it had that nice jungle feel to it. We walked under giant nests made of sticks that had been formed by the parrots high above. Palm trees swayed in the wind and I was glad I had put suncream on today.

For the first part, we followed the road and then diverted off down a waymarked path. Lee had a moment where he nearly broke the camera by trying to fall off a tiny bridge and we continued on. He hobbled up the hill, his ankle having taken the brunt of the force rather than the camera.

It was a short trail and towards the end we lost it. I regretted wearing flip-flops as we tried to scramble over rocks. After some dithering around though, we made it out on top and picked up a service track that ran to some official building at the end. Next to this was the mirador.

The viewing tower was an ugly concrete contraption which somewhat reminded me of the guard towers for a prison. We climbed up the metal ladder underneath and emerged at the top with a beautiful view down the coastline we had driven along over the past few weeks. It was not a breathtaking or particularly remarkable hike, but it was nice to feel like we were getting out and about again.

The other point of interest in this park is its fort. As we now know, it’s a star fort and quite unusual. The reason why can clearly be seen from the air. Being located at the northern end of the park, we stopped off here as we drove past.

We had mainly been getting by in Uruguay on our cards. Nearly everywhere accepted them and the cash machines had quite a large fee attached to them. We hadn’t quite planned for enough cash to visit the fort. We had enough for only one person. We explained this to the lady and asked if we could pay by card. She told us we couldn’t. We were about to leave when she stopped us and said it was fine, just to pay for one of us but we could both go in. That was a nice surprise and we were lucky she let us, because the fort itself was actually very interesting.

It’s probably one of the most well-preserved forts I’ve visited, dating back to the 1700s. Along its edges, cannons pointed out in every direction over the vast flat grasslands that surrounded us on three sides. Some of the cannons had even come from England and bore the Tudor rose. Inside were several museums showing other local forts as well as some of the weapons that had been found on site and a history of the conflict.

After an interesting little visit, we drove back out and around the corner to fly Steve, much to the rage of a local bird who kept trying to attack both Lee and the drone.

That evening, we drove on for our final beach camp before we would leave the coast for a while. We opted for the outskirts of La Coronilla. Despite the fact it was the weekend — and normally you wouldn’t see me anywhere near a beach car park on the weekend — previous experience taught us that we would be ok.

We weren’t the only overlanders taking the risk. Finally, we got to put some faces to some names as we bumped into Roaming About. Mark, who is American, and Liesbet, who is from Belgium, had been present in WhatsApp groups and discussions amongst friends for a while. Until this point though, we hadn’t met in person.

We had actually planned to leave the following morning, but when Lexi vanished under the decking nearby and refused to come out, it seemed fated that we spent a day hanging out with these guys and drinking a bit too much wine.

We postponed our departure until the following day, Monday. As it turns out, that happened to be a very good decision.