Uruguay’s Beautiful Coastline

We now retraced our steps back towards Montevideo. Our plan was to follow the coast up to Brazil, where we would once again dive inland and head for the Argentinian border.

This time, we broke up the drive, stopping first at a little free roadside camp around halfway back to the city. It was easy to live in this country in a van. Spots like this, offering all the services for free, were somewhat of a rare luxury, but it was easy enough to camp for free and find water and even free electricity.

While we could have arrived back in Montevideo sooner, we headed back down to the shore of the river and spent a few days there. I had ordered a new small gas burner and some cheap cans online and got them sent to Jessica's house, as the Wallas was still playing up. While we waited for them to arrive, we spent a couple of nights by the river. As the camping was out of season, it was free. There were no services except for a water tap and toilets at one end, but we could park up by a small grill with what would normally be a nice view. Due to some unfortunate natural causes though, the entire beach and the first few metres into the sea were full of dead fish. In the heat of the afternoon sun, the smell was somewhat unpleasant. To my disbelief, some of the locals were still in the sea amongst the floating bodies.

This was clearly not the first time this had happened. The beach was covered in the skeletons of dead fish, all in varying states of decay. Despite the fact it was a bit smelly, we stayed a couple of days waiting out the weekend so that we could hit the city at the start of the week. We decided the dead fish smell was better than being kept up all night by kids cruising in their cars.

When we arrived in Montevideo, our priority was taking our broken laptop to a repair shop. While we had one shiny new computer, sharing it was a bit limiting and so we wanted to take advantage of the capital city to try and repair the other. After some messing around, we got pointed in the direction of a repair shop and dropped it off. They told us it would be a couple of days to diagnose it but, as it had done this before in the UK and had been a quick, cheap fix, we decided we’d wait.

In the meantime, we headed to the large agricultural market to try and find some reasonably priced vegetables. We were in luck. Not only did we buy some veg, but also some dried soya and some reasonably priced coffee. With a bit of luck, this would be mainly enough food to get us out of Uruguay. We didn’t plan to stay all that long. With the shopping done, we tried a pint of the local beer before heading down to the lighthouse of Punta Carretas Lighthouse to camp for the night.

There were limited free options here in the city and this looked to be the best one, despite its somewhat mixed reviews. Apparently it was the spot for locals to come and hook up and, amongst the stray condoms, lived several stray cats. On the whole, we were largely undisturbed. While it was a busy spot as locals came to watch the sunset, the car park soon emptied out, leaving us alone with the wind. The real noise here didn’t start until the early hours of the morning when the diggers on the building site next to us fired up. At 7am they were already scooping up huge piles of rocks and dumping them on the coastline. Apparently this point was entirely man-made and they seemed to be extending it to the other side. The older part pictured behind us here is the most southern point in Uruguay.

We decided that a nice hot shower and a quiet night sounded quite appealing and so we headed over to Jessica’s house to collect our gas and the stove. We traded hot showers for a good clean-up of the house, but this time opted to stay outside in Ruby overnight. We stayed here two nights as they delivered us the wrong cooker and we were waiting for them to change the order. Jessica was out a lot, helping look after her dad.

The second day, we got a message from the laptop repair shop and a sizeable quote of $150 to fix the laptop. We declined. We went and picked it up from the annoyed technician, who told us they had rushed diagnosing it especially. Regardless, I wasn't paying $50 for it to be cleaned as detailed on their quote. We decided we’d manage for now and try again in Buenos Aires. Passing back by Jessica’s, we stopped off to pick up the new cooker that had been delivered. She wasn’t there, but we left a bag hanging on the door with some treats for the dogs and some chocolates for her before heading off. We had no plans to return here again.

Now we had moved on to new roads. The most visited part of Uruguay is its coast. The holiday homes of this continent’s rich and famous, it is not a long coast, but it’s a pretty one. From Montevideo to the Brazilian border is only around a three-hour drive. We drove just a short way to Punta Ballena. This beautiful little peninsula reminded us of Cornwall with its grassy cliffs and rocky shores.

It was a lovely stop and a bit of a shame that the locals had treated it so poorly. Again there was litter on the floor and graffiti on the walls of the caves on the beach. Strangely enough, there was also a stray cat.

From our vantage point, we could see the city of Punta del Este, nicknamed the Saint-Tropez of Uruguay, across the bay. This was our next stop.

For the remainder of the afternoon we went for a walk on the peninsula, passing by this building called Casapueblo. This museum/hotel/cafe is the design of uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró.

We drove the short distance across in the morning. You could tell there was a lot of money here. The roundabouts with flowerbeds and beautifully manicured lawns. Not a single piece of rubbish was visible. In what felt like true cheap-traveller form, we drove around to the beach and used the free shower and some buckets to fill the water tanks. Then we parked up and went for a wander. Down on the seafront we bought our traditional fridge magnet and some new alfajores to try. Then, realising that we were actually a bit peckish, we wandered into town and grabbed a couple of empanadas.

It was clearly a tourist town, and an expensive one at that. There was a distinct lack of “local” looking shops — the little corner stores that are everywhere. Instead there were nice boutiques, photography shops and tour agencies. Everything was very clean. We walked down towards the harbour to get a look at what several million pounds worth of yachts looked like. Somehow it didn't feel like this was one of those ports that would offer us a free shower. As ever in “fancy” cities, we hardly felt at home. We walked along the seafront, stopping for a moment to watch the cargo ships passing by towards the capital.

We had thought we might stay the night here, but it wasn't really our vibe. We moved on just a little further around the coast to the small town of José Ignacio, finding ourselves a quiet little spot in a small car park right on the beach, but also sheltered from the wind. This looked like it’d be quiet even on a Saturday night, and that was just perfect for us.