Lazy Days and Gaucho Parades

Lazy Days and Gaucho Parades
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

Just one hour by ferry from Buenos Aires lies Uruguay, I don’t know about anyone else but before now if anyone had asked me to find Uraguay on a map I would probably have been looking for it in Africa. Turns out it is in South America, who would have thought, its no wonder no one goes here!

In BA the Subte metro had served us well until it was time to get to the ferry. We had scraped together the last of our pesos and had a pretty scary taxi ride as we watched the meter tick closer to the amount of pesos I was gripping in my sweaty hand. Thankfully we had enough to pay for the taxi and even enough to buy a snickers to share, rock and roll.

The ferry from BA goes to the little ex smuggler port of Colonia Del Sacramento, one of the more regularly visited places in Uruaguay as it is cheaper to come here on a day trip to withdraw dollars than it is to take money out of your account in Argentina. The ferry was absolutely jam packed full and there were nowhere near enough seats for everyone to sit down for the crossing. Somehow we managed to get lucky having waited for the queues to reduce to check in, by the time we went through passport control and headed to the waiting room the staff diverted us past the waiting room full of all the keen beans that had been checked in and waiting for a good hour and diverted us straight over the gangway onto the boat so we had our pick of seats in an empty boat and just got to comfortably sit back and relax as the mayhem began of probably 300 people trying to sit in 200 seats.

The crossing was quick and calm and over before we knew it and when we landed in Colonia we could not help but be surprised at just how small this little place was. It was tiny, we walked up one hill from the ferry and were at our accommodation. We had booked a cute little B&B as the hostels were expensive and looked pretty dire, thanks to a Booking.com deal we were paying less for a luxury boutique B&B than we would in a hostel. The owner was great and gave us a ton of maps and advice and told us that we really only needed about 2 hours to see the whole city.

We went to explore and the quaint little cobbled town filled with vintage cars just slowly dying at the side of the road, was just beautiful, it was peaceful, it had ocean, it had cheap good restaurants and we were happy. We hadn’t planned our onward route and when we were asking the B&B owner about going to the countryside in Uruguay to track down some traditional Gauchos (Uruguayan Cowboys) he told us that we didn’t need to bother as they were all coming to Colonia that week….. So it turns out that each year a bunch of gauchos hop on their horses and ride from Colonia to Southern Brazil. The following Sunday they would be holding the first ever leaving ceremony in the main city square, how could we possibly miss this. We took the executive decision to stay put and hostel hop around the city chasing room bargains.

Aside from chopping and changing our accommodation every two days we didn’t do much in Colonia, we took a walking tour to see the different Portuguese and Spanish architecture as this poor little town was owned by Portugal then Spain four times before it was taken by Brazil and was then finally liberated in 1828. We climbed the lighthouse which is built into the foundations of a 17^th century convent, we crossed the cities original wooden drawbridge which is the marker for where this city turns into a UNESCO world heritage site. We ate fondue in one of the best little cheap restaurants we found in the town and even managed to squeeze in a photo shoot as Mr & Mrs El Generale, , no language barrier is going to come between us and an excuse to dress up.

Finally before we knew it, it was Sunday and the day of the big parade, as we checked out of the awful Che Lagarto Hostel and returned to the B&B where we started we saw horses and people dressed up all over the streets, this was going to be fun.

We headed to the main square and definitely stood out as pretty much the only foreigners there, in fact the locals seemed more interested in taking sneaky photos of us than of the cool Gauchos and their horses.

It is not easy to see gauchos in South America as the pomp and ceremony that goes with the traditional outfits has largely gone and whilst the gauchos are still out there herding their cows with amazing horsemanship they are most likely to be doing it wearing jeans and a t-shirt, which is why seeing all these gauchos dressed up properly with spurs on their boots, knives in their belts, lasso’s over their saddles and of course an iPhone in their hands was so special.

We had well and truly outstayed our welcome in Colonia as there was pretty much nothing left for us to see or do so we took off to one of our most exciting destinations yet and pretty much our main reason for visiting Uraguay… we were off to Fray Bentos!