Uruguay: A Love Letter
In 10th-grade Spanish, we had to do a report on a Latin American city. I was assigned Montevideo, which I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce, so I flip-flopped between “Mon-tay-VID-ee-o” and “Montay-vid-AY-o” throughout my entire presentation.
Since then, I hadn’t thought much about Uruguay or its capital city until I started planning my trip, and even then, I afforded it just a passing thought of “sure, I need no visa and it’s well-developed, I’ll spend a month there—or maybe just three weeks since it’s so incredibly small.” I didn’t even make what has passed as an itinerary on this trip (a list of cities to visit and/or things to do—i.e., Argentina’s was “hike in Patagonia, drink wine in Mendoza, art / food in Buenos Aires”) for the country.
You see how I’m setting this up. Of course I fell deeply in love with this country and its perfect beaches and ambidextrous mate-quaffing populate and forward-thinking government and appreciative pace of life. Of course I gave the classic traveler’s compliment of “I thought I’d stay in this place for one week and I ended up staying for thrice that” in Punta del Este. Of course I’d come to think the Uruguayan way of doing things (whether those “things” are pronouncing words or preparing mate or anything in between) is the best on offer in Latin America.
Here I am, rather in love with this little chunk of land nestled between Argentina and Brazil, about to fly to the other side of the continent. I’m ready to leave, and I’m so excited for what’s next (Lima, and reunions with loved ones, and a hell of a trek to Machu Picchu, here I come). But I will miss this place.
I’ll tell you a little bit about Uruguay in general—an overview similar to the one you’d get during a reality television audition tape, let’s say—before I tell you about my specific experience of it. If you, like me when I got here, know little to nothing about the country, feast your eyes on these impeccably-researched bullet points; if you’re some kind of worldly individual who knows the stats on each UN member country, 1) do I know this about you? Can we form a pub trivia team together? 2) feel free to skip ahead to the next section (I can write choose-your-own adventure stories with the best of them).
Opening voiceover, read aloud as the camera pans over views of Montevideo’s rambla as seen from above, bustling with people biking and walking along the water;the pier in Colonia del Sacramento, sailboats bobbing in the wind; the beach in La Pedera, full of families enjoying the sun; the high rises of Punta del Este at night; a cow grazing in a pasture in La Rocha; the night sky in Punta del Diablo; and a ranch perched on the edge of the Sierras, solar panels glinting: Uruguay is simultaneously an underrated country and a highly rated country. Underrated, because almost no one visits it—it gets about 3 million tourists a year, but a whopping 2 million-plus of those are Argentinians hopping across the Ria del Plata1; a measly 3 million visitor count doesn’t even get close to making the top 50 most-visited countries in the world, even if you look at a weighted visitor-per-citizen measure2. Highly rated, because it’s quite literally topped many best-of lists for Latin America: highest in democracy and peace, lowest perception of government corruption, highest literary rates, highest and most consistent access to services such as education, running water, and sanitation 3.
In a continent marred by military dictatorships and corrupt leaders, Uruguay does not escape unscathed. Uruguay had a military-run dictatorship from 1973-1985, which, while less bloody than others in the region (like Chile’s or Argentina’s), still included torture, imprisonment, and the suppression of speech and political activity of perceived threats including left-leaning politicians and Marxists 4. The transition back to democracy was peaceful and democratic, but over 180 Uruguayans were killed during the dictatorship.
In a continent muddled by the close relationship between religion and state, Uruguay does stand out—it formally separated church and state in the early 1900s under reformist President Jose Battle y Ordonez5, becoming one of the first countries in Latin America to do so. This allowed Uruguay’s political system to develop without excessive pressure from the Church, making it one of the first countries to allow women to file for divorce (in 1913) (which Chile didn’t do until 2003…) and to give women the right to vote (in 1927); it’s continued that legacy of progressive legislation recently, legalizing abortion for Uruguayan women (and paying for it, with state-sponsored healthcare) 6, allowing gay couples full adoption rights7, and becoming the first country in the world to legalize the production, sale, and consumption of marijuana8.
Uruguay’s government is so secular that Holy Week isn’t called Semana Santa here, like it is everywhere else on the continent. It’s called Turismo (Tourism)—people still get the time off, and many of them celebrate Easter or Passover, but there’s no official government holiday for Good Friday (which, incidentally, is today).
I didn’t know how progressive Uruguay was when I got here, and I couldn’t have imagined how protected and respected I would feel. Admittedly, my sample size is small—just a month in the country and probably only a few dozen different Uruguayans met and interviewed—but I was so positively impressed with the mindset of the Uruguayan populate. People here genuinely believe that the government can and should provide for its people, that education should be free (it is, and as a result, Uruguay has the highest literacy rate in South America)9, and that women should have control of their own bodies and lives (see previous paragraph). Sure, you still have some wildly excessive bureaucracy or some misguided public works, and there’s still a film of machismo that clings to everything (a less obvious but almost more sinister version, in fact, since its perpetrators see themselves as champions for women’s rights but do things like tell their wives not to disagree with them in public). But it feels palpable different, even than other extremely developed countries like Chile and Argentina. This is a citizenry I would be proud to be a part of.
And now I’ll give you a rapid-fire deep dive, by subject; these bullets scroll along screen as our video montage of gorgeous scenery continues:
• Geography: Uruguay, which is about the size of the state of Washington, is relatively boring compared to its neighbors; it has no mountains, no deserts, no Amazonian jungle. What does it have? Rolling, fertile plains that host its 12-million-plus cattle population (over 75% of all of Uruguay’s land is in a state of permanent pasture) and its diverse collection of crops 10 and natural, clean energy sources (95% of its total energy footprint is clean energy!) like wind and solar farms11.
• Economy: GDP at $79 billion, economy concentrated in services but with a healthy agriculture sector. I’d comment more but I feel underqualified…basically, Uruguay is steadier financially than its southern cone neighbors (and you can feel the difference—the banks here don’t randomly close, people don’t insist on being paid in USD, there’s less demonstrations in the capitol of young unemployed people).
• Population: 3.3 million people (just less than the state of Connecticut). Almost half of Uruguay’s population lives in and around Montevideo. The rest are mostly scattered along the coast. Most of the interior is sparsely populated by farmers and ranchers.
• Sports and culture: Uruguay apparently won the first World Cup in 1930 and again in 1950. I say apparently not because it’s not a fact (it is) but to convey how little I know about international soccer (a large wedge between me and most Uruguayans, let me tell you). As a result of their early success, Uruguay is obsessed with soccer, even more so than other South American countries I’ve been to. Another national-conscious-creating moment for Uruguay also involved sports, but this time a rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972. 16 of the 45 people on board survived through a combination of innovation (making snowshoes out of seats), determination (embarking on a trek out of the mountains despite the constant avalanches), and cannibalism (they ate the bodies of their fallen teammates over the two-plus months they spent trying to get rescued)12.
• Politics: Uruguay has three main political coalitions: the National (conservative) and Colorado (conservative but with a libertarian / socially-liberal flair) parties, which have been around since the 1770s and, and the Broad Front, a left-leaning coalition that includes Uruguayan’s socialist and communist parties as well as Christian Democrats and other groups and which first came to power in 2004 and has won most elections since then13. Jose Mujica, who was elected president in 2009 and served til 2015, famously donated 90% of his presidential salary to charity, eschewed the presidential home and continued living on his farm house off a dirt road, and drove his little beat-up VW instead of a fleet of armored cars. He also said this about Trump during the lead-up to the 2016 election: “If Trump wins, well…I don’t know, because there is still no direct line to escape to Mars” 14. We love him.
Ready? Feel like you have a good base of understanding or this country? Now I’ll tell you all about how my love story unfolded, accompanied by a gratuitous photo essay of sunsets on sunsets on sunsets.
COLONIA
I crossed the border between Argentina and Uruguay via boat over the Río de Plata. Our boat emerged from the skyscraper-cluttered wetlands of Puerto Madero and onto the wide expanse of water and the sun, ebullient and glowing, took our space, gently sinking into the horizon and melting upon the water.
Colonia was all cobbled streets and marshy river beaches and the self-contained nightlife of a small town. I spent two days there, catching the tail end of regattas and gawking at beautiful old doors and spending far too much money on food. My last night there, I met an English doctor named Joe, who was a few weeks away from embarking on a 4-month backpacking trip through South America with his 60-year-old dad and was fortifying himself with exciting solo travel experiences beforehand. We, as any two 20-somethings in the prime of their lives would do, spent an exciting evening eating pizza (actual pizza! the shop owners brought the oven over from Naples and everything! not a soggy, olive-studded crust in sight!) and swapping stories of dating on the road over slices of margarita, sitting in the town square and listening to a zydeco band jam out on reggaetón covers, drinking sangria on a porch with a view of the Milky Way above and the river below while discussing the merits of the National Health Service, and tucking ourselves into our beds by the wild hour of 11 p.m.
MONTEVIDEO
If you told me I couldn’t go home to the United States after my trip but instead had to stay somewhere in South America for the rest of my life, I would take about three seconds to think and then announce that I’d be moving to Montevideo.
It has its old district, full of fruit markets so dazzlingly colorful and bountiful they’re almost lurid; it has its rambla, a walking path hugging the sea where everyone gathers to drink mate and watch the sunset; it has dozens of free museums (including the gorgeous Museo de Artes Decorativas and its perfectly-manicured lawn) with kind docents; it has its heavy 19th-century doors with ornate brass letter slots; it has its young neighborhoods plastered in feminist graffiti and unselfconsciously nerdy bookstores and lowlit tapas bars. It’s walkable, and safe, and clean, and you’re never more than ten minutes from the water.
I stayed in a little hostel between the Palermo and Parque Rodó neighborhoods that featured freshly-baked bread each morning; I thought I couldn’t worship carbohydrates with any more fervor than I did at that breakfast table, but then I found Escaramuza.
Escaramuza is everything I love my bookstores to be: well-lit and aesthetically refreshing, full of hand-lettered signs and pleasingly messy shelves and bathroom doors that glide on their tracks as if weightless. I’d met a lovely Swiss girl at my hostel the night before—we’d shared homemade popcorn and watched the Oscars together, straining to understand either Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary or the Spanish translation that played over it on a 6-second delay and bemoaning the terrible broadcast choice to dub instead of subtitle—and we spent an afternoon leafing through children’s books (the only literature I can reliably translate from Spanish) and gorging ourselves at the attached cafe, whose house-made rosemary focaccia later appeared in my dreams.
The food there was the greatest hits of Uruguay. My first visit, Seraphina and I got a classic steak and vegetables and also split a chalá, a classic Uruguayan dessert. (This also epitomizes why I am enamored with this country: while the rest of South America is salivating over dulce de leche and flan, Uruguay gets its kicks with a peach-stuffed chantilly-cream-coated sponge-cake-and-meringue confection that takes you on a journey of texture and taste that’s unrivaled in its complexity and perfection). I went back the next day, alone, at teatime, and drank a cappuccino and ate carrot cake while talking to Michael on the phone; some combination of the caffeine and the sugar and the paralyzing happiness made me break a plate and my server couldn’t have been sweeter about it, so I stayed for dinner, too, and ate a plate of roasted vegetables and drank a liter of mint tea and read a book under the amorphous shade of an ivy-covered trellis and wondered if one could burst from contentment.
PUNTA DEL ESTE & LA BARRA & JOSE IGNACIO
When I think about my trip, the thing that stands out to me over and over again is how random it all is. How one person, met in a hostel or on the Girls vs. Globe Facebook group or on a hike, can change the course of my afternoon, my week, my life. (Sounds melodramatic but is entirely true.) Sara was one of those people, and I came across her entirely by chance.
I had planned on doing a Workaway in Buenos Aires at an artists’ colony (housework and event planning in exchange for room, board, and a group of other writers to hang out with), but it fell through at the last minute (they decided to pack up the house and start a new project to build a poetry barge). So there I was, surfing Workaway for opportunities in Uruguay, the next country on my list, and found a posting from an Englishwoman in Punta del Este who was looking for someone to help care for her 2-year-old daughter, two dogs, and garden. I sent her a note and honestly didn’t expect it all to work out—I’d had to contact two dozen hostels in Puerto Natales until I finally arranged things with Tomás, and you all know how that ended up—but Sara responded, we arranged dates, and she picked me up from the Punta del Este bus station a few days later.
Punta del Este is the Monte Carlo of Uruguay (their words, not mine)—it’s full of glittery casinos and beachfront high-rises catering to the rich Argentinians who flock here every January to spend a few weeks looking at other beautiful people in high-cut bikinis and neon board shorts. I think I’d’ve probably hated if it I’d come then. But I came for the month of March, by which point all of the vacationers had fled and the town was half as full but just as beautiful.
And being with Sara and her daughter Amelie, who you met here, was incredible. It was as if I’d taken everything that wasn’t perfect about my summer au pairing in Madrid in 2012 and tweaked it until it was. Sara speaks perfect Spanish but obviously is a native English speaker too, so I could communicate with her easily while also having a built-in tutor to explain to me the nuances between different ways of asking “how are you”; no breakdowns by the pool because I couldn’t get my host family to understand that I wanted to go home. Amelie is sweeter and more communicative than my erstwhile Spanish charge was. Sara’s friends are mostly other single mothers, so I got to be part of an incredibly empowering feminist community, versus hanging out with coupled-up Spaniards and suffering the occasional leering husband. We had an all-women’s asado my last week in town and enjoyed ourselves too much for it to be legal.
I could do three dozen paragraphs on the beauty of Punta del Este and a life that included hanging out with an adorable toddler, doing yoga on the beach, and cooking fish caught fresh that morning, but instead I’ll just tell you about two perfect days, different in their makeup but equal in the way they made me feel: appreciative and alive.
The first beings with a trip to Jose Ignacio, a town a few kilometers up the coast that is literally the sister city of Bridgehampton, with Sara, where I take her yoga class for free (perks of being the instructor’s nanny, y’all). The class is incredible—I leave it feeling sore and loose and centered. Sara and I drive to her friend’s farm for kirtan practice (Sara is an accomplished flautist and is a part of a trio called Aria that practices the ancient musical performance of mantras), where I lay out in the sunshine and read my book with a beagle named Cashew draped over my legs and listen to them play. Then Sara and I get burgers (hers veggie) from a little shack near the beach before heading over to a sculpture garden, reminiscent of Storm King in New York, and spend the afternoon wandering around the park and sharing our interpretations of the work. Sara goes to teach a class in the evening and drops me off in La Barra, the hippest neighborhood in Punta del Este, and I wander in and out of art galleries and coffeeshops for an hour or so before finding my way to Canoa, a surfy souvenir shop where I want to buy a sarong for the beach. I get to chatting with the proprietor, a 27-year-old bass guitarist who’s planning on touring Mexico with his band the following summer; we talk about travel and English and he offers to give me a tour of the off-the-books Museo de Marijuana that he keeps in the back. (Remember, marijuana is legal here to grow, sell, buy, or use.) We smoke and drink Coca Cola together and he cuts me a great deal on my sarong. I run off to meet Sara at the house of a friend of hers, who is an architect whose husband is sarcastic and also completely willing to do half the housework; I fall a little in love with both of them as we share lentil burgers and white wine. Sara and I go home, rally for a night out, and head to the only bar in town open on a Tuesday; I immediately note a pair of Englishmen at the bar and we sidle up to them, which leads to them buying us our whiskey and regaling us with stories about their lives as directors for Red Bull commercials. We make our escape and fall into bed at 3 a.m. after sharing the absolutely highbrow drunk food of avocado and tomato toast sprinkled with sunflower seeds, and my hangover the next day is thoroughly worth it.
The second: I’m a little under the weather, so Sara makes me a fresh-squeezed ginger / orange / carrot juice to start the day. I go with her to class again, which is excellent again, and then go to the beach to read Purity and give Sara some time alone with her young lover. Sara, feeling guilty for sexiling me, makes us homemade hummus and Greek salad for lunch and regales me with the recap as I tidy up the kitchen afterwards. Sara lends me the car and I drive, fast and well, full of confidence and appreciation for the smooth ritual of shifting from first to fourth, to Casapueblo, the house of Carlos Páez Vilaró, where I wander through rooms of his artwork before ordering a cappuccino from the balcony cafe and watching the sunset dapple the water. I drive home, meet Sara’s date and enjoythe dinner he cooks for us, curl up in my cabin to write for a bit, and then go out on an absolutely lovely date with a beautiful Uruguayan man named Maximiliano.
You see what I mean? Three weeks of honest-to-god near-perfect-bliss. (Also, I took care of a sometimes-tantrum-throwing toddler—both of the above days were Tuesdays, my days off, as Amelie spent them with her father, but my time with her was just as lovely, if slightly less glamorous).
PUNTA DEL DIABLO & CHUY
Near the end of my time with Sara and Amelie, we went on a road trip together. We drove up the coast and then through the interior of Uruguay’s Rocha district, passing little farm stands with their red-checked-cloth-covered wooden shelves heavy with jars of thick amber honey and cheeses tucked into cloth, protected by corrugated-iron roofs, and pastures of grazing cattle interspersed between the palm trees that looked like cocktail umbrellas stuck willy-nilly into the grass. We ended in Punta del Diablo, a town almost on the Brazilian border that, despite sharing two-thirds of its name with Punta del Este, is nothing like the busy tourist trap. Punta del Diablo is full of surfing beaches and colorful cabins; over the four days we spent there, I met some of Sara’s friends (she lived there for four years before moving to Punta del Este) who included a truffle-maker, surf instructors, an internationally-ranked pole dancer, yoga instructors, organic farmers, masseuses, a surgeon-turned-reiki doctor, a chef, and many, many property owners who, like Sara, rented out their cabins to tourists (usually Uruguayans and Brazilians, with the occasional European) for a steady stream of passive income. No one had a 9-to-5 job and everyone’s doors were always open. It felt like what my college friends and I might create if we manage to successfully buy an island together—a place where appreciation of the natural paradise comes first, an appreciation of the people sharing it come second, sharing sustainably produced food comes third, and things like jobs, money, clothes, cars, or other physical things come at a distant fourth, only worth mentioning so long as they are necessary for one through three.
I went on a few long beach hikes over the dunes (including one where I almost stepped directly onto a poisonous snake and only avoided it when a German couple yelled at me to move), watched kitesurfers create physical poetry, and learned backgammon from a Frenchman during a Punta del Diablo dinner party at the house of Roly, a six-five dreadlocked South Londoner with a pair of wild 6-year-old twins, three kittens, and a single gas-fed burner with which he produced a delicious roast chicken and steaming chips.
We took a day trip to Chuy, a town in the free trade zone between Brazil and Uruguay. You technically are in Brazil when you’re north of the main street—we ate lunch at a Brazilian buffet and paid in reales—which was exciting for this American-without-a-visa who probably won’t make it to Brazil proper this time around. Sara and her friend were in a shopping frenzy, stocking up on all of the clothes, foodstuffs, and appliances that were much cheaper at the border; I was in charge of entertaining Amelie and one-year-old Mariano while their mothers shopped. With a jar of olives, a newly-bought stroller, and the Frogger-style dangers facing us on the streets of Chuy—dodge the flying oil drops from that street meat vendor! get out of the way before the man rolling speakers down the sidewalk crushes you! squeeze past the carts of watermelon in order to get to the curb!—to entertain ourselves, the three of us danced up and down the sidewalk for the better part of an hour. Amelie and Mariano are both blonde, like me, and I bet it looked, to our large and gawking audience, like I was a 24-year-old mother of two, which got me thinking how much I’d really like to one day be a mother of two, but not anytime soon (more on this in another post).
VALIZAS & CABO POLONIO
On the way home from Punta del Diablo, I was dropped off in Valizas for my own mini coastal trip, a warm-up to get back into solo traveling after three weeks of staying with Sara (who is and was wonderful, but who, after near constant companionship for three weeks, I was ready to spend time away from.) In Valizas I had, by far, the most perfect 12 hours on record. After a night in my decidedly rustic hostel cabin—no electricity, no heat, just a wool blanket and a flashlight—I woke up at 6 a.m. to watch the sunrise, which I witnessed alone, not a single soul on the beach with me. I went back to bed for an hour or so before heading to the main room for breakfast, which exceeded all expectations: fresh-squeezed orange juice, thick and warm homemade bread, braided with seeds and served with plenty of butter and strawberry jam, and a fruit salad drizzled in thick honey. I ate with gusto and launched into conversation with the pair of Argentinian lawyers across from me about books: Borges, Thoreau, Emerson, A Little Life. Satiated, we did the washing up together and I went looking for the owner in order to check out; I found him in his solar-powered music studio, laying down the piano bit for a poetry music video he was working on. He patted the seat next to him and I sat down to watch what he’d done so far, then paid him and went on my merry way.
My merry way led me to a horse farm on the outskirts of Valizas, where I was hiring a horse to ride to Cabo Polonio, a town about 10 kilometers down the coast. I’d had “ride horses” on my South America list since Camilla gave me a soft leather cowboy hat that made me dream of galloping across the pampas and was looking forward to adding “by horse” to my list of travel methods attempted (alongside the much less sexy “bus,” “plane,” etc.).
I met Brisa, a gorgeous ten-year-old mare. Since no one else had signed up for a trip to Cabo that day, I had to pay a little extra, but it meant I’d get a private three-hour horse-riding lesson with my lovely Italian instructor Laura.
She instructed me on the basics—rein technique, mounting tips, posture watch-out-fors—as I packed my saddlebags. (I got real saddlebags! I’d left behind all my big backpacks and was carrying only what I needed for two days of travel; I felt like Athena.)
Geared up and ready to go, I placed my left foot in the left stirrup, gripped a combination of Brisa’s blonde mane and the saddle blanket, and stepped up, settling my right leg along her flank. And there we were: a team.
I hadn’t ridden a horse since a Girl Scouts excursion when I was 9; I didn’t know how it’d feel to travel on horseback.
Sitting there astride Brisa, feeling her shift under my legs, falling into her rhythm, touching her sides lightly to turn us towards Laura, I wanted to enter a jousting competition with her. I wanted to attach her to my wagon and drive our goods to market. I wanted to ride her across the Scottish highlands. I felt a kinship with legions of riders before me and a brief regret that we no longer ride horses in everyday life.
Laura and I rode along the beach. I paused for her to go first through the inlets that wove between the dunes, then nudged Brisa to follow Laura’s gelding’s path. We chatted as we rode, and I realized how much I enjoy practicing Spanish with other Spanish-as-a-second-(or-third)-language speakers—their sentence structures are less confusing, their slang almost nonexistent.
When we reached the final stretch of open beach, Laura taught me to gallop. The first time I nudged Brisa into high gear, I nearly flipped out of the saddle, unprepared for the lurching speed. My second try was better, but I couldn’t keep my toes pointed and my heels down, which meant my legs bounced out of the stirrups like cooked spaghetti. The third try, I settled in and vowed to move with, not against, Brisa, and it worked: there we were, galloping.
It felt like we were moving in slow motion, but I could see Brisa’s hoofs churn up the sand beneath us as she took ever-faster strides. It was beauty and grace and adrenaline and it was wonderful.
We trotted into town, watered the horses, and said our goodbyes. I headed off to find a hostel (more on that below), then spent a wonderful afternoon window-shopping at the half a dozen jewelry stands and art stalls that lined the main street of Cabo and reading my book on the beach, looking up every half hour or so to watch the surfers off the shore. I wandered over to the lighthouse, waved at the sea lions, and did the tiny 700-meter hike linking one side of the town to the other. I returned to my hostel, showered, combed my hair and read in a hammock, and then headed back to the beach to watch the sunset.
As the sky turned to fire, I saw mankind’s greatest attempts at triumph over nature—airplanes, cars, combines—appear in the clouds, only to be pulsed through with red light from the setting sun. The sky had the last word and I sat there, listening, grateful to witness.
After a near-perfect three and a half weeks in Uruguay—the only minor inconveniences up until that point being a small lice infestation and a few rough nights fighting mosquitos—my last few days here have been a complete shitshow. A play-by-play of these last 48 hours:
I accidentally arrived in no-cash no-electric-grid fisherman’s-town-turned-tourist-destination Cabo Polonia with only 200 pesos in my pocket, which came out to about $7. (This was my own fault—I was in an impatient mood when I left Punta del Diablo and didn’t want to stop for more cash, I had to use my emergency US$ on paying extra for horse riding when no one else signed up, and I thought my hostel in Valizas had already charged my credit card but it turns out they needed cold hard pesos before they’d let me check out, so I had to give them my last 500-peso note.) No ATMs meant that I had to beg, borrow, and steal my way through my day and a half there. Literally. I begged each hostel I found to let me pay in Argentinian pesos (I had about $20 worth of those, which Uruguayans largely loathe) and eventually found one, I borrowed toiletries from random girls in the hostel since I couldn’t afford to go buy what I’d forgotten (shampoo and conditioner—the only negative of packing only what you can fit in a pair of saddlebags is that you have no back-up anything), and I stole an orange from the hostel bar at 5 o’clock in the morning as I was being kicked out (we’ll get there—next paragraph) and ate it for breakfast. Oh, and I ended up blowing $50 on dinner at the only restaurant in town that accepted credit cards, which wouldn’t have made it onto a list of shitty things had the dinner been good or in any way worth it, but instead it consisted of fresh-caught fish, potentially delicious but ruined by having been wrapped in too-sour pickled strips of cucumber, doused with an overpowering olive tapenade, and then plopped on a nearly tasteless greenish lukewarm mash that may have originally been a type of potato. (Aside on an aside: I technically had an emergency $50 hidden inside a tampon tucked into my toiletry bag, but didn’t feel like the situation was dire enough to break into it, which proves that you should take all of my whining with a grain of salt.)
The bed that I had finagled my way into with cold, hard, Argentinian cash ended up being the single worse place I’ve ever laid my head to rest. As I climbed into bed around 11 p.m., exhausted from one of my best-ever days (which you read about above—horse rides and baby hikes and sunset views galore), I realized my mattress tilted towards one side like a trap plane on a pinball table. Uncomfortable, but fine; I’d just be careful not to roll off the side. Then a baby started crying from the private room above our dorm (who brings a baby to a hostel whose major selling point is its plethora of open fires?) and did not stop. Loud, but surmountable; I’d use some of my precious cell phone battery to play white noise at top volume. Then I woke up after about 45 minutes of fitful flip-flopping to itchy hands, feet, and cheeks (the only parts of my body not covered in clothing), padded to the bathroom to check it out, and realized mosquitos had feasted on my appendages. Annoying, itchy, and frustrating, but again, recoverable. I slathered on repellant and laid back down. Half an hour later, head pounding, I again slipped out to the bathroom to check on my face, which felt swollen and misshapen, and found two golf-ball-sized lumps on my forehead, exactly where, were I the spawn of Satan, my devil’s horns would’ve been. They weren’t mosquito bites—spider bites, maybe?—and they were the nail in the coffin of my future in that dorm room; I grabbed my scarf and my Kindle and went out to blue velvet couch in the sitting room, where I read, dozed, and palpated my forehead for an hour until I was woken up by the return of the hostel employees, coming back at 3:30 a.m. from the only bar in town and searching for cubbyholes to sleep in like they were penniless streetsweeping London orphans in winter.
At 5 a.m., after an apparently fruitless search, one nicely asked me to get off of the blue couch, as it was his bed, and I resigned myself to give up on getting any sleep and bundled up to watch the sun rise. On my way out of the hostel, I spotted hostel employees tucked into every possible cranny: one sleeping on the kitchen floor (had to step over her as I stole the aforementioned orange), one wrapped in a sleeping bag and sprawled across the wood pile out back, another in a hammock by the garden, covered in a folded-up tarp. I hiked over to the beach and had a truly incredible predawn commune with the earth—her, peeling back the dark-blue sky bit by bit and feeding it jewels of smokey orange; me, watching the fishermen haul their boats into the ocean in the almost-darkness and imagining centuries of men leaving on the same journey to pull sustenance from the depths of the sea. I returned to the hostel, collected my things, and attempted to brush my teeth, before learning that the hostel’s limited water supply (there’s no water system in Cabo; everyone’s supply is self-collected rainwater) had run out. Furry-tongued and exhausted, I headed back to the beach, where I made a semi-bed out of my jacket and backpack and sat down to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack and cry a mix of sad, sleep-deprived, grateful tears until the next bus out of town.
I got on the bus, but stupidly sat at the very back, which meant that I felt every bump of our 25-minute roller-coaster-ride over sand dunes, mud pits, and exposed rock. I realized it was a blessing I’d only had an orange for breakfast, as that made very little to be thrown up.
Upon arrival to the entrance of the national park that houses Cabo Polonio, I learned that the next bus out of town wasn’t for four hours. Laying on the cold linoleum bemoaning my existence was a tempting use of the time, but I instead decided to try my hand at hitchhiking, because I was already exhausted and disappointed and penniless and figured it couldn’t really get any worse. I was, luckily, correct; after 20 minutes of trying out different angles of thumb positioning at the 4x4s that passed every few minutes, a little green Fiat stopped down the road, reversed back to me, and asked where I was going. Turns out that Alvaro and his mother, a darling, concave 90-year-old woman who began bragging about her son’s saxophone skills before I even finished maneuvering my backpack into the car, were going to spend Easter at her house in La Paloma, which was 50 kilometers down the road in the direction of Punta del Este, my destination. We listened to Alvaro’s sax singles intermixed with Cat Steven’s greatest hits and drove a solid 15 kilometers under the speed limit the entire time. The ride was a bit awkward, but completely fine; it, like the high-potential fish of three graphs prior, wouldn’t have made this list if it wasn’t for what came after it—a deeply irritating hour spent wandering around La Paloma until the bus to San Carlos (still not Punta del Este, but another 80 kilometers closer) left, being followed by two German teenagers who did not understand that I wasn’t in the mood to make friends and chat about Spanish verb conjugation.
After disembarking from my bus in Punta del Este, I began the long walk back to Sara’s, shoulders aching from the combination of horse ride and heavy backpack. I got home, immediately showered—hot, running water! you are the stuff of legends and lovers’ tales!—and checked my WhatsApp messages after nearly two days without wifi. (It was nice to actually be offline for a little bit—I’ve been so constantly connected this entire trip, which has been great for staying in touch but makes a very tempting time-waster that I so often give into, instead of spending that energy writing or practicing Spanish or being engaged in the place I am in.) I was hoping for a text from Maxi, the cute Uruguayan, the first guy I’ve met on my trip who I am both physically and mentally attracted to. We’d had (what I thought to be) a really good time together and I was hoping to see him again before I left. This being the wrap-up of an incredibly disappointing day, I’ll now confirm what you’ve already surmised: he hadn’t responded.
Wrapped in a towel and clutching my cell phone with the apathetic grip of the recently jilted, I trudged back to my cabin for a siesta. I opened the door to an overwhelming cloud of wet-dog scent. Investigating further, I found the mosquito netting above my bed ripped down, my bedding covered in mud and mulch, and incriminating pawprints on the roughly-hewn wood floor. Hurray! The dogs had used my cabin as shelter at some point during the long weekend, taking advantage of the barely-there latch to hide from the thunderstorms!
I changed my sheets, took a Benadryl to get me through the remaining pet dander coating my living space, and slept the sleep of the dead.
The next day was lovely—yoga and a world-class lunch in Jose Ignacio—until I got home, put all my clothes in the laundry, messaged my former boss and current friend Kav about how excited I was to see her in Lima in a few days, and received her response: “you mean tomorrow??”
My heart dropped as I pulled up my Apple calendar. There, in all-caps, sprawled across Friday the 30th through Monday the 1st, a reminder I’d put in when she booked the tickets five months ago: KAV IN LIMA. I cross-referenced with my Gmail flight tracker. There, top of my inbox, the reminder for the flight I’d purchased three weeks ago: Your Upcoming Trip, Montevideo to Lima, March 31.
I’d fucked it up. Majorly. Kav could not have been cooler about it—I got maybe five minutes of completely deserved teasing and then immediate reassurance that it was fine, that I shouldn’t spend $450 moving my flight up a day, and that she’d enjoy the time on her own to relax anyways—which only confirmed her status as one of my top-five favorite people in this world, but I still felt terrible, and then spiraled into a bit of frantic and depressive self-reflection: how did I become a person who was so careless about commitments I’d made with friends? Is this a side effect of Chill Kath (who first made herself known in Torres del Paine)—reckless inefficiency? Is there a happy medium between straight-laced crusher KP and sabbatical-living go-with-the-flow Katherine and if so, how do I find my way to it?
Caught up in a cloud of self-loathing, I forgot to take my laundry off the line before the sun went down. This morning, when I went to collect it and hurriedly pack so I could make an early bus to Montevideo and get in a little museum-seeing on my last day in this country, I found it damp with dew, heavy and wet and completely un-packable. Sara drove me to the only laundromat in town open on Good Friday, where they charged me $12 to dry half a load of laundry.
When I finally got to Montevideo, three hours behind schedule but with dry, clean clothes, I realized that I’d booked my hostel here for the night of the 31st instead of the 30th; at that point I honestly began to laugh at myself and my idiocracy and continued walking to my hostel from the bus station. Upon arrival, I explained my mistake, profusely thanked the receptionist who assigned me a bed for tonight instead, and arranged an airport pickup at 4 a.m. tomorrow. I then took an Uber to the Museum of Decorative Arts, which I’d only gotten a few minutes in on my first trip to Montevideo and had been excited to re-explore, only to find it closed for Good Friday. I took another Uber to Escaramuza, the amazing bookstore/cafe I’d had three meals in a few weeks ago, only to find it also closed. Dejected, rejected, exhausted, I dragged myself back to the hostel and decided to make the best of my afternoon in the ghost city of Montevideo by finishing this blog, so here we are: steady clacking away at the keyboard and eating the shitty hamburger that I ordered from the Uruguayan version of Eat24 (it’s called PedidosYa!, in case you’re in the market) as my last hours in Uruguay tick down.
Did I just have a relatively frustrating 48 hours? And write 2,000 words detailing it all for you? Yes and yes. Does that mean that Uruguay, home of forehead-eating spiders and text-ignoring boys, is any less the apple of my eye, the jewel of my crown (this metaphor would work better if I was an imperialist state versus a solo traveler but just allow me to sub in “passport” for “crown” in your mental image and let’s go from there), the place I can’t wait to come back to, the country I will now be an unofficial tourism ambassador for? Not in the slightest.
Uruguay, you are a beautiful, kind, 21st-century-minded place and I loved living in you for a month. Thank you for giving me a house and a home and a hope for the kind of communities I want to inhabit and create in the future.
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: Because good things come to those who don’t deserve them, my last night in Uruguay ended up being wonderful. In the middle of writing those dejected words above, I was interrupted by Diego, an Ecuadorian designer living in Buenos Aires and, at 30, on his first solo trip—a long weekend in Montevideo. We started chatting, were soon joined by Seba the Chilean, also staying in our room, and the three of us had a lovely evening drinking and smoking and debating questions like “does God exist?” and “how did humans evolve?” and “is Breaking Bad the best television show of all time?” I stayed up too late having fun with Diego, did not finish this blog, and went directly to the airport to fly to Lima, where I had an incredibly weekend with Kav (more on that, too) and am now here, posting this, a bit late but finally done. Uruguay, I was right: I don’t deserve you, but you’re perfect.