Carnival in Camboriu

Our first stop in Brazil was a place called Balneario Camboriu, a popular beach resort town on the southeast coast about 90mins north of Florianopolis.  Joel and Sabrina, friends we met in London, had organised a flat for us to rent for a month so we were looking forward to chilling out by the beach.

We arrived at carnival time, so the first weekend we spent 3 days at different beautiful beaches swimming, drinking beers and getting tans.  You know you're in a great country when you can drink on the beach and it's not only tolerated, it's encouraged by getting drinks delivered to your sun lounger.  Brilliant.  

The town was packed - the normal population of about 100,000 swells to over a million during summer - and for 5 nights there was live music on the beach, with well over 100,000 people dancing and drinking.  There were no street parades or anything like the big city carnivals, but it was still a good atmosphere and heaps of people around.

Our month here was pretty similar to our time in Cabo Polonio - swimming, walking, sleeping and chilling out.  It was nice to slow down for a while, but we were getting itchy feet and ready to travel again after a month.  So we decided to swap the relaxed beach living for the hecticness of Rio.

Our hippie hideaway

After our not-so-inspiring stays in Montevideo and Colonia, we headed off to Cabo Polonio, hoping the hippie little beach settlement would be a great ending to our time in Uruguay.  And we weren't disappointed.

After a 4 hour bus from Montevideo and a 20 minute ride over the sand in a crazy truck type thing, we arrived.  There were a couple of hostels and a hotel, but we wanted to rent a little bach/hut.  The only thing was, we didn't know how.  We'd read that the local stores/markets would have signs up for places for rent so we went off in search of them.  We didn't find any signs, but a guy at the store saw us with our packs and asked if we needed a place to stay.  So after some negotiation we ended up with our very own little hut for the next 8 days.  Rather expensive (about $50 a night) but we spent bugger all on other stuff while were there. It had solar power and a water tank so it was more luxurious than we were expecting, but it was still a feeling of getting away from it all.  And so began our hippie retreat of lazing around outside on the 'day bed', reading, swimming, walking and sleeping.  Not a bad way to spend a week.

Our hut

The MC Duo

Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America (by area), and we really had no idea what it had to offer.  But being the intrepid travellers we are, we didn't hesitate in finding out.

We ended up spending a week in the capital, Montevideo, but that was mainly because we were waiting for Kurt's Brazil visa.  Three days would definitely be more than enough time to see it all.  We therefore had plenty of time to check out the city and make a day trip to the nearby town of Colonia.  We were staying in a hostel by the port, so it was only a short walk to the historic part of the city known as Ciudad Vieja (Old City).  There are also some cool buildings near the main plaza, a real mixture of old and new.  

One evening we borrowed a couple of bikes from the hostel and rode down by the waterfront, coming across some sort of festival/tradition.  People were walking into the water and floating what looked like little boats made out of cardboard or polystyrene.  No idea what is was all about, but there were thousands of people around.  

We were also lucky enough to go along to a local carnival event one night, as one of the guys working at the hostel offered to take us with him, his girlfriend and his niece.  It was a competition of local performers singing and dancing in different styles.  The costumes and make up were pretty impressive, and there was one group in particular that we both liked over all the others.  They had a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of look to them and they were a crowd favourite too.  It was a really good night, and the guy's hyperactive 6 year old niece was yelling out all the English words and phrases she knew, as well as singing some Abba for us.  The poor girl has already been corrupted. 

Meanwhile, it was a rather tense couple of days as we waited to find out if Kurt's visa for Brazil had been approved.  We had to show proof of exit and entry travel details, so we printed some fake flights and used that.  We thought they'd just look at them and tick a box, but the woman kept the printout which made us worry.  Our 'reservation' was only valid for 24 hours because of course we hadn't actually paid for it, so we had to hope like hell that if she was going to check the reservation she'd do so before lunch the next day.  As it turned out, the new grey hairs we got were unnecessary, as Kurt's visa was approved.  Phew!

Our day trip was to a town called Colonia, about 3 hours from Montevideo.  It's a popular tourist spot and is a quaint little town with winding cobbled streets overlooking a river.  It even has a lighthouse with a gorgeous 360 degree view.  We spent a couple of hours wandering around snapping away along with the hundreds of other tourists, but we ended up changing to an earlier bus back to the capital.  Clearly we're productive tourists - we get shit done fast.

So as you might have picked up on, we weren't overly impressed with these two cities.  We didn't dislike them, we just weren't fussed either way.  Plus, things were a lot more expensive than we were expecting which is never a good thing.  We were, however, holding out hope that the next place in Uruguay would change our opinion - Cabo Polonio.