Ritzy & Rusty Punta del Este

Our first Uruguayan couch surf started on July 2nd when we got up super early in the morning (4 am!) to catch a 5:45 am bus to Punta del Este. We discovered at this point that almost all the first class buses in Uruguay have a fantastic feature: free WIFI! While Colin slept I played around on the phone and watched the sun rise as we made it through the different villages. I checked the address we had for our hosts, Anibal (from Uruguay) and Mia (from the USA) as we drove through Rocha and other, smaller towns towards the next city. Punta del Este is known in the summer as a real celebrity ‘hot spot’ where the rich and famous come to party on the beach. During the winter however, while not as deserted as Punta del Diablo, there is still a slower pace. Once we arrived in the bus terminal we switched to another bus heading back away from the city center – their house was about a 20 minute bus ride towards the more ‘suburban’ area of Manantiales (springs). Mia’s directions were good and we found their place without any problem, arriving around 9:00 am in the morning. Our knock was greeted by Anibal, and we chatted while waiting for everyone (Mia and a couple from Columbia) to wake up.

After meeting everyone and getting settled in (and after a trip to gather firewood in the forest for the boys!), the Columbian couple headed out to the city and Mia and Anibal treated us to a delicious pasta in pink sauce. Yum! Once lunch was finished the four of us went down to the beach in Manantiales and walked around for a while finding crazy things (like purple crabs!) and witnessing Anibal climb along the wet rocks gathering some wild mussels up to go with the dinner he wanted to make for us: a shrimp and mussel risotto. Once we all had enough we returned to the house to chat and relax for the rest of the afternoon.

The evening of July 2nd the four of us (minus the Columbian couple, who ended up walking a dozen kilometers back to the house from the city!) enjoyed the risotto with some delicious Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. We got to share some of our travel experiences with Anibal and Mia, and they told us about their time in school together back in the States. Anibal explained to us his secret to making us the delicious pasta and risotto: his Italian ancestry! A lot of Uruguayans have Italian roots, and many can even get passports from Italy based on their great-grandparent’s heritage!              

The next morning was our first real day out in Punta del Este. The first thing we noticed on the bus ride into town was a really cool artsy, curved bridge and a bunch of flamingos just past the bridge in the lake. Our first stop of the day was at the famous large hand on the beach called “the hand, ” done by Chilean artist Mario Irarrázabal. The hand has a pretty grim idea behind it – it is a sculpture of a giant person drowning in the water, reaching out for help as they are going under. Not too pleasing a concept, but we still had fun posing with it!      

Colin and I next walked to the port where we were hoping to catch a boat out to an island with a seal and sea lion colony on it. Known as the Isla de los Lobos (‘lobos’ meaning wolves is what Uruguayans call sea lions: ‘sea wolves’) this island has tons of the large and intimidating (yet also cute!) guys lounging around and swimming near it. However, before we got to the point to register for our boat trip, we happened to notice a commotion around a fish market at the port. A dog was jumping around, barking its head off at something we couldn’t see. Walking behind the people gutting fish and past the dog we saw what was happening: the fish gutters were filleting fish and the scraps were sliding into the water behind them – directly into the mouths of a group of at least a dozen sea lions and/or seals! Colin and I got some good videos of the action as the massive beasts (which reminded me of giant black bears in the water) fought over the fish with each other and the birds hungry for a bite.

 

Suddenly, we saw the best treat of the day occur. As the sea lions were fighting amongst each other to gobble a piece of fish tossed into the water near them, Colin and I watched as a clever and quick seagull came swooping down from the air to snatch away the fish from both the sea lions. It was great timing for us, and we got the shot you see below.

 

 

Later that day at the Museo del Mar I would learn the difference between the sea lions and the seals we saw that afternoon. Sea lions can weigh up to 1,000 lbs and more than 8 feet in length! They have long front flippers, can walk and swim with their front flippers, and they have ears. Seals on the other hand are typically much smaller than sea lions with the smallest sea lion having a length of just 3 feet. Seals have short front flippers, they swim with their tail flippers, and they slide with their body instead of walking. Plus seals have no ears! Both sea lions and seals can move on all fours with their unique body structure – and both are pretty impressive to look at.

 

 

We really lucked out and the ‘show’ went on for quite some time. We took some videos, sat down to watch them, even the dog seemed to get bored after a while of barking!   

 

In the end Colin and I decided to save the money on the boat trip once they told us not enough people had signed up and we would have to pay more. We knew there were seal and sea lion colonies we were going to in Argentina, and an extra trip wasn’t worth the money with the luck we had seeing them for so long at the port! Instead we decided to treat ourselves to a bit of fast food (Burger King lunch) and some shopping around the city center, such as a stop inside a place called the “Indian Emporium” for me. At first I thought it could be a place for kitchenware and spices, but it was actually a really hip, decently priced clothing store! I ended up buying a few pairs of really soft, purple socks here. (Editor’s Note: They did start to fall apart after multiple washes over a month.)  

 

Later in the afternoon Colin and I headed back to the bus station to catch the bus going to a museum we were excited about seeing: the Museo del Mar. We heard this place had a lot of stuff in it and was pretty big, but after countless tiny museums in Brazil we weren’t prepared for how much stuff was crammed into the space. Everything from stuffed birds, fish, and mammals to historical documents and photos. 

The Museo del Mar showed us lots of interesting animals on display that had been collected in the region – everything from the largest known birds to the largest set of great white shark teeth. The amount of interesting sea creatures was just incredible and really reminds you of just how much life remains under the sea. We learned that Charles Darwin came to this area when he was just 24 to research because of the abundance of animals. It was in this museum that we got information about why we saw so many penguins washing up during the winter:

“Every winter, thousands of magellanic penguins emerge onto the coasts of Uruguay to die. They are covered in oil, which causes them to loose their defense against the cold. The most skillful manage to remove the oil with their beaks, but then they also die from having ingested the oil.” (Museo del Mar literature)  

 

There were some massive skeletons of giant sea turtles and even more massive skeletons of whales that had died in the area. These things are just unbelievable in length… it took us three photos to get the entire image of the largest one, a baleen whale found in Argentina, recorded – these whales can grow up to 420,000 lbs and more than 110 feet in length. This whale doesn’t have any teeth, just plates for filtering. Plus they can jump completely out of the water! (How they manage that with their incredible size, I don’t really know…)

 

Around the back of the museum was an exhibit on pirates and some other strange sea creatures such as the teredo shipworm which must have brought great frustration to the pirates as it destroyed their ships. This shipworm can grow up to 6 feet in length and basically acts like a termite by destroying the ship’s wood by eating and boring holes through the wood in the process. Normally these worms are found in mangroves and up being quite a pest out of their natural habitat! Another creature I found cool was this massive 9 foot wide crazy-looking flat fish called the sunfish that feeds on jellyfish! Colin found the coconut crab one of his most interesting, a crab which places a rock under a palm tree, climbs up palm trees to grab the coconuts and throw them down to the rock below to crack them open. The smartest thing is if the coconut doesn’t break the first time, the crab grabs the coconut and tries to break it in the same way again! Once the coconut is split open the crab eats the flesh, then uses the half shell as protection as it wanders around the beach.    

 

The side of the museum that told us about the history of Uruguay and specifically Punta del Este seemed to have everything the last 50 years of celebrities and rich party-goers left in the city. We saw photos of a woman named Esther Bofill who led the social scene of beaches and parties back in the 1930’s in Punta del Este. Among the old objects were 1930’s medicine bottles (including prescription bottle heroin and morphine) and some really racist material and packaging. Take a look at the photos and products below.  

 

During the 1930’s as Uruguay continued to grow as a place for people to party, pain-killers to relive the effects of partying became popular in both Uruguay and Argentina. As a result, so did the advertisement for Genoil, a popular drug, below. Designed by a French publicist attempting to ridicule his client for not liking any of his previous advertisement ideas, the concept of a head with nails and pins torturing it was a hit. There was even a jingle that went with the pain-killer: “Be it caused by air or sun, wine or beer, any headache will disappear with Genoil.”   

Once we finished with the museum (just after closing time) we quickly walked back in the rain to the bus stop. It was starting to get dark so we were glad when the bus came that would take us back to Anibal and Mia’s place. That evening Anibal tried out his homemade thin-crust delicious Italian pizzas on us – with lots of different toppings! Yum!

The morning of July 4th was really overcast and rainy, but we still decided to head out to see a famous hotel in the area of Punta Ballena called Casa Pueblo. While now a hotel, Casa Pueblo was originally built as a home/art project by the Uruguayan artist Carlos Paez Vilaro. Vilaro. This artist is well known because of his art and because his son Carlitos Paez survived the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which is portrayed by the movie “Alive.” Casa Pueblo is a Mediterranean-style villa which contains a gallery of the artist’s paintings, but the first thing we did was head into the restaurant to dry off (we got soaked by the rain trying to walk after the bus dropped us off) and take a look at the view. There wasn’t a nice blue sky so the photos ended up a bit drab, but we took some anyways before going to the documentary room to view a short film about the life and art of Carlos Vilaro.

The documentary told us how Vilaro’s popularity and activity as an artist grew from his paintings in the 1940’s of candombe, a music form in Uruguay with African influences to his modern work. He even wrote musical pieces and conducted an orchestra. In the 1950’s and 1960’s he hung around with friends Brigitte Bardot and Pablo Picasso and helped make a documentary in West Africa called Batouk. When he began work on Casa Pueblo in the 1960’s, the construction began in stages in an attempt to mimic the mud nests of hornero birds. I selected photos I took of some of my favorites to show you all below: 

Walking around Casa Pueblo didn’t take long and by 1:00 pm we were already finished. Since it was still a bit wet out we decided to take a taxi back to the bus station and then the bus straight back. Before dinner Anibal had us try a typical Uruguayan snack known as the poor man's desert: Dulce de Batata. This is a delicious paste of sweet potato jam (in this case mixed with chocolate) usually served in square blocks with cheese. We had ours as a spread on some soft bread and it was fantastic! It is so strange to have something with a consistency almost like a thick jam but the taste is pure sweet potato – a surprise for the mouth and brain. This jam was perfected combined with a sweet drink of macela tea. Macela (see features here) is a tropical, medicinal plant used both as a sedative and something to calm the stomach in Uruguay, but it is found all around South America. Normally I’m not a typical tea drinker but this stuff was just deliciously sweet.

That evening two more couch surfers arrived in time to join us for dinner, two brothers studying law who were from Brazil. After our 5 months in Brazil we all had a lot to talk about, although they mostly spoke Portuguese. At certain points we had three languages going at the table: English, Spanish, and Portuguese!

The next day was still rainy so we decided to just hang out around the house and relax indoors. Anibal prepared a traditional peasant stew for lunch. Later that evening I headed out to a birthday party with Anibal, Mia, and the Brazilian guys which involved a lot of dancing and much fun.

 

The next morning Colin and I left our couch surfing friends to take a bus to a new city. Now let’s let Colin tell you about our time in Montevideo!

Francesca