Colonia
The ferry from BA took us to a small town called Colonia. The ferry itself was a bit strange. It actually had its own lounge singer and this was at 10am in the morning.
Colonia is appropriately named as it’s an old Colonial town on the coast. There isn’t much to do there but the old town is very picturesque with lots of cafes and restaurants by the sea. We were only there for a day so we took the chance to hire buggies and drive around for the afternoon. The buggies were these little cars that looked like massive roll cages and had a small engine in the back. On the open road we got it up to about 50 km/h which is not bad. We drove to the beach for look, but at seeing the colour of the water we decided against it. Colonia is at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata river which runs into the Atlantic and the winds and tides stir up them mud and silt making the water turn a cloudy brown colour.
After driving round the old town for a little bit, we returned the buggies and went out for dinner. As usual we’d looked at all the local postcards to get ideas for photographs, and the only thing we could find were sunsets, so Ross took the camera with us to try to capture the sunset ourselves. The photos he got were spectacular.
Montevideo
The next day, we were off early to get a bus down to Montevideo the capital of Uruguay. The city is also on the coast but has similar coloured water to Colonia so swimming was out of the question. We rented bikes instead and went for a ride along the 20km beach front track.
Nine people in our group rented bikes and we set off. After about 5kms we managed to lose one person and despite riding back to where we last saw her, she was nowhere to be found. About this same time, the pedal on my bike fell off. So we had to walk the bike around looking for a repair shop and eventually found a little hole in the wall place. Despite being on his lunch break, the guy fixed my pedal.
Heading back to the group, Louise, the missing girl, still hadn’t been found, so the group split in two, some heading back to try and find her with the rest of us heading onto the end of the trail.
Shortly after getting to the end of the track and turning around, Ross’s back tire popped and he was left searching around for a taxi who’d take his bike back to the hotel. Another member of our group was pretty tired and feeling ill from the sun and heat so she offered to take the bike back for us. After eventually finding a taxi we were off back to the hotel. When we got back we found out that Louise’s bike also had problems and she had stopped to get it fixed. So after 1/3 of the bikes hired fell apart, we decided to be much more careful in future before accepting a bike rental.
Having exhausted everything there is to do in Montevideo (not much as it turns out) we started our bus trip to Iguassu Falls. Due to bus connections, and a 24 hour bus ride, we stopped for a night in a small town called Salto.
Our bus wasn’t until 5pm the next day and the only thing to do in Salto is visit a small water park with a couple of waterslides and hot springs. The warm water was a bit uncomfortable in the 32 degree heat but we eventually got used to it. Ross spent the entire time going down two of the slides and trying to find faster ways to get down. Afterwards we were off on our 18-hour bus journey to Iguassu Falls.
