Punta del Diablo :: Uruguay
I may have sunstroke.
Places: Punta del Este, La Paloma & Punta del Diablo.
Coolest thing I did: Finally found a beach with warm water and surf worth swimming in.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The French have churros. Until this trip I thought it was just the Mexicans that liked these crazy Latin doughnuts but its seems like they're everywhere.
So far my decision to not spend more than 30 mins in Montevideo changing buses seems to have been vindicated: pretty much everyone I've spoken to who was there was very vague over whether they liked it at all and tend to say they think they could have skipped it themselves. I have no first hand knowledge of the place so I can't comment but I feel happy that I went directly to the beach, and made it to Punta del Este (PdE) in time for the weekend.
PdE would like to think of itself as the Miami Beach of Latin America, but for my money it's more like the Gold Coast of Latin America. It's set on a narrowing peninsula with a port that is home to "artisanal" fishermen (I'm not sure if they do wood work in their spare time), with uninterrupted beach down the Atlantic side and a massive port for mooring your yacht on the sheltered side. That alone should be a warning that there's some money floating about the place. Any ground on the peninsula that is capable of supporting the weight of high rise buildings pretty much already has a high rise building on it, apparently the population sky rockets from Christmas until early February, meaning it's necessary to have plenty of places to stay, rent or own on hand.
It's a well known fact that South America has some of the highest concentrations of cosmetic surgery recipients in the world, and there would have to be a fairly high percentage of those on display on the beaches of PdE. There are innumerable women in their 40s and 50s shot full of botox and collagen in tiny bikinis supporting totally improbable breast implants. It does, however, only seem to be the women, as the beaches are also heaving with fat, ugly middle aged men, and the numbers would dictate some of their disposable income is being pouring into physical maintenance of their wives/mistresses.
The beach culture here is very different to Australia, or practically any other Western country I can think of. Instead of everyone lying down, feet pointed at the sea and ignoring each other (which is some feat on Bondi in summer), there are groups set in circles, women sitting back and chugging ma-te while their kids run wild around the place, and the men all standing in circles arguing with animated hand gestures that reach back to a forgotten Italian heritage. Everyone is talking to everyone, and generally having a good time. I can't understand why even the slightest glance at another person in Sydney on the beach is going to cause offence, when you see these people actually enjoying themselves. This is true whether it's the rich folk on PdE, the family friendly La Paloma or the hippies and backpackers of Diablo. Much like Tango night I feel like we might be missing something at home.
All the beach towns I spent any time at in Uruguay had a fairly good nightlife, mostly due to it still being peak season, but PdE takes the cake. After spending all day lazing around the beach getting tanned all the girls get made up to the nines and make their way to the bars and clubs. Even the backpackers in the hostel seemed to put in extra effort. Of course, all the blokes make barely effort at all, and when you've been out a couple of nights you tend to work out why - the blokes have all the money. I was taken aback by the fact that every girl out on a Friday night looked like she was about 21 and every bloke looked like he was over 40. It seems like the guys get in anywhere if they have money to spend, and the girls get in anywhere if they don't look like they've just been dragged backwards through a hedge.
The Brazilians that adopted me on the first night out told me that nearly all of PdE is owned by either rich Argies or Brazilians who are looking for somewhere more solid to stick their money than their home countries, and for some reason Uruguay seems to be one of those places they feel safer with. With past histories of military dictatorships and even more recent financial calamities in both countries I guess it would seem prudent to have a bolt hole over the border somewhere.
My next stop along the coast road towards Brazil was La Paloma, which isn't really high on the list of most of the Lonely Planet crowd but it does seem to be a hit with the Argie student or family crowd. The hostel was almost exclusively Spanish speaking, with the thankful exceptions of 3 Swedes speaking better English than mine, and a few words between some of my BA native room mates. It's a lovely little town, but if PdE is the Gold Coast of Latin America then LaP is the Forster Tuncurry. Most people are staying in camp grounds on the road into town and it's very big with families on their summer holidays. It's kind of like of Northern NSW and QLD were in a different country to Sydney and Melbourne. By this time it had been a week and I'm pretty sure I still hadn't met an actual Uruguayan - even the staff working in the bars, restaurants, supermarkets and even at the bus station ticket window are from BA or Argentina somewhere. They seem even a little bit more friendly in Uruguay (must be that sun putting people in a good mood) but I still can't say for sure if the people from Uruguay are nice, simply because I don't think I've met one.
So after a quiet couple of full days in LaP where I mostly tried to get over the head cold I seem to have acquired through mostly lacking sleep and proper food in PdE (my attempts to sleep on the beach ended in sunburn, rather than rest) I decided to move on. While I toyed with the idea of going to Cabo Polonio just for the laughs of going to a town only reachable by 4WD it was starting to get into my mind that Carnival in Rio was only 3 weeks away (and I'm still in Uruguay) I decided to get a move on and get to the closest beach town to the border, Punta del Diablo (PdD) where you find me now. Cabo Polonio is famous for having the second largest sea lion colony in the country/continent/planet (can't remember which) but seeing as I have just seen sea lions begging, and usually getting (from the size of them) fish scraps on the docks of PdE I chose to skip it.
Diablo is probably what Byron Bay looked like in the 80s, before the hard core Noosa-fication took hold. The bus drops you at a sandy square 4km from town and then it's a minibus into the beating heart of a town that swells from 200 in winter to something in the order or 10,000+ in summer. It's all sandy streets, hostels and cabins, with lots of Argies in dreadlocks trying to find themselves. You get this kind of nonsense in many foreign coastal towns (Germans with dreadlocks and piercings are deep down, still Germans) so I try to ignore all the people selling hand woven trinkets and concentrate on the fact that the surf just out beyond them is the best I've seen anywhere so far on this trip. The water in by PdE and LaP was a few degrees below bloody freezing so it was a vast surprise that here, only two hours north of La Paloma there was water you can comfortably wade into and spend a long time swimming about in. My Swedish mates got a little bit worried when I didn't return from the surf for a good hour or so, but I was having way too much fun just body surfing.
The crowd that Diablo attracts is quite similar to the kind that Byron once attracted - young kids who want to be hippies and the hard core surfers who despise them. You can tell the difference right away, with the former decked out in baggy parachute pants in Inca woven patterns, possibly playing reggae and the latter wearing boardshorts and a singlet for all occasions, mostly staring out at the waves for hours when not actually on them.
So despite the occasional short bursts of torrential rain and a summer cold I've been trying to offload for a few days I've thoroughly enjoyed my detour into Uruguay and I'm really glad I've had some extra time to relax on the beach. We're a few days past the end of the second month now and I needed a bit of downtime after those couple of months of relentless seeing-cool-stuff but tomorrow morning it's off to Brazil, which I don't suspect will be quiet in any way this time of year.