Seasons on the Move

Colonia Del Sacremento – May 11

Another day of inertia. We had planned on travelling back to Buenos Aires, but decided that another day in the apartment would be good for us. The thought of returning to a major city to sit in a small hotel room didn´t sound appealing. Besides, the low-key atmosphere of Colonia had grown on us and the apartment felt like home.

Colonia Del Sacremento – May 10

We did nothing the entire day. I had a brief mental breakdown due to my lack of progress in filmmaking. After I blew my top and calmed down, Fab and I went for a walk. I think inertia was beginning to drive me batty. What should have been a lazy Sunday (or whatever day it was) turned into an all out stress festival. By nightfall, I had calmed down and realized that things were not as dire as I had painted them to be.

Colonia del Sacremento – May 9

We got up late and eased into the day. We had eggs and coffee for breakfast, all prepared on the single propane burner. It was nice to be staying in an apartment. The trouble with being too comfortable with your accomodations is that you don´t feel motivated to do anything else. However, we had been traveling for so long that things were beginning to lose their “wow” factor.

Colonia was pleasant enough, the colonial heart of city was indeed pretty, but it was not all that different than Marbella, Monda, Paraty or even the cities I had visited prior to this trip in Mexico. Still, we were enjoying the relaxed pace of Uruguay and the small town ambience of Colonia.

We left the apartment in the early afternoon and decided to walk until the sun went down. We took in most of the city within a couple of hours, so we found a nice cafe and drank some yerba mate. From there, we meandered around the city´s colonial streets and took photos, stopping after a while to have a picnic comprised of apple sodas and some prosciutto sandwiches we had made before leaving. At night, we made dinner and watched movies.

Montevideo to Colonia del Sacremento – May 8

After discarding the morning sipping coffee in a piazza, Fab and I took a bus west along the coast to Colonia del Sacremento, an old smuggler´s port located just across the water from Buenos Aires. We got into town in the late afternoon and met a man on the street who hooked us up with a lady who rented us her apartment for the same price as the nearby hostels.

The apartment had Uruguayan knick knacks hanging from the white washed walls, an upstair bedroom and bathroom, a dining area as well as a living room. We had lucked out again. Just when we were about to settle on a dorm room to save money, this came along.

The city itself was quiet and felt isolated, despite the day trippers from Buenoes Aires. The autumn leaves fell from the trees, the ocean breeze blew through the streets, and locals hung about selling arts and crafts. We ended up meeting some mohawked punk rockers selling used hash pipes. By the end of our conversation, they offered to sell us acid. We passed on the tabs and returned to the apartment to make pasta and watch movies on HBO, stopping en route to take in a silver and gold sunset. A twelve hour acid trip was not really what we had in mind when we arrived in this mellow little town.

We cooked the pasta in a pot that sat precariously on a burner rigged to the top of a propane tank. There was no stove in the kitchen. After finishing dinner and discussing the metallic taste of the pasta, we discovered that the pot we had cooked the pasta in was rusted on the inside. Oh well. Eating rust isn´t all that bad, is it?   

Montevideo – May 7

We crawled out of our dank hotel room after having spent most of the night fighting each other for space on our concave mattress. We walked down to the historical center to check out the crumbling edifices and cobble stone streets. Most of the buildings were in various states of disrepair. The windows on the upper levels were smashed and dirty and the paint was cracked and worn off in spots. Although they may sound unappealing, the streets of Montevideo were really quite wonderful. The city had a laid back appeal that was missing in the other South American metropolises we had visited. The people smiled more, the men had bushy beards and pony tails, some wore berets, and the women had none of the haughty attitude of their Argentinian counterparts.

There wasn´t too much to do in the city, so we just wandered around and got lost for most of the day. We walked down and looked at the ocean, drank coffee in street side cafes, and bought some ridiculously cheap silk screen prints from a mercado artist. All in all a relaxing and pleasant day.

By the time the day had come to a close we were tired, the preceding week having finally caught up with us. We returned to the hotel, ate crackers and cheese in our lopsided bed and tried to resist the gravity pulling us towards the center of the mattress.