Normally I would want to blog about my travels as they happened, but as I fell off the wagon a week prior to the end of our January journeys I’ve been occasionally playing catch up instead. I find that this has actually been an enjoyable pursuit. I was writing a lot on Cruise Critic about our journey much of which I was transferring here, but revisiting it later instead gives me a different perspective. I also find that, with the aid of modern photography, I still am able to remember details effectively. So we will see how this goes today.
Montevideo appears as a city on the sea, rising above the flatlands just a tiny bit.
Montevideo of course is the capital of Uruguay, a surprisingly impressive country on the eastern coast of South America. Uruguay feels to me a bit like Argentina with similar culture and similar gaucho lifestyle but a little more laid back. It is also a little cheaper than Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, which I will review later, seems to charge American or New York prices for anything that remotely resembles a luxury good. In other words, date night there is still a $200 proposition.
Our ship, the Oosterdam, chooses Montevideo to provision rather than Buenos Aires. My initial guess was Buenos Aires is avoided for this purpose because the Uruguayan currency is stable and HAL buys enough that transacting in U.S. dollars becomes unwieldy. The Argentine Peso is not a stable currency so individuals carry on a lot of transactions in dollars. In theory Argentines are to report larger dollar transactions and then be taxed on them in pesos, but in reality they do not and wait for a tax amnesty before depositing larger amounts of money in banks and using them in the official economy. Instead, they participate in an unofficial economy. Now, a cruise line cannot choose that approach, can they? They buy from local wholesalers and it is taxed and the government chooses what currency to use (always the peso, which is not stable).
But my secondary guess is because it’s more practical. The Port of Buenos Aires is a monster and they can get everything they need, or more, in Montevideo.
Also, about ten percent of the ship’s staff turned over that day. Our waiters from the Main Dining Room went home as a number of housekeeping staff, but not ours (we asked). The last port with a large crew turnover was Ushuaia I believe. They also provision in Ushuaia. What do these two ports have in common? It’s easy for trucks and buses to drive straight to the ship. In Buenos Aires everything is offloaded and switched to shuttles and the dock workers have their own thing going on of course.
Anyway, enough about that. Montevideo is nice because you can walk right off the ship and you’re in town. I wasn’t too sure about Montevideo before we joined the cruise. I wasn’t certain how well developed it would be as I have ended up in a number of places where there’s a nice downtown core but then there’s a vacant no-man’s-land or an unsafe-to-walk-area outside of the downtown core, but Montevideo wasn’t like this. You walk off the ship and you’re in town. The only challenge was there were two other ships in port that day so there were a total of six or seven thousand tourists flooding the streets. Fortunately we had a longer stay than either so the impact on us was spread out. I feel bad for the folks on the MSC cruise who had perhaps a six hour stop in Montevideo – in my mind barely long enough for a massive ship to empty out and then reload again (our ship, for the record, carried perhaps 35% the number of passengers, and it really does make a difference).
Our first stop was the Mercado del Puerto mainly for two reasons – to walk through and browse shops and find a hat but also to scope out to see if it works as a lunch stop. As you can see above there was at least one place that fit the bill. There were actually several, and this is where we began the practice of dining at the bar at a wood fired grill. Why didn’t we do this sooner in our voyage?
Our journey from this point took us through pedestrian streets lined with shops and cafes to multiple squares, some tree lined and some not.
Along the way we passed the Plaza De La Diversidad Sexual. The Plaza was dedicated more than two decades ago now with a monolith. The monolith features the following inscription: “Honrar la diversidad es honrar la vida: Montevideo por el respeto a todo género, identidad y orientación sexual” (Honoring diversity is honoring life: Montevideo for the respect of every gender, identity, and sexual orientation). On a random weekday afternoon it was a quiet and peaceful place just a block off busy streets where there were only a handful of people hanging around – mostly some boys riding their bicycles up and down the ramp.
We had vague plans to visit the leather factory off of Plaza Independcia (shown above), but the leather factory was a floor above ground level and more oriented towards tailoring to fit with 24 hour turn around than tourist browsing, so instead we took a wander back to the ship. I wasn’t permitted to wander the ocean front around the peninsula as this had resulted in a five mile walk for us in Punta del Este…
Like many South American cities there was a large classic theater, the above perhaps skewed a bit by me using the iPhone on fisheye mode.
This residence or business had some delightful sculptures climbing on the railings. And by the way the street scene was interesting to watch. We would not have happened upon this on an official tour.
We did actually make our way back to the market for lunch. As I said it was bar seating with food prep going on in front of us. Wine and beer here was the usual situation – nearly always they sell you the whole bottle of wine and they encourage you to order two beers at once by only providing liter beer bottles.
You can see the jamon serrano I ordered as well as tortilla de patata set for wait staff to slice off a quarter for anybody who requests. Reminds me that I should cook some up at home sometime soon; the challenge is it’s designed to be served room temperature at your leisure and I’m the only one who will have it that way so I make a plate full and serve off two slices and then it’s just me. But it’s oh so good.
This was the best beef I had enjoyed in two weeks at this point. There are about half a dozen of these places within the market as well as the fresh food stalls, tourist shops, and other artisanal shops. Also it didn’t seem to be air conditioned. I imagine it isn’t heated in the cooler months either. We were there around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. With Uruguay being the same longitude as us roughly as well as being two hours ahead of us this tells me the summer time hottest part of the day comes around 4 or 5pm in the afternoon, and the locals have lunch between 2 and 5, so I am thinking we timed things fairly well. It was warm to hot but not what I would say is Virginia hot, and it was fine inside in the shade.
Since our visit to Montevideo I have read additional travel reports regarding the city and the country and it all sounds fascinating – a great place to visit and base yourself for a week or two if not longer and travel around the Uruguayan countryside. Also, based on our experiences as well as these travel reports it almost sounds as if it is a better place to end a long haul flight than Buenos Aires. The airport is smaller and better run than the airports across the estuary in Buenos Aires. Between the two of us I think we both want to re-visit Montevideo and Punta del Esta as well as Buenos Aires. I know I would add on Argentine wine growing regions, the Argentina side of Patagonia and the Andes, and some hiking in the rain in Chilean Patagonia, but more on this when I write up Buenos Aires.
Eventually we made our way back to the ship. The night prior had been our final night in the main dining room. As our wait staff departed in Montevideo and we had a large lunch we opted to “stay in” and prepare for our travels home even though it was still two nights out. Also, it was our final night at sea.
Lovely skies. We packed up and prepared for two days in Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile at home a few days prior a thick layer of snowcrete had fallen which would plague us for half the month of February before it was no longer a nuisance…