The Street of Sighs

Colonia del Sacramento turned out to a be a sleepy little town where there is nothing much to do, and even if there was it would be too hot to do it. At the time of its founding in the 1700s Colonia was a home for smugglers and ne’er-do-wells, and it seems that was enough excitement for the following three hundred years.

The hostel (we had one, thankfully) was about five blocks from the ferry terminal, so we walked to it. The sun was intense, even hotter than BA. We never did manage to get an official number for the temperature but it was certainly into the thirties.  The town is built around the corner of a bay, with the south and western edges at the water. The streets are lined with trees that give much-needed shade. The buildings are crumbling but dignified, and on the main street is an old white edifice that is something to do with the government. Aside from the name of the place, it looks like how I imagined a colonial South American town would look.

Since Machine Gun has taken over the hostel-booking duties we seem to have seen a marked decline in the standard of accommodation. Our welcome was from a chap who really didn’t seem to be old enough to have a job, but he was friendly and helpful and confirmed the story that the two owners of the place had met in Ireland. He handed us sheet and pillowcases for the beds and showed us to the room, which we were sharing with a French couple. The bunk-beds were rather vertiginous, and several times I awoke during the night on the top one and felt around carefully for the edges.

We left there and went to the tourist office, where they suggested we go to the old town and have a look around. Given there is not a lot else to do I would imagine working in that offices requires a very high tolerance for having the same conversation over and over. It was a pleasant stroll away down the main street, Flores. The map showed quite a few museums but all of them were closed. The guidebook says that they close on a different day each week which seems like a scheme that could not be better planned to confound the tourists.

But it was a pleasant place to be. There is an old tree-shaded square, and beside it are the weathered ruins of a convent. There is a lighthouse which you can pay to enter and climb, which we duly did. The stairs spiraled the opposite way to how they do in castles – in the latter, they were curved to allow the defender looking down the stairs to use his sword with his right arm, forcing the attacker trying to get to the top to use his left. Things got rather cramped at the top, but once we emerged into the daylight there was a superb view over the town and it confirmed our suspicions that we were not in fact missing a district of world-class museums, free booze and rollercoasters. At the top of the lighthouse we met an Irish girl, who was with a tour group. If you could somehow map the position of all Irish people on the globe surely not a square mile would go untouched.

We walked the rest of the Old Town, the highlight of which was a tile museum. Mick failed to see the glory of it. I got several pictures of tiles through the window, the museum itself being closed due to the orbit of Jupiter moving into Mercury or however they decide these things. There was one street of buildings from the original colonial era, with a drain down the middle and ancient stones. Its name gives the title to this post, though alas there was no further information as to what prompted the melancholy nomenclature.

We retired to the hostel for more logistics planning and a beer. The collapse of the internet shifted focus from the former to the latter, and many of the world’s problems came up for discussion.

Mick realised that we had lost an hour in a timezone transition which we were otherwise unaware of, so we went for a slightly later dinner than usual. We ate at a place near the centre and a very pleasant day came to a gentle close.

This morning we were up about nine, and I managed to return to ground level from the upper bunk with all bones intact. We had breakfast in the hostel of two slices of toast with caramel – you get what you pay for, I suppose, but I was thinking somewhat longingly of the pancakes on the Expedition – and struck out to put Phase Two of the Colonia plan into action: renting a dune buggy.

We went to a place where we had seen them earlier. There was an older chap behind a desk of sorts facing the street, like a window with no glass. I asked him if he spoke English and he said: ‘No.’ Then he looked at us as if intimating that it was our move, punks. Through the standard method of occasional words and much pointing we managed to negotiate the various forms required – he seemed perfectly happy with my print-out from Dublin City Council with my licence details, and he hardly looked at Mick’s at all.

A dune buggy is essentially four wheels, two seats and an engine held together by a surrounding metal frame. Our particular specimen had come a long way from its hey-day, and not seen a lot of maintenance in the intervening years. The left-side lights didn’t work until Mick pushed the electricity cable a little tighter into the casing. The owner seemed very pleased. Mick was already seated and went to put on his seatbelt, which was the kind that holds rally drivers in place. The owner indicated this was entirely unnecessary, if not downright cowardly. I swung myself on board and we found that the space was rather tight indeed. You would certainly want to be on good terms with anyone you were sharing it with. We started it up and were off.

The controls are one pedal to go, one to stop, and a wheel to steer; it certainly strips driving a car to its basic elements. We headed north up the coast road towards where the tourist office lady had indicated there was a bull ring. We were on a fairly large road and I indicated to Mick that the time had come to floor it. He let me know that we were already at full speed. It was not quite the head-tipping acceleration I had been hoping for. But it gave the same sense of being in the environment as the quad bike, feeling the bumps in the road and the wind and smelling the fumes of other vehicles. Naturally the speedometer was broken (as was the fuel gauge) but we probably got up to somewhere slightly over 30mph, or maybe even just a shade under forty.

The bullring when we got there turned out to be disused and falling into ruin. I had been under the impression it was active. It’s large and circular, in the model of a mini concrete Coliseum, and must have held quite a few thousand people. There is a fence around it to keep people away, but there were several places where clearly a lot of people had already gone under or over it, so we went in for a look. The seats were over our heads and the sun was shining through them, and through the entranceway ahead the grass of the ring itself was a vibrant green. It was very photogenic. But scattered around were chunks of concrete that had fallen from the seats to the ground below, so we took a few pictures and didn’t stay too long.

I took over the wheel from there and we drove to a nearby museum. As it was, of course, closed, all we saw of interest were two dogs of the type that people who are frightened of dogs probably have nightmares about. Thankfully one was chained and one was behind a fence. So we took the coast road back to the centre and dropped off the buggy. When we pulled it up and got out the covering glass for the rear indicator fell off, which I think summed up the mechanical state of affairs nicely.

We had a quick lunch and went back to the hostel to get our bags and walked to the ferry terminal to see about a bus to Montevideo. The bus station is also at the ferry terminus, but we didn’t actually see that. The ferry company runs transfer buses to the capital, which I had said several times to Mick it was very unlikely we would be able to get as we were not technically transferring on a ferry ticket. Naturally we got on without a hitch, and within fifteen minutes of arriving we were on a bus heading east.

The countryside was green and verdant and the road just like a European road. Apart from the palm trees it could have been Ireland on a particularly fine day. I slept for much of the journey and woke at the edge of Montevideo. At first glance it seems much like the other big cities I have been in, packed full of noise and action and pollution and sunshine, all happening against a backdrop of buildings that are mostly crumbling and old. We got a taxi from the bus station to the hostel without any problems. This hostel is somewhat further down the scale than the last one, and has an epically low cleanliness rating on hostelbookers.com, but something about it presumably appealed to Mick. We have a private room this time, which even has a balcony, but its defining feature is a hat stand. On entry I tossed my Indiana Jones hat across the room Bond-style, and to my eternal satisfaction it landed right on a prong, where it now hangs.

We’ve been chilling out here for about an hour as I write this, and shortly will venture out for food and a stroll. The girl who works here told us its carnival time, but we think it’s an indefinite-article carnival rather than the highlight of the year. However she recommended a place for us to go later to see traditional music, and once Machine Gun had confirmed there will also be booze on sale we were happy enough to plan to see that. We’ll stay here tomorrow also, and if all goes well return to BA on Saturday morning and then fly to Iguazu on the same day, but due to the unfortunate lack of internet connections we have not yet got that booked – the connection is also down here, though they tell us they are working on it.

So all in all everything is well, and more adventures await.