Saturday, January 16, 2010

South America Day 7, Uruguay



Friday, January 15, 2010


We docked at Montevedago late…

At first glance, this is a different, older style of port, while there is a modern container dock nearby this is an old port, with warehouses now unused some junk equipment about and the like… Much more like a classic romantic sea port.
Mantevedago also has a reputation as an easy port to visit… you dock at the edge of the old city, you walk off the boat among collected artifacts salvaged from the German World War II battle cruiser Graf Spee… Scuttled in the River Plata early in the war…

We (Tina, Sig, Toby and myself) walked off early, maps in hand and followed the route marked… It was a tourist friendly, but not a tourist city… there are streets where cars have been banned in favor of pedestrians… lots of open market stalls, mostly vegetables and other local needs, few catering to tourists… the architecture is old, a mix of colonial and second empire (French Victorian)… with new buildings sprinkled in… Many buildings were deteriorated, some merely facades, some undergoing restoration.

We followed the route past the port market, up to the first of three squares. We wandered to the second, which was undergoing renovation… There was a McDonalds and a Burger King on the street nearby… the Cathedral is here… On the far side were craft and antique dealers, with silver, books (mostly in Spanish) and strangely, older kitchen goods… if you have ever wanted an antique meat grinder Monevedago is the place to look… Many items were intriguing, but none called our name.

We worked our way to the third square, the largest… Plaza Independence, complete with its statue of Jose Gervasio Artigasa (and his mausoleum) and the old city gate. Plaza Indepencia is the divide between the new and old city… At the far side is the Palacio Salvo, a really strange high rise from the 1920’s, incorporating every bad idea found in the architecture of the time… imagine a high French second empire building with a large Moorish tower on one corner… It was at one time the tallest building in South America. Words do not do the building justice… It is awkward, it looks like it is ready to topple over… It has gone condo (at least if my limited Spanish has not abandoned me…)

We worked our was slowly back to the ship… Monevedago is a city of book stores… It is a city of government buildings and embassies… The city has modern conveniences, but also men with horse carts picking through the trash in search of recyclables. We found the city museum… Near the port, we went to the Port Market… we were expecting vegetable stalls, we found a very much gentrified 19th century building with local restaurants… Sig and Toby went back to the ship… we chose a restaurant and had local beef steak, papas fritas and local red wine… Our fellow diners were Uruguayan…

After lunch Tina and I walked along the port road… It was still the old city, but not the city of tourists… we found more of the original city wall… we saw buildings being rebuilt… we saw another horse cart… We returned to the ship…

We sailed from Monevideo about 6:00… then due east through the River mouth before turning south-west towards our next port, Puerto Madyan… with its nearby National Park, and our first Penguins… But first we have a day at sea.

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