A tiny blot in our trip
The flight to Montevideo was around 30 minutes and we waited about 3 times that time in immigration upon arrival. The arrival was just the start of a bad time in Uruguay. The immigration official stamped our passports with the wrong date (4 December 2015 instead of 4 January 2015) which thankfully didn’t cause us any problems upon leaving. We found the country expensive and the people rude. We had one night in Montevideo before heading over to Colonia del Sacramento. We had booked into the top rated hostel in the town and upon leaving Montevideo our hostel there said that it was a great hostel.
It wasn’t.
We’d booked into a 4 bed dorm, and upon arrival we were given dirty sheets to make our own bed with, two of the lockers in the dorm were broken, which might not have been such a problem had the door on the dorm shut and locked! The kitchen was filthy with hardly any equipment and people sat outside our dorm talking loudly all night. Again this might not have been such an issue IF OUR DOOR HAD SHUT. We also woke up covered in bites.
Joey and I convened a meeting in the park over some blue cheese and alcohol and discussed our options. We could forego the night in the hostel that we’d book and sleep in the park that night perhaps? We decided we needed to get the hell out of Uruguay as soon as possible. Except all the buses were booked. We tried the ferry back to Buenos Aires but that was also fully booked that day. We booked the first one for the next day and booked an Air B&B for two nights. We couldn’t wait to escape. I cheered myself up by writing a scathing review for Hostelworld. It was a glorious review, my best one yet. I uploaded it but to my absolute dismay only the first line appeared. What a first line though!
Welcome to hell.
Think that said everything you needed to know.
This is the only time we can honestly say that we were not a fan of a country, every previous one had some redeeming features, but Uruguay had nothing. Not even the availability of blue cheese was enough to earn a point from us.
We escaped across the water back to Buenos Aires and our third Argentinian stamp in 4 months and it felt like coming home. We had a glorious couple of days in our apartment catching up on washing and roaming the streets and visiting the pin badge sellers. Buenos Aires has quickly established itself as one of our favourite cities in the world.
We had booked a bus to Porto Alegre where we had an onward flight to Rio booked. This bus took over 20 hours. We had booked the last two seats (which were not together) but as luck has it the seat next to Joey was unoccupied the entire time so we got to sit together after all. We ended up at the Brazilian border in the middle of the night and eventually arrived in Porto Alegre at around 2pm. We called at the tourist board desk at the bus station to be greeted with a long list of places where we shouldn’t go at night and an seemingly longer list of places we shouldn’t go in the day!
We made our way as quick as we could to our hostel and hunkered down for the night. It was an early start the next day to catch our flight to Rio and we were just thankful that we were still alive after our night in the city ranked number 39 on the murder scale.
Meandering Maxwells 
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