ideas for cheap stuff

I arrived in Montevideo on Saturday, 25th October, and the beautiful Lucia met me at the airport with her mother at 05:45 in the morning. We headed back to her parents appartment, with a quick catch-up along the way and then headed to bed for a few hours. When I awoke we went for a long walk with Lucia´s beloved dog Meekus ( I know I spelt that wrong) and she gave me the low-down on her childhood haunts and hang-outs. Introducing me as to how life in Montevideo was, and where it has and hasn´t changed. After some grub we went to see Lucia´s brother Vicente play candombe with a group of people who turn up every Saturday for the express purpose of walking the streets playing, with women dancing in front. The size of the group changes from week to week, and takes place all year round, excepting when its cold, or there´s bad weather. We walked about 10 blocks, taking a break inbetween so that fires could be lit to heat the drum skins to soften them up for a better sound. We had some beers along the way, and Lucia´s friends Elaine (from Ireland) and Milton turned up to party with us. After candombe ended we headed into town for some food and then got some beers to hang out at a park. Madness ensued of course, and Lucia and I decided it would be an absolutely brilliant idea to walk through the central fountain. Well, I walked, Lucia swam. I think that´s where the cold, that´s just leaving me now, probably started. My mammy always said I was clever! After that, face licking, and beer, it was time for bed. Slept late on Sunday morning, and after lunch we met Elaine at the Sunday flea market. Wow, Sundays are really dead here in Uruguay. Its family day, and that´s the end of it, but there was life at the deadly flea market, and an assortment of absolute ridiculous crap that you´d never need, let alone want, alongside some necessities like Mate cups and bags, they have special bags to hold your flask and mate cup. They seriously love mate. You see practically every second person drinking mate on the buses and that in the morning. After rambling there we went to visit the Carneval museum that Vicente works in as the only tour guide, which he is very good at. I really liked the museum and highly recommend everyone visiting Montevideo to visit it. Then we went to Elaine´s gorgeous apartment, with its very own tower, and had some pancakes before an early night, as the next day my boyfriend Jonathan arrived. Yeah! Lucia and I met him at the airport, and it was just fantastic to see him. Of course, straight away he was taking tonnes of pictures, so we left him to it until we got to the bus terminal so we could pay for our bus tickets to Buenos Aires that night. Jonathan was wrecked, so after something to eat we headed out to Playa Ramirez together and took a snooze in the sun, before repacking our bags, a little lighter where possible, though Jonathan and I still had the largest bags out of us 4, and then off to Tres Cruces bus station for our ueber sexy overnight bus to Buenos Aires. I had wanted to cross on the ferry originally, but that would´ve meant hanging around till 04:00 in Colonia, Uruguay, whereas with this bus they got your passport stamped for you as you slept, and gave it back later. Score!
When we got to BAires, we first stopped into Lucia´s mate Gaby´s place where she and her brother would be staying. After a rest and watching a bit of Kingpin, we all headed to San Telmo for a bit, before Jonathan and I went to find the place to stay that we´d booked the night before. Unfortunately, the booking was buggered, so we went somewhere else close by with the intention of resting up and moving to somewhere in San Telmo the next morning. Jonathan was still wrecked from his long journey, so we went out to meet the gang at 19:00 to hang about for a bit before heading to this gorgeous restaurant in San Telmo for the first delicious steak of our time in Argentina, and by god was it good! We so heifered ourselves that it was tough to move again, but we had a beer, avoiding Quilmes cos its awful watery, on our merry way home and then got some more serious sleeping done. The next morning I went to find a new room for us in San Telmo, which I was successful in doing, even managing to have time to have a coffee before we all met up to head to Tigre. Its a cute little hamlet to the north of BAires, and we soaked up the atmosphere in the market, the wee restaurant with the beautiful parrilla aka. grilled meat, and boat cruise, before we all headed back to town. That night Jonathan and I had some bevarages in San Telmo before heading to a tango show in the famous, for its coffee in particular, Tortoni Cafe. It was a beautiful setting, and the music and dancing were absolutely beautiful. I thouroughly enjoyed myself. Thursday, we met in the usual spot and headed first to La Boca neighbourhood, where tango was born, to check out the colourful buildings, and people just in time for lunch and some tasty coffees. Here Jonathan and I got some tacky photos taken as tango dancers with our heads through the holes, but even funnier was a guy posing as a Ronaldo lookalike, whom you could get your picture taken with for 75cent. Now the fact that he was much heavier and looked nothing like Ronaldo didn´t seem to stop loads of people paying him! Then we headed to Recolleta, the rich neighbourhood famous for harbouring the Cementario, which is home to many famous faces of Argentinian history, including the illustrious Eva Peron, whom we somehow missed. Afterwards, we took a snooze in sun, since our bodies could still feel the heat, and then headed to the museum of modern art to peruse the exhibits, some of which were extremely entertaining. I particularly loved the one of old vinyl recordings of poets reading their work. Couldn´t understand much of the Spanish, but their voices were wonderful. Jonathan and I managed, trust us, to find free booze at the end of this techy exhibition, and after I found Lucia, she was happy to head back, where we managed to get a tonne of refills and leave none the wiser to what the modern artistic, ie. screechy voiced people projecting themselves in poses on stage, were on about. Go team! Then we all returned to our abodes to enjoy the comfort of a stable roof before our foray into camping.
I really should have thought through the whole road-trip thing a bit more, but I was happy to be led this time, since I´ve been fending for myself for quite a while, its nice to be told what to do. I definitely should have strongly recommended that we get the bus down to the lake district instead of driving from BAires, however, everything happens for a reason! As it turns out, my nightmare of a 3-door car with no boot space, which we had apparently ordered from Hertz, it being the cheapest, went unrealised, and instead we got a spacious car with 4 doors, thank the gods, and enough boot space for all our belongings. Triumphant dance! To boot the car was brand new with only 4km on it, white was an unfortunate shade to give us, but thank god for unlimited mileage, it would come in handy when we returned with 4316km on the dash. Off we set with optimism boardering on psychosis that it would be piss easy to get out of BAires. Well the fates sure showed me! 3 hours later we emerged from BAires harbouring some wounds to our egos, but victorious nonetheless. Then it was a few hours hard driving, with Lucia taking the wheel for an hour, the brave girl, to Bahia Blanca where we found, to our delight, that the camping site was free. Woohoo! It was a beautiful setting between the estuary and rubbish dump. Nice. Again, we drove hard the next day, though poor Jonathan wasn´t feeling the Mae West, and we reached dinosaur country, spending the night in El Chocon, where the largest dino to date, the Gigantasauras was found. Unfortunately, by the time we reached it the dinosaur museum there was closed so we promised ourselves to return on the way back and went about enjoying the sun and a refreshing dip in the beautiful lake there. Being Irish I thought the water was grand altogether, the Grecos´, however, were not so impresed and Lucia said that she could feel the blood going back into her veins. After the dip, we dried off in the sun before getting a gorgeous pizza in town provided by a quite sweet lady who for some reason had decorated her walls with large cups from US fast food chains…one word, odd. On Sunday we stopped for breakfast in this cafe with an overly helpful owner who gave us beautiful empanadas and more advice than we could ever use and that evening settled into a gorgeous campsite in hippish El Bolson and Vicente got his first views of real snow ever, before going for some homemade beers and then more booze by the fire.
Monday morning was a late start what with our boozing the night before, clothes washing, Lucia´s nursing a teenage girl who´d hurt herself and just general back and forth. We headed into town to find out whether we could do the hike to the Cajon del Azul that day, but it was too late to get started so we went to a tourist office and booked ourselves in for para-gliding. I was definitely up for doing it again, especially somewhere as beautiful as El Bolson. I suggested lunch before we go up as it would take 2 hours to complete us all and I was pretty hungry. After we finished we headed up all excited and delighted to go para-gliding. Unfortunately, the winds were too bad for para-gliding. A guy who had just landed was thanking his lucky stars he made it down unhurt. We were all really disappointed not to be able to do it, but agreed that on Friday we would try to do it in Bariloche as the wind was meant to be high until Thursday. We went on a mini-hike after we got our money back from the tourist office. To get to the starting point Jonathan had to drive up a dirt track on quite steep hills. At one stage my life flashed before my eyes when this car came speeding around a corner and skidding on the rocks to pass us by. I did not enjoy this drive! We got our boots and trousers on and hiked up to see the wood carved statues before heading to the refuge at the top with superb views over El Bolson and surroundings where we had another gorgeous homemade beer before making our way back down.
Next morning we packed up our tents and drove to park near the start of the hiking trail to Cajon del Azul. It took 3 hours 15 minutes to get to the Cajon walking along, over, and above Rio Azul. The water was a beautiful blue colour. Some of the trail was difficult enough as it was up and down with some steep parts, luckily we had enough water, it wasn´t too hot, and the rain that was threatening stayed off. The Cajon del Azul (box of blue) was beautiful, with the water funnelling through the gorge and under the box part. The force of the water was amazing. We stood there taking pictures and enjoying the view and our accomplishment of hiking there until the hunger pangs set in and then we headed to the refugio where we were given free mate before the most beautiful fresh made bread and pizzas. The owner of the refugio had been living there for 20 years or so, and his son was helping him to run the place now. It was beautifully decorated, and I´d say it would be fantastic to camp there for the night. They had set up an old car radio to play the hundred or so tapes they had there. So long since I´d seen so many tapes! Generally good taste in music too. We´d been hoping to hire some horses back, but we were unlucky as the school trip that was on the way there had commandeered all the horses, so we swallowed the last morsels of pizza and got underway. The journey back felt shorter, the guys were convinced we only had another 40 minutes walk when my guess of another hour and 45 minutes was more like it. We made it back across the seriously dodgy bridges and saw two pick-up trucks sitting at the base of the mountain. In hindsight we could have saved ourselves 40 minutes walk by waiting on the owners to come back, but we decided not to cheat and make it up there ourselves. When the pick-up trucks bombed by us though we were less than enthusiastic. So when we reached the car we had a break before the drive to reach Bariloche that night. We got to Bariloche, but didn´t see any campsites, so we headed on towards San Martin de los Andes and pulled into a campsite at 22:15 to set up our tents in the dark. We knew we were alongside a lake, but the beauty of the place was striking the next morning when I awoke. I´d recommend it if you´re driving there as it was just gorgeous: Camping Don Horacio, Ruta 231 Km.31,500 Telephone: 02944-15637281 Email: angelicabarbagelata@hotmail.com
It was sunny when we started out on our drive to San Andes de los Andes, but quite soon the rain started pouring down. We´d a large breakfast and then did the 7 lakes road. It was beautiful, even with the rain, however, the roads themselves were pebbled and dodgy. It was exhausting driving, made worse when we tried to take another road to a small town we´d all wanted to see. We decided to turn back and just make our way on to our ultimate destination. We got to town during siesta, so there was feck all open, but we found a chocolate shop, and while the guys went on the net I got information on horse-riding, canopy tours, and a boat trip for the next day´s activities. We walked around for a bit, before heading to our campsite and then going out for dinner. Back at the campsite that night we´d a few drinks and deep discussions on how to deal with violence in South America. I really believe that once food and shelter are obtained that education is a real key, but there were good arguements against me. No solutions found, as usual…
Here I will take a break and write up the rest in part two, cos otherwise this post will never end!