The places we've been to so far have all had a distinctly European flavour so we decided that in order to see a more 'traditional' side of South America we would head over to Uruguay, a tiny little country with a shipwreck-lined coast and where horse and carts share the roads with cars straight from the '50s. We took the ferry from Buenos Aires at the ridiculously early time of 9am for the hour long trip across. The trip was one of the weirdest we've been on so far. From the moment they boarded everyone whipped out cameras and starting taking pictures of the dock. Undestandable if it had been a pretty harbour but inexplicable when all it had going for it was a very large pile of cargo crates. This photo taking continued the whole way. My favourite bit being when a man started filming open ocean (no boats) for a good ten minutes. Bizarrely as soon as we got to Colonia, which is a pretty little harbour, everyone put their cameras away. Apart from the video guy who took a photo of a concrete wall.

Colonia del Sacramento is a small little town which was used as a smuggling base back in the day and now has a pretty old town full of run down houses and little restaurants. We spent the day wandering round and visiting a couple of museums, one of which was devoted entirely to little blue tiles and nothing else. We met a tiny old woman in the town who rattled along in too fast to understand Spanish and tried to get us to buy a mysterious item from her hand bag. After finally convincing her to actually take the object out of her hand bag it turned out to be a jar of apricot jam. Turns out she only looked like a drug dealer. I also had a chat with a local guy who spoke as much English as I do Spanish, and after much gesturing we agreed that Amy Winehouse smokes too much crack. As Colonia is so tiny there wasn't much else to do and so we thought we would try going along the coast to Montevideo (the capital) for a couple of days.