WHY OH WHY, URUGUAY?

If you ever have to spend 24 hours in Uruguay, try your best not to make those 24 hours be a Sunday. And, Duncan adds, try to spend them in Argentina. Having already been to seven countries, we decided to add an extra one to the itinerary - the wonderful Uruguay, which we'd only heard good things about . There has been a big advertising campaign that we'd caught a few times on South American TV promoting this beautiful country with its great weather, exclusive shops and golden beaches. We must have gone to the other Uruguay because our experience was of a distinctly average country - like Belgium, but without the beer and mussels. But first, we headed out to the suburb of Tigre, on the delta of the Rio Plata, which we reached by apparently the most environmentally friendly train in South America (not much competition there, we thought, given that trains are fairly non-existent round here and climate change concerns don't seem to have hit the headlines yet). Tigre , which had been roundly hyped to us, was a pleasant enough place but not quite what the guidebooks had raved about, with murky brown water, and loads of rubbish clogging up the shores, rather than a beautiful riverside retreat, and not helped by crap weather - although all of this wasn't enough to deter Madonna as she apparently visited Tigre a few days later. After endless sunshine in Buenos Aires, the cold and rain wasn't what we'd bargained for. To amuse ourselves, we finally got to see the new James Bond film, part of which was filmed in the Chilean desert near to where we had stayed. And at our hostel we made friends with a Belgian Brad Pitt/Kurt Cobain lookalike (but sadly not nearly as fit as he sounds) who spends his life cycling around different parts of the world. He'd recently cycled from Belgium to Senegal, and then Belgium to Ireland and now was pedalling around Argentina: "Oh, I'm not sure whether I should head to Lima or Santiago next". We were knackered from doing these journeys by bus, we thought inadequately…The next night was spent in the Uruguayan town of Colonia de Sacramento, but getting there proved to be another triumphant Team West race against time. We caught a catamaran ferry from Tigre across the border to Carmelo. The journey was painfully slow as the ferry was overtaken by speedboats, jet skis and the occasional rowing boat until we got into open (brown) waters of the Rio Plata. Although we had left plenty of time to catch our bus, the last of the day, the prospects were not looking good as we chugged our way slowly into port contemplating a night in this deserted no-horse town . But, in a remarkable period of flukey good luck and some quite outrageous queue-jumping, we had jumped off the ferry, barged our away past the long immigration queue, barked at the baggage handlers to pass us our rucksacks, had our bags checked by customs, sprinted to the taxi rank in torrential rain, sped across town paying the taxi driver in Argentinian rather than Uruguayan pesos, bought a bus ticket and boarded the bus all in the space of five minutes of the boat docking. Phew! Colonia was worth the rush as we spent an enjoyable 24 hours in the small old town, climbing the lighthouse in a gale and eating steak, of course. And so it was that we arrived into Montevideo on a Sunday - but this is the capital city and you expect there to be a bit of hustle and bustle, even on a day of rest. Instead, it was more like the aftermath of a war with grey deserted streets and crumbling abandoned buildings - we were almost expecting John Simpson to emerge with a flak jacket on around the next corner reporting on the latest skirmishes. For the current-affairsly challenged, there is no conflict in Uruguay to speak of, it's just a bit rubbish. After eating dinner in the only bar that appeared to be open and sampling the Uruguayan speciality of a pizza crossed with pancake - we think we'll stick to the other speciality - steak - from now on, we returned to our hotel which didn't appear to have changed in any respect since about 1950, and looked forward to Montevideo waking up the following day for a bustling Monday morning.With the 'war' now over, the locals returned to the streets on Monday morning and things were a bit livelier although you still couldn't disguise the fact that it looked like someone had grey-washed over the city with a dirty watercolour brush. The one redeeming feature of the city was the old port building which has been converted into a vibrant (no, really) market full of bars and restaurants selling all sorts of grilled meat. We tucked into two different types of delicious sausages washed down with a bottle of 'medio medio' (half still/half sparkling white wine) and spent most of our lunchtime marvelling at the fact that it was MONDAY lunchtime and we were medio-pissed, which we do periodically to make sure we don't forget that we could instead be eating sandwiches at our desk - hey, Montevideo's not all that, but it beats work. Afterwards, we headed back to our hotel via the really interesting Museo de El Gaucho with a fine display of old gaucho paraphernalia such as knives, whips and spurs (ouch - poor horses) housed in an impressive old building. One thing which wouldn't have looked out of place to the gauchos is still very much in evidence today in Argentina and, even more so, in Uruguay - to almost comedy proportions - is maté , the herbal tea which the locals seem to drink at every opportunity - literally, the Montevideans, particularly the men, seem to go everywhere nursing a flask of hot water and sipping on an ornate silver gourd full of mate herbs, even the supermarket - at one point we counted seven people within a three metre radius of us clutching their gourds… we began to speculate that there were some 'magic' properties to these herbs. And so it was time to leave Uruguay and return to sunny Argentina. We caught an overnight bus to Cordoba, which wasn't on a par with previous journeys, mainly because they only served chicken and chips (no steak), and because the films were pretty poor - Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson working their way through a list of activities before they die of cancer; and a rubbish Christmas film called 'Deck the Halls' in which Danny Devito and Matthew Broderick fight over the Christmas lights. We'd deck both of them, given half a chance. These were interspersed with a mix of terrible 80s/90s videos by mostly unheard of German bands, put together by someone with a taste for Haddaway and Roxette. The one redeeming feature of the whole journey was the hilarious sign in the toilet which read as follows:"Avoid bad pass moments…The bathroom is not to DEFECATE (in red letters), only serves to URINATE (in green letters), please do not uncomfortable with the rest of the passage…THANKS!" And that was Uruguay…