Our bus arrived in Buenos Aires at around midday on Friday 2 March. We had to walk about 2 kilometers from the bus station to the port to catch the connecting ferry to Montevideo, which wasn't so much fun in the heat and with all our stuff. The ferry is quite big - takes hundreds of people and there is a restaurant and a decent sized duty-free shop on board. The journey takes 3 hours, so we arrived late in the evening. Our hostel was overlooking one of the main plaza's of the city (Plaza Independencia) and the walk there took about half an hour from the port. We got settled in our room and chatted a bit with some other traveler before heading off to bed after a long day. However, there was quite a rowdy bunch staying that night, and one of them managed to vomit all over the floor of our dorm just as we were going to sleep! So we were awake for another hour while that was all cleaned up :-/ Ahh yes... the joys of budget travel.

Saturday we woke up late and headed down for breakfast - only to discover that we had lost an hour somewhere and it was over (Turns out Uruguay doesn't do daylight-savings but Argentinia does.) So we walked down the Saturday market to have a look around. They have these restaurants here with huge indoor braai's (grids are like 5m x 2m) so we chose some meat that we wanted and had a great lunch :-) We wandered the old streets a bit admiring the beautiful old buildings, and then headed back for a much needed nap. In the evening we walked to the local supermarket to buy a few things for supper.

Sunday we woke up in time for breakfast and then hired bikes to explore a bit more of the city. There is a great cycle/running path all along the coast which we rode along (yes, Monique rode a bike!) It was really hot (up to 39deg) and we stopped off at 2 beaches - neither of which was amazing. The sand is quite hard and the sea-water here is cold and brown. We found a small local bakery and had these two pastry-type things for lunch, one with meat and the other with ham & cheese filling, and then cycled home. The bikes were old and just plain bad, so it was a bit of a slog :-/ We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing/recovering and then walked around town a bit more in the evening. We ate at the hostel and then headed upstairs to pack.

Monday morning we were up fairly early - checked out and took one last walk around to get a final few pics of the city. We got a local bus to the bus station, hopped on another bus to Colonia and off we went. We had a nice enough time in Montevideo, but I don't think its a place we'd go back to in a hurry.