MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY

I arrived at the central bus station in Montevideo, which is a couple miles from the city center itself. This time I had a guy with my last name on a sign waiting for me as the bus pulled up. I felt like a VIP again. The taxi situation in almost every city I’ve visited on this trip has been stressful, to say the least, so to have a prepaid ride like this really takes the edge off. This time I was his only passenger so he quickly led me out front to his van, then he jumped in the back with me and tried to sell me a city tour, but we both knew his English skills weren’t strong enough to properly convey his message. Again with the sales pitch wrapped around a ride to the hotel! He quickly gave up and he drove directly to the Crystal Palace Hotel right in the middle of town. I was told this was a four star hotel and it actually exceeded my expectations. It is an extremely nice hotel probably meant for executives and top-end vacationers. I think I must have been paying about $40 per night as part of my package so I was very pleased.

When I checked in I asked about city tours and ironically they recommended the tour given by the company my driver worked for. It was $15 and was leaving in 30 minutes so I signed up. As sleazy as some city tours are, there is rarely an alternative if you want to see the highlights of a new city in a short time. The bus showed up almost 30 minutes late, but another American guy from my hotel and I were the final two passengers so the tour started immediately. That’s another thing they never mention about these tours. They almost all include pickup from your hotel and that usually means a giant bus lumbering through downtown streets pulling up to each hotel while someone runs into the lobby to call out names. If you are picked up first you might be sitting there on the bus up to an hour as it picks up other passengers.

Thankfully there were only about 20 people on board the 60-seat bus. About half spoke Spanish and half spoke English, but the guide did a decent job with the bilingual explanations. The first stop was the main municipal square, then some other government buildings, then a long trip to an old fort on a peninsula that overlooks the city. After a short stop there we were underway again to a church and then the beach areas and expensive coastal suburbs just east of town. I heard there would be the obligatory “shopping stop” at a ritzy suburban mall, but this time that mall contained a bookstore with English language books that I wanted to visit. As the main tour was ending the guide announced those who were interested could be dropped at a shopping center, but would have to get their own ride back to their hotel. I was surprised when every single Spanish speaker on board jumped up and climbed out of the bus at the mall. I read in my book that Argentines find both the prices and quality of clothing to be better in Uruguay so I imagine that is a city highlight for them.

All the English speakers stayed on board and we were soon back at our hotels. The tour was actually well worth it and impressive. We covered a lot of ground in a short time and visited things (mainly the fort) that would be impossible to reach otherwise. Overall though, my impression of Montevideo was one of mild disappointment. It’s a pleasant enough city, but the diesel fumes reminded me of Central America and the main shopping street through the center of town was a bit dirty. Something unique is that the city is surrounded on three sides by water and there were supposedly beaches in town, however the actual sandy beaches don’t start until you get out of town a bit. They are decent beaches, but the sand is only 20 or 30 meters from the main road to the water. I think the main reason I was a little let down is that I had just spent so much time in Buenos Aires, which to me is one of the nicest cities on Earth. It’s like visiting New York City for a week, then arriving in Philadelphia. If you liked New York City then Philly is a step or two down from that and if you didn’t like NYC then you probably won’t like Philly anyway.

After the tour I didn’t really have an agenda to speak of. I had finished the Jack Kerouac book I was reading so I wanted a new novel and I also would soon need a tour book for Europe. In Argentina and other places I had visited the supply of English language books was severely limited, partially because there is a very high tax ($12) on any foreign language book. I think the governments must want to discourage any competition to Spanish in the language department because a $12 tax on an $8 book is insane otherwise. I had read that the tax in Uruguay was lower so I set out searching the 5 or 6 stores recommended in my tour book. The one I saw that had English language books was closed due to their own crappy version of Carnaval earlier that week. The others were all clustered along the main shopping street (18 de Julio) where my hotel was located. Not only did none of those contain the English language books I read about, no one spoke any English in any of the shops. I discovered that Montevideo has even fewer English speakers than Buenos Aires.

Just before I took a taxi out to that mall a few miles away, I went back to the closed store the next morning and they were actually open. Hooray! The supply of English books was limited to current pulp titles like John Grisham etc, and a few series of “classics” along one wall. I had my choice of Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce and things like that, but I found another series of more recent classics. I scanned the Ks and there were four Kerouac books, 3 copies of Dharma Bums, which I have read, and a single copy of Lonesome Traveler (ironically enough) that I hadn’t. It was a small paperback printed in England that would sell for about $5 in the States. The price on it was £4.99, which is almost $10 now, but when they checked the price at the counter it was the equivalent of $15. I put it down and started to walk out, but then considered my alternatives. I also decided I should reward them for not only carrying some English books, but also speaking a bit of it. I picked it back up and bought it.

There are really two worthwhile areas in town for the tourist in my opinion. One is the “old city” which contains nice colonial-style architecture in office buildings that comprise the countries financial district. Mixed in between the buildings there are a few plazas with “al fresco” dining at bunches of restaurants. In the evening this area comes alive with booze and bands and when I was there a decent local rock band played a free outdoor concert attended by hundreds of young people. The old city was about a 15-minute walk from my hotel all the way down 18 de Julio street and going further in that same direction you get to the other worthwhile attraction, which is the Mercado del Puerto.

The “port market” is a collection of outdoor restaurants across the street from the large commercial port that lines one side of the city. Inside the main hall of the Mercado are about 10 more restaurants that all serve the exact same thing, grilled meat. Employees of each place try to talk you into eating at their grill as you walk through, but the prices and selections of each place seemed almost identical. The inside part is only open for lunch so my book recommended and I second that, go during lunch and go inside for the real flavor of the place. The restaurants outside are pleasant enough (in fact I ate at one the previous evening before I saw the inside the next day), but strangely there are more locals and fewer tourists inside.

I ordered a lomo (filet mignon) and a large bottle of beer for about $7 and was not disappointed with the portion (you actually get two approximately 6 ounce pieces) or quality, even by the high standards of Argentine meat. Actually, in a way I preferred the Montevideo dining experience. Porteños (as the residents of Buenos Aires call themselves) are meat snobs. They have delicious sauces (most notably Chimichurri sauce, which my old roommate Tim introduced me to) for sausages and other things, but it would be sacrilegious to use these sauces on steak. There is no such pretension in Montevideo. Great meat? Check. Delicious sauces? Why not? Pile it on!

My boat ride back to Buenos Aires was a 3-hour trip scheduled for 8 p.m. the following evening. This was on the faster boat, but since Montevideo is much farther away it still takes three hours. I didn’t have anything else to see in town so I investigated a ranch visit for the next day since I had not been able to do that while in Argentina. I found a travel agent that books these “Estancia” trips to nearby working cattle ranches that feature a barbeque and horseback riding, but even the cheapest one she had was about $60 so I passed. I wanted to do that, but it will have to be on my next trip to the area. She kept mentioning that the ones in Argentina have these grand ranch houses, but the ones in poorer Uruguay have smaller, more authentic ranch houses. I even told her the grand houses sounded like more fun to me, which was another reason I decided not to do her option.

She did mention, however, that changing the time of my boat trip was very easy, so I went back to my hotel to get my ticket and took it to the downtown office of Buquebus where they quickly changed me to the noon boat the next day. I had the hotel call the transit company who promptly picked me up the next morning and brought me to the dock where I boarded the boat. This boat evidently went much faster than the other one, but the experience for the passengers is identical except the seats are smaller in the fast boat. I was back in Buenos Aires a bit after 2 p.m. with the time difference, for my last weekend in the region before flying to Rio de Janeiro.