Punta del Este, Uruguay

Last weekend I went with my roommate to Uruguay, to a beach town called Punta del Este. Buenos Aires is right across the water from Uruguay and there are ferries that you can take to Montevideo, the capital, and a town called Colonia, Uruguay’s oldest town. We went to Colonia and then took a 4 hour bus ride to Punta del Este. It’s a pretty small town, with a peninsula stretching south that is about 4 or 5 city blocks wide and maybe 30 long. This picture is the view from our hotel window, you can see how close the ocean is on both sides (the panorama looks curved but that’s just the camera angle). There are beaches on either side, one side faces a bay and is calmer and the beaches emptier, the other side faces the open sea and has decent waves and a lot more people, mostly a bit older than us and some quite old with skins like leather, as if they’d spent their lives (sunscreen-free) on that beach. The town had a bunch of tourists, mostly from Brazil as far as I can tell. I’m not sure why, I think there are probably much better beaches in Brazil, but whatever.

We didn’t do much all weekend, just sat on the beach or in cafes, reading and sleeping. We had been told that it was Carnaval weekend but couldn’t really find any reference to it, which was disappointing. Also disappointing was that it rained every night we were there; it was sunny for enough of the daytime to sit on the beach for a while (longer than my capacity for sitting in the sun anyway). All in all, though, it was a really calm, relaxing weekend; in Buenos Aires there is so much to see and do and new places to try, and it was so nice to be in a small town.