uruguay

I'm writing this while sitting on a ferry from Colonia del Sacramento to Buenos Aires. I've spent the past couple of days in Colonia just chilling and doing a whole lot of walking - this is pretty much all there is to do in this old Portuguese Colonial town.....read more >>

I didn't really think I would spend much time in Montevideo, but I'm noticing more and more that plans can't be too fixed on this sort of trip. A series of events - an asado, chatting with a Brazilian family and May 1st - have lead me to stay that bit longer than planned but having seen some cool things, I have no regrets.....read more >>

For the past couple of days I've been in Cabo Polonio. An almost hippie community on a nature reserve on the Uruguayan coast. The only electricity in the village is delivered to the big lighthouse at the tip of the cape. The roughly 80 inhabitants of the village use gas stoves, light their houses with candles, and occasionally will have a generator. Bath and kitchen water comes from wells. The village may only have 80 human inhabitants, but it has a couple thousand lion seal inhabitants. ....read more >>

So after nearly 2 weeks at Punta del Diablo, I decided this morning that I'm moving on. The place has been awesome and I almost feel like I'm part of the furniture in the hostel, but events last night prompted me to make the decision. There was a new arrival last night who went straight onto the booze when he arrived, and then got back to the hostel at about 6am in some state....read more >>

Got up pretty early today and took the board out for an early morning surf. The waves were decent and I was the only one on the water for the first while - there was one other person on the beach. Didn't stay in for long as I knew later we'd be going on our hike of Santa Teresa Nature Reserve.....read more >>

By early morning the fog cleared and revealed some pretty decent surf. The line up was crowded by Punta del Diablo standards - I think I counted 10 dudes in the water. The swell was a bit bigger than what I'm used to and I struggled quite a bit due to a combination of big swell, a really crap board and me just being crap....read more >>

After 5 days of wild onshore winds that turned the sea into a washing machine, last night the winds finally changed direction and calmed down - finally a chance to go surf again. Excited at the propesct of going surfing again today, I didn't sleep much eventhough I got to bed real early. Unfortunately though I woke up this morning to a cloud of fog so thick....read more >>

Yesterday was another totally crazy day and night here in Punta del Diablo. Once again the onshore winds were howling all day so the surf was pretty much non existent, so everybody just sat around the whole day waiting for our afternoon "field trip". When 4pm came a bunch of us jumped on the back of a bakkie (truck for non South Africans) and drove about 20kms to a famous shipwreck in the area,....read more >>

Been a couple of days now since I wrote on here, probably because it is such an idyllic place that I feel bad sitting in front of a computer. I haven't even taken my camera out which is a shame because I've seen very cool things - dolphins swimming in the distance, a secluded beach that stretches for about 2 km and had 5 people on it. I've just mostly been going for walks, surfing, sleeping on the hammocks and partying at night.....read more >>

I've finally arrived in Punta del Diablo, and it's everything I imagined it would be. It's a small fishing and surfing village pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The bus rolled in at about 8 in the evening and dropped us off in the "town center", which is just a widening in the dirt road and there's a little police station and a supermarket on the right. ....read more >>