Leaving Arg! And coming back.

Tourist visas to Argentina are only valid for 90 days. The easiest way to receive a new visa is by leaving and reentering the country, at which time you receive a new stamp in your passport granting you another 90 days stay. To renew our visas, and to stay on the right side of the law, Nate and I crossed the Rio de la Plata to spend a few days in Uruguay. We went to Colonia del Sacramento, an old colonial town founded in 1680 by the Portuguese to support a thriving smuggling industry that thwarted the Spanish monopoly on trade in the region. The town's been remarkably well preserved in the intervening centuries, and the historic old town has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site.

We travelled to Colonia on a ferry run by Buquebus, a company which holds a practical monopoly on voyages to Colonia and which advertises its fleet as "the fastest in the world," a claim which is not at all close to being true. Our Buquebus boat took three and a half hours to flounder its way across the river. We didn't mind the slow journey too much, as the boat had all the comforts a human could reasonably desire: fully reclining seats, intense air conditioning, and a claw arcade game.

We thoroughly explored and exhausted the sites and resources of downtown Colonia on our first day there, so on the morning of our second day we rented bikes to explore the surrounding countryside. Colonia is extremely well supplied with places to rent motos and golf carts of all description. Renting motos in fact appears to be the town's sole industry. Finding non-motorized means of transport, i.e. bicycles, was a little more difficult, but Nate and I managed to track down and rent two of the most inadequte bikes ever pedaled. We rode out of town along the coast of the Rio de la Plata, admiring the pristine, empty, white-sand beaches, which are unfortunately lapped by the mud brown Rio de la Plata, a river which does not really call to the swimmer.

It was remarkable how quickly we adjusted to the peaceful, slower pace of Colonia. In Colonia, the few cars on the cobblestoned streets drove slowly, obeyed traffic laws, and even stopped for pedestrians. As we were disembarking the Buquebus upon our return to Buenos Aires, Nate joked that every Urugyuan driver leaving the ferry would be killed instantly on the streets of Buenos Aires. There wasn't a fifteen Fiat pile up that night, but when we reached the streets of Buenos Aires I felt like I had lost all my hard won traffic navigating skills. I wasn't picked off by an insane taxi cab that night, but it took hours before I felt like I remembered how to walk the streets here. -EMW