There’s more to say about Uruguay…

Looking back over our days here, patterns emerge.

Obvious things, that hang under the surface of awareness for awhile. Like when you’re in Venice, of course, it’s all boats and canals, but then you start noticing and distinguishing between delivery boats, emergency boats, and gondolas.

In Montevideo, the streets are a cacophony of noise and clutter until 3 or 4 in the morning, but the upper air is filled with cupolas and the regal tops of buildings.

Uruguay has a long coastline on the Rio de la Plata, the widest river in the world and the second largest drainage basin in South America. Most of the country’s population is along the river. As you travel east toward Brazil and the Atlantic, the water gets bluer and bluer.

As you travel west toward Colonia upstream, it gets browner and browner. Montevideo’s between the two, sometimes blue and sometimes brown.

The road on the map doesn’t always go through, and the map doesn’t show whether the road’s paved. Along Ruta 10, a bumpy gravel road that was clearly shown going over the lagoon on our map, we came to the sign “camino sin salida” just before an impassable ditch and had to go back 30 kilometers. Another time, another lagoon, there was a ferry. We guessed it would take two cars, but it took all four.

There are cows. And horses. Everywhere. One young man from Montevideo explained to us why he likes living in Montevideo and Uruguay, even though it’s not the most vibrant, trend-setting city in the world. If Uruguayos were animals, he said, they’d be cows, standing contentedly in a field, in the company of other cows. We all laughed, but he was serious.