Asleep In A Vineyard

Our fridge is making peculiar noises but it is still working; the sun is out, nights are cold and Uruguay is lovely. 

We have to be in our campground outside Buenos Aires by Wednesday worse luck but it will be for an excellent reason to meet long lost friends. Taking short hops and poking around oddly little roadside attractions in this perfect Fall weather is utterly delightful.

This is nowhere Uruguay but Layne manages to dig up all sorts of oddities to cause us to stop and ponder. On a map we were between Nueva Helvecia and Nueva Palmeira near Carmelo on the eastern shore of the Uruguay River which is the border with Argentina, land of chaos a million miles away.  

In the New Switzerland of Uruguay we started Saturday by driving around after our free night in the park.  

The immigrant stories are pretty similar across South America and once you realize tons of Europeans came to these countries you  can see the same pattern we are used to in the States.

“If any Swiss Colony is  going to prosper, let it be this one.” 

There is a massive amount of nostalgia among their descendants who have no actual connection to the past, to the motherland. 

I suppose a cynic would say there is a good financial reason to turn on the nostalgia tap but I find it rather touching how a bunch of Spanish speaking Uruguayans can look over their shoulders and see Switzerland. I’ve seen the same in the US where roots sprout a connection with Germany or Slovenia or some other place.

Rusty could have celebrated the founders of the town all day had we let him but Layne had a tower to visit. This is said to be the most photographed structure in town, a highly decorated water tank; she got out to take the picture and now you can see that beauty and utility can go hand in hand. 

Then we had a statue of a troubadour to pay our respects to in this lightning tour of Nueva Helvecia but the only thing was when we got there a lady got mad because Rusty got out and played momentarily with her dog. The dogs ignored all calls to break it up and went off on a peeing spree while Layne snagged the picture. Apparently he is the playador of Nueva Helvecia. Enjoy.

The afternoon got rather more eccentric at Layne’s next planned stop, a sculpture garden in the middle of nowhere. I have to say Velarde Gil’s sculptures put  me in mind of various self educated Keys artists who have over the years filled their gardens with products of their imaginations. This place looked closed when we got there. 

But sure enough the artist appeared, charged us five bucks apiece and have us a guided tour. His English failed at critical moments but our Spanish filled the gaps. He showed us with some pride the status of a famous Uruguayan performer Eduardo Franco of a group called Los Iracundos which translates as “the Irascibles.” 

They were around from 1960 until about 1994 after he died of cancer at age 45. These encounters are a healthy reminder of how isolated we all are in our cultures. Hollywood has find an amazing job of selling America as in the US, to the world. 

Moving on I got on firmer ground in this very odd garden of statues. This guy looks like Lech Walesa of Poland but knew he was José “Pepe” Mujica who died recently. He was a remarkable figure initial politics starting out as a revolutionary guerilla and ending up as the president of his country refusing to adopt the trappings of power. 

Einstein. 

Marie Curie. 

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. 

General San Martín liberator of Argentina. I’ve spent too long down here as I recognized him easily. 

I had to look this guy up Jorge Ballte President of Uruguay from 2000 to 2005. He was an interesting character a libertarian as best as I can figure but a friend of the United States at a time that wasn’t popular but he also expanded Uruguay’s welfare state and rebuilt the economy from a ruinous recession. 

Gil described this as the garden of revolutionaries and I guess they come in wildly varied packages. We wandered the garden and checked out his animals also sculpted in cement to survive outdoors. Apparently in winter Uruguay gets cold enough to see frost if not snow.  

Quite the eccentric afternoon in Uruguay the staid.

We had to drive a few dirt roads recordings off the beaten track but weirdly enough even dirt in Uruguay knows how to behave and the dirt roads are quite smooth.

City streets are pretty much crap like most places in South America, full of mud matched cement slabs, potholes and uneven patches. 

Back roads vary between terrible and not bad but most are at least paved. 

Main highways are well paved and smooth. 

And for dinner we had to get on dirt to find our way to Layne’s chosen winery.

Almacen de la Capilla translates as “warehouse of the chapel” amdcthryboffer dinner al fresco and as a free service a place to park for the night and a hot shower. Dinner for two was $130 with several wines and free camping in this country is worth $30 so we settled in.

Dulce de leche crepe for dessert. 

Not a bad spot to end an action packed day. 

Swiss Cheese In Uruguay

Twenty five dollars buys you this much first rate cheese in New Switzerland, Uruguay:

The Summit Farm has a restaurant as well as a cheese shop where you can taste the cheeses before buying. So we tasted a few among their vast selection…

…and bought the pieces we preferred and then had some melted cheese for lunch.

And then we drove up and down the hill:

…to camp for the night in a park five minutes away.

For some reason it’s called the Little Train Park on Google Maps though I’m not sure why. 

The highway runs next door so there is some traffic noise by day but the insulation in GANNET2’s construction keeps our home quiet when we button it up. 

The cheese tasting was brought about by an invitation to visit the town of Nueva Helvecia -New Switzerland- from Pablo whom we met while camping in Brazil. He said come and have breakfast with me at 9:30 Saturday morning when you’ve finished in Colonia. So we did. We woke up on the waterfront in the city Saturday morning and I took Rusty for a walk on the pretty cobbled streets. Everywhere you look is a photograph in Colonia Del Sacramento so I made lots of photographs of the postcard worthy streets. 

I have been struggling to figure out the actual location of the River Plate which it turns out is an estuary 220 miles wide at its widest where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. It is formed by the confluence of the mighty Paraná River and the Uruguay River about 250 miles from the sea. 

I’d never really thought too much about it until I got here but it has been the scene of some navy battles and its Spanish name Rio de la Plata (River of Silver) is quite evocative. But it’s basically an estuary or a bay dividing the two countries and there is no interactive by that name and it’s taken me 68 years to figure that out. 

We have been figuring out how to spend less in Uruguay and using cash is one way which is annoying as credit cards are simple and require no ATM visits. When we spoke with our new friends from Virginia it was interesting for us to see how Uruguay did not strike them as expensive. Clearly we have become used to low cost South American living. Personally I think Uruguay, clean orderly and easy to deal with makes for  good value for money. 1790 pesos is $45 minus 25% for cash or 20% for credit card payment. That’s their idea of a bargain lunch for two:

Cat alert: 

Gentleman’s little plaza.  

A Lambretta L80 rotting into permanence as street art: 

And then I came across a statue dedicated to William Brown an Irishman who is said to have founded the Argentine Navy and spanked the Spanish so badly on the River Plate he helped force the Spanish to give up control of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. 

He died at the age of 79 an Argentine national hero but his biography is extraordinary and worth a read. He lived a full and exciting and utterly unexpected life. I was glad I was prompted to find out about William Brown hero of the River Plate and I didn’t some time looking him up. 

We had a date at 9:30 an hour inland so we got going and drove to New Switzerland the land of cheese.

Welcome to the Swiss colony it says founded by immigrants from Switzerland Austria and Germany but whose culture is now represented by cheese from Spanish speaking descendants. 

Pablo grew up in Montevideo but he got tired of the big city. He went to work in the US for five years in Maryland, rented a car, a Monte Carlo he said with some pride, and drove to Key West of all places before he came home to set up a new life in the interior of Uruguay. 

When we met in Brazil he was surprised to see we were from Key West a place he remembered fondly. So he invited us to visit when we arrived in Uruguay. 

We spent a couple of hours chatting about our trip and his journeys in Europe where he took his family in a rented motorhome.

Uruguayans like Argentines drink maté a bitter herbal mixture but Pablo does not approve of the Brazilian habit of drinking the stuff cold. We had coffee.

Layne wanted to check out a deli in town so after we said goodbye to Pablo we stopped off to see what we could find. 

Lots of stuff it turned out and quite affordable. 

We got a stroganoff dish, vegetarian lentil stew, and a fried fish plate for thirty bucks. 

And that included two desserts. 

Part of our economy drive in Uruguay is wild camping deliberately a lot more than usual, and oddly enough we have found lots of free camping spots  in a country that defines itself by its low corruption levels and low crime statistics; how convenient for us vulnerable old foges in a van. Before we settled in to a free roadside park for the night we stopped at the farm for lunch and had Layne’s long desired fondue. Then we drove down to the main road and there we were, home for the night on a bright sunny Saturday afternoon.

And Rusty was happy rolling in the grass under the weak autumnal sunshine. I like Uruguay.