Montevideo Feo

 

Boy Howdy! Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, came as a surprise. 

“Feo” in Spanish means ugly  and Montevideo has been hit back and forth by the ugly stick. It is nothing like what I expected, and it was bad enough we didn’t feel like leaving GANNET2 alone on the street for any length of time.

Winter doesn’t help with dead leaves everywhere and not a street cleaner in sight. The sidewalks are all torn up and walking to the Jeep dealer required paying attention. 

I have been noticing a slight but noticeable loss of coolant even after we have Adrian’s mechanic a fortune to solve the problem. I am pissed. 

The Promaster shares its six cylinder gasoline Pentastar engine with the Jeep Wrangler so when I need filters or fluids I go by the dealer and tell them I have a Jeep…

Parking was hopeless but we found a spot three blocks away which involved me walking the obstacle course to get six quarts of coolant designed specifically for the aluminum Pentastar engine. 

We have found a radiator specialist who did a pressure test on the engine when it had cooled down.

Sure enough he found a leaking hose clamp and said he wants to do a proper job by replacing the hose so we got an appointment for first thing Wednesday.

I knew there was a leak because after five years and 130,000 miles I know where the fluid sits normally and it was low. It helps to be taken seriously by the mechanic. 

Rusty got his walk while Layne went food shopping and he liked the smelly nasty sidewalks. 

A carefully locked and inaccessible church:

Our plan is to visit some tourist locations today before we do a load of laundry and see if we can find pretty Montevideo. It looks unlikely thus far. 

It’s odd because Buenos Aires across the River Plate  is a vibrant modern clean city. It certainly has some rundown areas too but Montevideo is decidedly uninteresting. At least in the areas we have been so far.

Here’s a string of shots I took as we drove around town.  Clearly not the tourist zone. 

Can you imagine going out for an evening on the town here? Bars? Clubs? Restaurants? Me? I’d be happy at home with Starlink. Exciting stuff.  

Our plan was to drive east along the coast to a rather rundown beach front campground. We needed to dump our porta potty and needs must so off we went  along the waterfront. Montevideo lived up to billing even here: 

The River Plate.  If you want to win a bar bet ask someone which is the southernmost capital city of mainland South America. 

Chances are they’ll say Buenos Aires on the southern bank of the river. Ha ha! Montevideo is the correct answer despite being on the north bank of the River Plate.

See? The river curves so Montevideo is further south.

I find the waterfront apartment complexes uninspiring. Maybe I’m biased because of the rest of the city. 

Limited parking, almost none, limited beach access points and totally uninspired landscaping. Disappointing. 

The 1921 Belle Epoque Hotel Sofitel and casino. Excellent breakfast buffet they say can be your for something around 250 bucks a night. 

The campground we stopped at was a wreck with trash everywhere and not one human in sight. The outside toilet flushed though so I dumped ours into it and we left. Weird but effective. Further up the coast ten minutes we found an iOverlander mentioned wild camp on the beach  next to a couple of seafood restaurants. Layne doesn’t trust Uruguayan eateries to offer value for money so we had Chinese dumplings aboard and watched some TV, “Bad Monkey” set in the Keys filmed I think in Miami mostly with a rather weak Karl Hiassen plot. I liked the tropical scenery but it’s a lackluster TV show. 

Tuesday is laundry day and explore touristy Montevideo day. Wish us luck.

Murals And Vino

In light of the fact we drove to the town of 25th of August to see murals painted on the streets as a public art project let us view murals to start today’s journey (which ends up immorally boozy so be warned). Let me say about the Florida Keys it’s well known they don’t have hills but if they did this could be a Key…memories of home:

I get the feeling this may not end well below, but once you know a French artist organized this permanent outdoor art show all is explained…

Leo Arti, a French artist, arrived in the sleepy town of 25 de agosto just an hour outside of Montevideo in 2006 to visit the train station. Enchanted by the peace and quiet of the town, a couple of years later she moved there and set up her workshop.

A fan of horse-riding and gaucho events, she painted a gaucho scene on the front of her atelier in 2012. Shortly after one of her pupils asked for help to reproduce a mural of her own work on her house-front.

Requests started pouring in from townspeople and businesses for her to paint murals on their houses and shops.

I found an article, headlined by this excerpt, online discussing the murals in much greater detail if you are interested:

https://www.guruguay.com/murals-25-de-agosto/

It was a cold wet breezy Sunday morning so we drove around at random after I walked Rusty and took some pictures. If you notice a total absence of humans we didn’t plan it that way, there were none.

Almost none…

We added our street parking spot to the iOverlander app for others following us though there is a campsite shown out of town.

Campsites in Uruguay are quite expensive, $30-$40 a night so we try to keep costs down by street camping in towns or in parks outside towns where overnight stops are not expressly prohibited. Our overnight stop Sunday was planned for a winery an hour outside Montevideo.

You can imagine this location in summer but we arrived in a drizzly afternoon and surprised the owner.

This is the first bottle tree I’ve seen in South America but I found out the owner didn’t a couple of months working and studying at a winery in Virginia so I guess he brought a few ideas back. 

Rusty liked it.  

You can get married here if you feel like it. I’d recommend in summer. 

Layne had sent a couple of WhatsApp messages but got no reply so we showed up deep out of season hoping for the best. 

They had been recommended to us by our Canadian friends Hugh and Sue with whom we had traveled in Central America and Argentina an the food got some good write ups online so Layne was ready…

Omar the owner demurred that he needed time so we said we’ll be happy to spend the night and have lunch tomorrow, so he said how about dinner? Great! 

Make yourselves at home he said as he lit the fire and offered his wine selection for our perusal on the honor system. They make a very nice fortified wine using his grandmother’s formula and it’s not too sweet. Highly recommended: 

Our favorite wine was a Merlot-Tannat blend light and very drinkable. Layne made lunch and we drank and ate and napped and read by the fire. 

And the hound was welcomed too. He was entirely sober and resisted the wine.  

We got a tour of the cellars set up by Omar’s family in 1954. The original wooden barrel:

At the turn of the century the government persuaded growers to tear up their vines and replant high quality grapes to upgrade wine production from mass produced table wines. So the whole country got together and replanted their vines. 

Smaller quantity but higher quality has worked for Omar. 

His grandfather built a 109,000 liter cement wine chamber, a giant swimming pool to ferment the grape crop, indelibly marked with red tannin from the grapes.  

Nowadays it’s a curiosity in the new world of fine wines promoted by Uruguay. 

Dinner was excellent. Lamb empanadas spiced with oregano:

Accompanied by all the wine you can drink…Chicken roulade with white wine:

Beef with roasted root vegetables and a wine reduction sauce: 

And a flan for dessert:

With dulce de leche on the side. Coffee and feet out by the fire for a very reasonable sixty bucks each. Plus Omar gave us a bottle of fortified wine as a present.

A hot shower and a free place to camp for the night rounded out this delightful stop. I like Uruguay.