Chasing Rainbows

By Lawrence Selby - Guest blogger traveling in Montevideo. The weather wasn't great this weekend so I didn't end up going to Punta del Este for an extended weekend trip. On Friday, I made plans to go to Buenos Aires for next weekend and then went to a discotheque. On Saturday, I attended a few parties. Then on Sunday, I did a day trip out to Punta. Making the reservations for the Buenos Aires trip and inquiries about the bus schedule to Punta on primera de mayo (Monday, May 1st) turned out to be a fairly painful experience, but it all worked out in the end. Another detail that I tend to forget about travel is the difficulty in making travel arrangements in train and bus stations. As I´m saying this, a time comes to mind when I was in Paris with a few friends and trying to book a train south to Lyon. We had to wait in line and get a ticket to make the reservations. The number that we got was (as best that I can remember) several hundred spots away from the number that they were currently serving. When we came back a few hours later the number that they were on was about 100 or so past our number. And of course, they wanted us to pick a new number ... but, I digress. A big difference between Western Europe and Uruguay is that almost everyone there in the tourism industry speaks English with some level of fluency whereas here almost no one does. After waiting in line for about an hour, I was able to arrange my Buenos Aires trip with Buquebus. This includes: roundtrip bus and ferry service from Montevideo to Bs. As., 2 nights at a 4 star hotel in central Bs. As. (with full breakfast), and shuttle service to-from the ferry terminal to the hotel, all for the very reasonable price of $224! What didn't work out as well was my attempts to figure out the bus schedule from Punta del Este to Montevideo on primero de mayo. I talked to about 4 different people and the best that I could understand was that, yes there are buses, but who knows who many and when. No schedule is available and they certainly would not be available to write the arrival and departure times down on a piece of paper for me. However, what I could do is come back tomorrow and ask someone else (preferably a different person). At the end of the final fruitless conversation, the guy (clearly looking annoyed) just kept saying, manyana, manyana ... It was then I decided to just make Punta a daytrip on Sunday. Uruguay is, after all, a Latin American country.