Up early in the morning and a wild taxi ride to the ferry port. Buenos Aires has a strict rule that you can only have 4 passengers in a taxi or uber at one time, so we had to take 2 taxis. The one I was in…we hardly made it on the ferry in time.
The guy didn’t follow the GPS, didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t know where the ferry port was. I wound up having to give him directions, the meter price was much higher than it should’ve been, and I cut 30% off of that for what I was actually willing to give him. We sprinted inside, checked in, ran upstairs to passport control, begged them to send us to the front of the line, and actually crossed the ramp onto the ferry as they were reeling it in and pushing off. Wow.
The ferry was decent, but we were super tired and tried to sleep.
As soon as we arrived, we debated about what to do and actually stumbled on a hop on-hop off bus across the street, so we decided that was a good option again.
They were much more organized than the bus in Buenos Aires, and we were off.
We passed a street market that seemed really packed, so we got off there and walked around for a bit.
I didn’t take pictures in the street market, except for one funny stall that was selling US license plates.
We had the misfortune that the bus was on their lunch break time when we got back to the pick-up point, so the next one wouldn’t come for another 50min. We just sat there and joked around while people watching, but it got quite boring.
One of the best sites the bus went to was the Estadio Centenario. Built for the 1930 first-ever World Cup, it’s now also used by several of the teams based in Montevideo and has some great artwork honoring the Uruguayan national team.
It looked like there was about to be a game that night, because there was already a guy set up to sell stuff for Nacional fans. Since it was a Sunday, the museum inside wasn’t open, so we just stayed on.
There weren’t a lot of stops left on the bus route, and things were closed for Sundays, so we’d already killed some time having a slow lunch. We felt like doing that for an afternoon coffee was also needed, because the “day trip” super price deal on the ferry means you have to take the first one in and last one out, so we needed to kill time until 8pm.
We’re idiots. We had no idea we were going to come across this amazing beach, where the whole city was hanging out, and arrive there after we’d already killed all of our time and needed to get back in time to eat dinner and get on the ship. We suck.
We grabbed some dinner, checked out a few small shops, and then were back on the ship. It was a decent day trip, but we clearly should’ve just gone to kill time walking along the beach, checking out the street performers there, and enjoyed the coast like the entiiiiire rest of the city was doing. No wonder everything seemed so empty.
