Mate mate?

After our run in with the less well intentioned locals we were pretty glad to make it onto the ferry. It was a real shame that our trip to Buenous Aires finished on a negative note because overall we had a really great time there and would definitely recommend anyone visiting this part of the world spend a few days there.

The ferry to Uruguay only took an hour, we decided to visit the town of Colonia Del Sacramento. Colonia is the oldest city in Uruguay and is a wonderful little place to vist. Founded in 1680 by the Portuguese, the historical part of town is listed as a world heritage site. Pokey little coblestone streets line the old part of town which is situated on a little peninsula thats sticks out in to the river. The town has a real country feel about it and feels alot further than 1 hour away from Buenous Aires. There are still horse drawn carts in the streets and the odd vintage car permanently parked on the roadside.

We got up pretty early and wandered round the streets of Colonia, it´s only a little place so it´s easy to do on foot and best early before the little side streets fill up with tourists. This place is well and truly on the tourist map, but still doesn´t have that over commercialised feel about it. We definitely recommend spending a day or two here, probably best to come during the week if you want to avoid the crowd from Buenous Aires.

Uruguay definitely had a more relaxed feel about it, the locals seem a lot more laid back very content to sit around sipping theit mate. Mate is a local tea like drink that is more of a social pastime than a simple thirst quencher. We first learnt about it at our Spanish class in Auckland, but didn´t realise what an integral part of day to day life it is for the locals. They drink it out of these ornate cups and sip the mate through these silver straws topping it up with hot water until the flavour is lost.

Other random things we noticed, they don´t seen to eat pepper here, juice is served to you more often than not in a big shot glass, the beer is good, they like to eat meat in vast quantities and much to our delight the sky has been blue every day.