Our friends let us borrow their car one of the days we were staying in Montevideo and we went to visit Punta del Este and the area around it which is about a 2 hour drive from Montevideo. It was enjoyable to drive out in to the country side to experience that part of Uruguay, but it did bring about our one disappointment in Uruguay: visiting in the off season, means more things are closed.
Our first stop was Cerro Pan de Azucar which has a cross on the top it and was supposed to be nice 1 to 1 1/2 hour hike up and down. We hadn’t done a hike in awhile and we thought this would be a nice trial run for Julia’s ankle. However, the picture on the upper right is as close as we got, as the trail to the top was closed for maintenance and we could only make it to an overlook point. It did give a decent view of the valley, but not quite the full roundabout view we were hoping for.
The trail started from a nature reserve/zoo that was free so it wasn’t a total loss as we got to walk around there and see various animals. Interestingly enough, we saw one coati in a cage (with a sign), and about a dozen or so “wild” ones running around the trails and woods of the park.
Our next stop was going to be museum on a point called Punta Ballena which overlooked the city of Punta del Este across the bay. We decided to drive all the way to the end of the point for lunch before going to the museum. It was a beautiful setting and deceivingly large. Annika says she could have spent all day there exploring all the nooks and crannies. Definitely lots of ragged lava rocks to climb on.
Marika wanted to try a panoramic “trick” shot from the point and this was the result!
The museum was Museo Casapueblo which is this huge white house built by the famous Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró. The house itself was quite large and impressive, however the museum part was only about 3 rooms, a cafe, and a gift shop. We were expecting to see a lot more of the house. We found out that the large area had been converted to a hotel, but only after we bought our museum tickets.
Punta del Este was a pretty upscale kind of resort town because it sits on miles and miles of beaches. We were struck again by how much beach there is in Uruguay and they have all the hotels, condos and apartments to support a strong tourism industry. We stopped by the famous fingers sculpture on one of the beaches, took a short walk along the beach, and watched a few surfers brave the cold waters.
Our last stop was Fundación Pablo Atchugarry which was further inland. As we drove there we saw more and more farm land and other than the occasional palm tree, parts of it looks like a mix between rural Ontario and rural Saskatchewan, especially with the many cows and lots of fields containing what we think was canola.
Fundación Pablo Atchugarry itself is a 40 acre park promoting various art installations, primarily sculptures. We had learned from our friends that it had a nice cafe but on par for the course, that main building was closed for renovations.
Thankfully the rest of the park was open and we had a nice walk to look at the various sculptures. The sculptures cast some cool shadows on the ground and we decided to create our own shadow art. As we were heading out, we circled around one of the ponds closer to some farm land and the path narrowed down between the pond and the trees bordering the farm. Suddenly the path became full of biological “land mines” and we were debating whether it was sheep or goats. Annika was just saying out loud that she wish she could see what animal it was when we came around the corner and ran into a large capybara, catching it in the act. We tentatively chased it down the path until it got tired of us and finally dove into the pond.
Overall, even though a number of things were closed, we had a enjoyable day in the countryside.