Montevideo - February 9th

Our first full day in Montevideo begins with a walk along the Rambalas.   This is a long coastal road that follows the Rio Plata.  However you would really struggle to identify that you were on a river, there is no sign of land on the other side (it’s almost 100km wide here) and the waves are pretty large.  But it is a nice way to walk to the old part of town.

When we get there we find that everything is shut.  It’s hard to tell whether this is a shut permanently because it’s gone out of business type of closure, a closed for the holiday type (although all of those in BA did have signs saying they were closed until some date), or they are closed because we are there too early.  There are a few shops open, including one in the tourist information office, but not that many.  So we walk towards the main commercial centre of town instead, still taking snaps of all the landmarks.  As Uruguay was a rich country between the wars there are a lot of grand 1930 style buildings around.

After all the sightseeing it is time for lunch, so we go to the old port market, Puerto Mercado, which has been turned into a load of trendy parrillas (barbeques) which have their meat on displaying competing displays.  It is quite interesting. Because it is a bit busy at lunch time, we give it time to quiet down by going to the museum of carnival next door.

Not many people outside of Uruguay know that Montevideo has actually one of the biggest carnivals in the world.  It lasts much longer than Rio’s and it is the reason why we are here at this point in time.  Tonight is the Desfile de las Llamadas, one of the main parades in the whole 40 day carnival.  We ate early to get back to our hotel early so we can walk up the parade route to a house which overlooks the parade route.  Our hostel has arranged for us to get tickets from the owner to use the roof to view the parade.  It’s an interesting viewpoint, but we actually ended up going down to street level for a better look later on. 

I’m going to leave Dorota’s blog to explain all the bits of the carnival, all I’ll say is that it did get a bit repetitive towards the end, but the candombe drumming was very spectacular and unique.