Piriapolis - February 16th

Again on the beach the day starts early.  But this is because we are leaving for our third and final Uruguayan beach resort, Piriapolis.  To get there we have a multi bus trip, beginning with the truck back to the ‘mainland’.  We could have waited for a pick up at our hotel, but for some reason we felt that we needed the exercise so we walked the 1km up the beach with our full backpacks on to get to the village.  Luckily at 08:00 it is still not too warm to do this.  The fun part is the transfer again, this time we are able to sit up top and at the front of the truck, and going over the dunes it is like a roller-coaster.  There was nearly some travel sickness from both of us.  Still it was fun.

After a bus journey which has a slightly baffling route (and therefore takes 3 hours to do about 120km) we get dropped in the town of Pan De Azucar, which is Spanish for SugarLoaf.  This town is overlooked by a SugarLoaf like mountain, hence the name.  This ‘mountain’ is Uruguay’s third highest point, at 423m!  This is one of the flattest countries in the world.  The drop here is so we can pick up a local bus and get it the last 8km to the coast, which we do with some ease.  We only had a minute to wait which was good because the heat inland was unbearable.

However the dry heat of the interior is far preferable to the humidity of the coast.  Of course I say the coast but now we are back on the Rio Plata coast, not the Atlantic.  So there is less wind leading to the humid conditions.  Our short walk to our hotel is entirely uphill with our backpacks on, so this time we are covered in sweat by the time we get there.

After that we are back to our usual beach resort pattern, eat, beach, shower, eat, sleep.  The beach in Piriapolis itself is not great, and is quite crowded.  This is a much bigger resort than the other two we have been to, although smaller than the more famous Punta Del Este which we have skipped because on MTV it looks like Benidorm.  This is more of a family resort, founded in 1930 by the building of a large hotel by an Argentine, Francisco Piria, hence the name.  We move slightly upstream to Playa Grande, on the basis that it is bigger and might be emptier, which it is.  So that is where we spend the day.  Our evening search for a restaurant, the top one in town, is interesting in that nobody seems to know where Café Picasso is, so we end up in an average pizza place.  But the ice cream in this town is good.