Piriapolis - February 17th

The thing about the beach names here is that they tend to be quite descriptive.  Playa Grande is big, and therefore we assume Playa Hermosa is beautiful.  So we decide to walk the extra few kilometres to this Playa.  It is a nice walk because today the sun is behind clouds, making it cooler, and there is even a little rain.  We also realised that our little hill that we have to walk up to get to our hotel, does actually provide us with a little wind to make it cooler at night.

When we get to Playa Hermosa though it is not quite as beautiful as we had imagined.  It was never going to be Cabo Polonia, but it wasn’t even as good as Playa Grande from yesterday.  Worst of all was the smell as we approached it, because we had to pass some old tied up fishing boats which really stank.  But once past them the smell did disappear, and in fairness it wasn’t a bad beach, it just didn’t live up to the billing.

Again we stayed on the beach for a large part of the day, before heading back to town for ice cream and the walk up the hill to the showers.  The humidity once in the town, one block from the coast, is amazing compared to being on the coast (it is still hard to think of this as a river bank given the opposite one is over 100km away).  Also at the hotel we try to use the wifi, but the hotel has some serious connection issues which mean the service is very intermittent.

In the evening we head down town for some very disappointing pasta, and some proper wifi.  We also discovered that our quest for Café Picasso was founded on a wrong premise last night, the chef, Carlos Nunez, is so famous around town that we should have been asking for directions to him, not his café.  It’s a pity, because all other food joints in this tourist town have been quite bland.  Lonely Planet described Piriapolis as the closest Uruguay had to a Mediterranean beach resort, because of the long seafront and hills behind, but if they meant having nothing but sub-standard restaurants they would have been correct.