March 22, 2019 – April 7, 2019

We had an appointment to load the truck into a container in the port of Montevideo for the 8th of April, so we had more than 2 weeks to fill. We had no real plan, other than that we knew we would have a week to explore Montevideo after the truck went into the container, so we started driving east, passing through the city of Montevideo and found some water front camping.

I think I mentioned in the last post that Uruguay is expensive. We were camped along the beach in a campground with fire pits and a bathroom block, no electricity, and it cost about $20 CAD for a night…a similar camp in Argentine might have cost $7. The beach was nice, but it was just an okay camp and we wanted some wifi, so we headed inland to a camp run by a dutch couple, Hollandaise Chakra.

We arrived and were surprised to see 5 or 6 other overlanding rigs parked in the field…we didn’t realize there were that many in the area. Several of the overlanders were at the end of their trip and were prepping their vehicles to go into containers heading for Europe.

One of the travellers we met at the camp was a 19 year old man from Britain who, after having driven much of the Pan-American Highway, was buying Land Rovers which he was about to ship back to Britain, for sale and restoration. He was just headed back into Patagonia for one more retrieval to fill his containers. Derek took some pictures of the treasures that this young man had limped (all matching Nos. series 1) into Uruguay, many from distant locations in Argentina.

It was pretty easy camping at Hollandaise Chakra, with its clean bathrooms and hot showers, good wifi, and with the owners sharing their stock of wine from the local bodega at happy hour (yes, you read that right, free wine), and we probably could have stayed here for some time, if it wasn’t for the owners’ dogs. They had three dogs, and on two occasions the dogs decided to take after Piper. The first time it happened, Piper had started chewing on the alpha males bone…not a good idea there doggy. Derek and another camper jumped in and pulled the dogs apart, and afterwards, everything seemed fine. Piper and the other three dogs were running around together, sniffing at everything and each other, Piper often in the lead. But the second time it happened one of the female dogs bit her…nothing too serious, but she definitely left some puncture wounds on Piper’s back. We’ve had kind of an unspoken rule that if one of us doesn’t like a camping spot, for whatever reason, we move on and Piper didn’t like it here, so the next morning we packed up and left.

The coast of Uruguay is very developed, with many beautiful, modern vacation homes, almost all sitting empty in off season, across from most of the beaches. We spent our days walking along the beach, or driving to another location for the night. If we didn’t need to stay in Uruguay to ship the truck, we probably would have moved on….the beaches were beautiful, but we were feeling restless and were getting a bit bored.

We headed inland for a few days for a change of scenery and ended up at a free municipal campground at Grutas de Salamanca. We arrived to find a work crew there…they were going to be paving the road, so we wouldn’t be able to leave the next day. We decided we would stay two days. I asked the worker about wood for a fire, and he said there wasn’t any readily available, and then went on to warn us about one of the trees that grows in the area. He said that the sap from the tree was very toxic, that people would develop bad “burns” if they touched and that the smoke from this wood was very, VERY bad. He also said to watch for snakes, as they were migrating this time of year and were very poisonous. Okay, that was enough to convince us to not go traipsing around in the woods looking for firewood on the rocky slopes….we did without. It was a pretty nice campground, with good bathrooms, hot showers and electricity, all for free, but the workers continued to work through the weekend and it got a bit crowded with tenters, so we moved on.

We camped for a night in Punta del Este, a Miami style beach front town, and had an expensive, pier-side, late afternoon lunch of salmon bruscetta and fried calamari.

A few more nights of random beach camping and we headed for an Airbnb we had booked that was about 70 kilometres east of Montevideo. We spent the days there cleaning the inside and the outside of the truck and camper, doing laundry, and sorting out what we wanted to have with us for the 7 weeks we would be without the truck.

Then it hit us…. In a day or two there would be no more driving in South America …..Seymour would be loaded into the container on April 8th, and, if all went well, we would retrieve him on May 30th, in Halifax, Canada. We reminisced about the past 17 months of driving as we prepared the truck for the container. We visited so many fantastic sites and sights. What a trip it has been…… We’ve met so many great people, both locals and other travellers, and have received hundreds of heartfelt “thumbs up”, whistles and cheers from people along our route….it never failed to make us smile. Now we have to switch “gears”, literally, to lightweight foot-based travel, with carry bags. This will be our new mode of tourism until we return to our own big, beautiful country and retrieve Seymour for the East coast tour!