Punta del Este & Chuy, Uruguay

After escaping Montevideo and its urban “charms” we traveled by bus along the southern shore of Uruguay to the resort town of Punta del Este. It is a mid-sized city located on a peninsula of land jutting out to the Rio de La Plata/Atlantic Ocean and is surrounded by kilometres of beautiful wind-swept white sand beaches. In the summer the town supposedly bustles with tourists and surfers but as we discovered during our visit, in the winter season the town is absolutely dead. Prior to arriving we had researched online where we wanted to stay for the night but much to our dismay everything was closed for the season when we arrived. So with our heavy backpacks we trudged around town looking for lodging and after being turned away either by locked doors or exorbitant prices we found ourselves a reasonably priced room at a hotel straight out of the 1970’s. There was green shag carpeting, parquet hardwood flooring, pin-ball machines and for some odd reason, leather lounge chairs in the narrow upper floor hallways. Our guess was that some people must prefer to sit and stare at a white painted wall only a few feet away in a depressing hallway rather than looking at the ocean from their room. Strange indeed.

Our first evening in town was rather non-descript except for a visit to a cool half-buried hand sculpture on the beach and then an exhaustive hunt for an open restaurant. Our hunt yielded few appetizing choices so we headed to a local supermarket and proceeded to make our own dinner without the aid of a microwave or stove or any utensils. The results weren’t pretty but our modified hot dogs (French baguette, breaded chicken cutlet, cheese slices and mustard) tasted good enough to keep us satisfied until the morning. The litre of beer also helped to some degree.

After sleeping in the next morning we spent the day exploring the nearly deserted town, snapping photographs of the sea, and watching what we presumed to be a very large sea lion chasing birds out in the water. Once again we were joined by a furry friend for the duration of our walk until he was distracted by a curious smell along the way. The city itself was quite nice with many wealthy summer homes and condos facing the sea.

That same evening we boarded a bus for the Uruguayan border town of Chuy. Fortunately we had done some research online about crossing into Brazil at this particular city because the events of that night and the next morning were even stranger than the leather lounge chairs in our Punta del Este hotel. The town of Chuy, Uruguay shares its main street with the Brazilian border town of Chui. One side of the street speaks Spanish the other Portuguese. One uses the Peso the other the Real. And there are no official border crossings between the two sides. Anyone can freely cross from one side to the other with no documents and no intervention from police or authorities. This concept works quite well for local Uruguayans and Brazilians but not so well for foreign tourists who need official exit and entrance stamps in their passports from each country so as to not be denied boarding a plane when leaving the country.

What we learned in Punta del Este is that the official border and immigration control stations for both towns is 2km outside the city centres. So in our limited Spanish we convinced a very nice tourist information guide at the bus station to write us a note in Spanish asking the bus driver to please stop the bus when coming into Chuy, Uruguay and wait while we quickly hopped off to get the required exit stamps before continuing into the city centre. Our plan worked to perfection with both the bus waiting for us and immigration providing the stamps in our passports in record speed. Arriving in the city centre we made our way to a pre-booked hostel by foot before retiring for the night.

The next morning we awoke early and headed by foot to the Brazilian border where we simply walked across the demarcation line as if it was a crosswalk. After finding the bus station we inquired about the next bus out of town to Porto Alegre, Brazil, the cost in Brazilian Reals, and where the nearest bank might be. The bank directions turned out to be somewhat suspect as soon enough we found ourselves back in Uruguay before crossing back into Brazil two minutes later. It was officially the shortest stay in a country for each of us in our different travels. After finally getting some local currency and dodging numerous horse and wagons (which we also saw many of throughout Uruguay) we hired a taxi driver to take us to the official Brazilian border and immigration control station a few kilometres outside of Chui, Brazil. This quick trip was also successful and now with all the proper stamps in our passports we booked our ticket out of town. The entire process of exiting and entering the two countries was another strange experience made all the more odd by the fact that we officially did not belong in either country for about twelve hours. Fortunately, the relaxing beaches and warmer weather of Campeche, Brazil our next destination (near Florianopolis on Ilha de Santa Catarina) was waiting for us only 22 hours to the north.