Day 1: Theme for the Trip

Dear Reader,

Mike, Dickie, and I have been planning a 10-day trip to Uruguay and Argentina for some time. We left from New York today and will be venturing til December 13. 

In the weeks leading up to the trip, we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could make the trip as sweet as possible. Dickie insisted that the best way to maximize adventure is to ditch luxury for filth. He told me Mike's ideas (staying at nice hotels like airbnb) were fine for vacations, but not for adventures. 

Further, because adventures are born from an open mind, we need to cast aside inhibition and rationality, and instead embrace a nutty mentality in order to maximize adventure. 

"Nuts to the bones" (read: nutty to the core) and filth will be our two themes for this trip. Instead of planning exactly where/what we'll be doing, we will go with the flow so long as that flow is chock full of filth and nuts. 

Any doubt I had about whether Dickie was actually serious about these themes disappeared when he started the trip by doing basically the nuttiest thing you could do as we were boarding our flight:

So Dickie, well he ain't coming anymore.

Stay tuned, dear reader, to see what kind of nutty, filthy adventures Mike and I get into, as Dickie tries to hitch another ride to South America after missing his flight. We hope to go surfing, ride a horse, eat good steak, and go on our first non-SDT wine tour (more Tapfar, more fun), though who knows where the filth will take us! First stop -- Montevideo. 

------------------

Biggest Nut Award: Dickie. Not even close. 

Day 2: How is this possible

What the Dickie.

Dickie boarded our 11:55p connecting flight (Miami > Montevideo) at 11:56p. Here's how it went down: After realizing he was in the wrong airport he jumped in an Audi with a guy named Reggie, zoomed to LaGuardia, and got a seat on the last flight to Miami (our connecting city). The flight was delayed so our young hero landed in MIA just 20 minutes before our international flight was to take off. He deplaned and broke a land speed record sprinting to gate D46. Thing is, Mike and I were at gate D24 and, importantly, the airplane was too. After realizing this, Dickie rebroke the niacent land speed record sprinting to the correct gate, D24, and boarded the plane one minute after the flight had technically departed. 

When we arrived in Montevideo at noon on Saturday almost everything was closed. We walked around for a couple of hours and checked out a local street fair. 

The Gang's all here

After, we checked into the Caballo Loco hostel and got prepared for the adventure ahead. We had no idea how nuts and filthy we would get. And Dickie still thinks Montevideo is pronounced "MonteDeVito"

Dumbest Guy Award: Dickie -- the outlets here are different from US outlets and require an adapter. Dickie brought this piece of work:

A US to US converter. Dumbest guy. Where did he even find this?

Day 3: Punta del Este

Our four hour trek to the beaches of Punta del Este started at 5am on Sunday. Dick and I packed our backpacks while Mike mashed away at his clothes, trying to jam a month's worth of clothes (three pairs of shoes, five pairs of dress socks, etc) into a giant duffle bag and a backpack.

We checked out of the hostel and made our way to the bus stop. A couple of transfers and a few empanadas later, and and most of us were sitting on a huge thumb at the beach.

-__-

The first hostel we walked into had room for the three of us in a dumpster of a room out back. The smell of tetanus baked under the rusted tin roof -- it was perfect. 

We rented a surfboard from the front desk and the three of us headed back out to the beach. Mike and I spent the morning teaching ourselves to surf, taking turns strapping our bodies to the board and rolling around in the waves until they washed us ashore. Dickie, in the meantime, started on his tan and picked up a Dumbest Guy Award along the way for packing the wrong beach towel:

In the evening we went to a street fair to pick out gourds and special straws for brewing and drinking mate, a popular Uruguian tea. 

We capped the night off with some fine dining -- good fish, steak, and wine at restaurant called Lo de Tere, and then got ready for our next adventure to Cabo Polonio, the filthiest and most nuts place yet. 

Day 4: Cabo Polonio

Cabo Polonio is a remote beach village with no electricity or running water. The first thing we read about it was this person's account of their stay:

After a three-day rainstorm, I emerged from my cabin to find the sky a loopy pink, a whale washed up on the beach and penguins wandering around in the grass. 'It's because of an eclipse,' someone in town said.

Are you kidding me. 

We asked some Urugians about Cabo Polonio who told us it is difficult to get to: "You need to take two buses to get nearby and then a sheep to get into the town." 

Are you kidding me.

Our excitement was momentarily halted when we saw that the only two hostels in Cabo Polonio were completely booked. But remembering the themes of the trip (theme: nuts to the bones) we hopped on the bus anyways, hoping to figure it out without phones or electricity but prepared to sleep on the beach (theme: filth) if we couldn't. 

We were in Cabo Polonio by mid day Monday. Turns out the "sheep" we had heard about riding was actually a double decker "Jeep". Still, it was a sweet ride into town, "sheep or no sheep" (as they say in the old country). 

Mike's friend told us that we might be able to get a place to stay by knocking on locals' doors and asking for their house for a night or two. Seemed like a nuts concept but so was an eclipse making penguins go to the beach so when we got into town we went to the first store we saw:

"Hola, me gusta su tienda. Quiero su casa." 

"Si, $80 por la noche."

"Belisimo!"

Easy. 

The store owner took us through town (the entire town is less than a mile) to the house, a small, candlelit shack with three mattresses. 

From the outside -- there is a small upper level that fit just two twin mattresses and has a window that leads to a raised porch

Basically the entirety of the first level, including the ladder that goes up to the top floor

Our hostess made us feel at home, insisting that we help ourselves to any of the kitchen supplies like salt, pepper, oil, and these sandy lemons that she already used but would probably still be okay if we blew the sand off

As we were settling in, a band of horses came barreling through our yard, chasing after some pooches. Sweet. 

We next headed for the beach, a vast stretch of sand dunes on one side and flat ocean on the other. 

The beach had weird eggs and strange things drifting ashore, which kept us entertained for most of the rest of the day until we stumbled upon a grass basketball court outside a hostel at sunset. Despite having Dickie "Knockdown D" Sutton on offense (and therefore Dickie "Lockdown D" Sutton on defense) Team USA suffered an embarrassing five game clean sweep to the locals in both 2 v 2 and 3 v 3 formats. 

Afterwards we got dinner at a shack nearby although Dickie advised us not to eat because all they had were carne (meat) sandwiches and there ain't any cows around, just horses and beached sea lions. 

As the darkness settled in on the electricity-free village, we made our way to a small moonlit bar, Joselo, that looked like a heap of bushes from the outside. Inside, we saw the walls and ceiling were constructed from flower plants and leaf plants growing through and around each other. Smooth jazz played all night while the large flowers dripped into our whiskey and wine. Bellies full of beached sea lion and wine, it was easy to fall asleep that night. 

Day 5: Travel Day

Mike and Dickie got the bug!

Last post I didn't mention that our house at Cabo Polonio was filled to the brim with red ants. It wasn't a huge deal -- we planned to spend most of the day out of the house anyways, could hang our bags on hooks out of reach from the ants, and could sleep on the deck under the stars where there were no ants. Plus the filth was endearing. 

But that night after I passed out on the deck, Dickie and Mike snuck inside the Bug House to sleep on the mattresses, which they knew were more ant colonies than mattress by now. Dumbest Guys. 

When they woke up, they had the bug! Bites everywhere. One little guy woke Dickie up by nibbling on his finger, which had swelled to several times it's normal size. Mike just let the bugs bite him through the morning. After all was said and done, Dickie's swollen hands had 14 fingers-worth of mass on them. Mike's back did too. The whole ordeal was gross and heelarious at the same time. The only concerning part was whether the bites were from just ants or whether they got the bed bugs too.

Feeling dirty, infested, and itchy, we booked it out of there. Cabo Polonio is a strange and special place -- great and terrible at the same time. A lot of grief, but the fun kind. I like to think Charlie Brown had Cabo Polonio in mind when he famously spoke of "good grief". 

Buenos Aires is a five hour bus and a two hour ferry ride away from Cabo Polonio and we wanted to make the journey by nightfall. At the bus station we bought out every single empanada they had and loaded up for our long journey ahead. 

The ferry we rode was unreal -- spacious, luxurious, new. They must have smelled the bug on us because they made us put these on our feet as we came aboard:

We arrived in Buenos Aires at 9:30p without a place to stay and took a cab to a neighborhood called Palermo Soho. There we walked from packed hotel to packed hotel until we finally found a place with room for three. By the time we had a room and stopped for dinner it was 2am. 

Having our first taste of Argentine steak at a bar called Negroni

The first order of business was to set up a quarantine area for our bugged luggage. We wanted to see if we should throw out our stuff in case some bed bugs had hitched a ride with us to Argentina. To inspect, Mike and Dickie turned off the lights to simulate a night time environment and watched their luggage with flashlights for any signs of bug movement. 

After a while without movement we called it a night. Happy to be in civilization again, I planned to look for an Airbnb with a washer/dryer the next day. 

Day 6: Buenos Aires

Getting rid of the bug was a priority for Wednesday. It cost just $3.00 to get all of our clothes and bags laundered so we dropped off everything but the clothes on our backs at the laundromat. While we waited for those to get cleaned, we stuffed the clothes we were wearing into the freezer to freeze out any final bugs. 

There wasn't much to do for an hour or so there. We enjoyed each other's company. 

Once the bug was eliminated we went to the zoo for a few hours and then to the barber, as is tradition, to get an authentic hairdo. It's my theory that, in order to properly experience a new country, one must look and feel like they're from there. 

Three cool guys

Until Buenos Aires we hadn't taken full advantage of the cuisine, though to be fair there wasn't much opportunity to because we had been traveling a lot. Plus, we ate a lot of junk food because Mike was always begging to stop for ice cream "since we're in South America". I wasn't sure how the two were related and didn't ask. 

While I'm not one to blog about food, I will say that our dinner that night at Casa Coupage -- a nine-table "closed door" restaurant -- was one of the finest meals I've ever had, and I've had several. Seven courses, five wine pairings, and a great sommelier who, to tune our senses, passed around vials of essence (for example, a vial of licorice essence) and had us guess what each was based on smell. It was a four-hour dinner to remember*, after which we explored the nightlife with some of Vio's friends who were nice enough to show us around. 

* Not everyone remembered 

Days 7 and 8: Buenos Aires

We spent our last two days in Buenos Aires doing more traditional sight seeing and sleeping in fewer ant colonies. We set up a home camp at an Airbnb in the Palermo Soho neighborhood and toured the city via bike. 

Paseo el Rosedal:

Botanical Gardens:

Leather shopping:

Trash:

We ate great steaks at Don Julio (where the tablecloths are leather) and Floreria Atlantico (hidden in the basement of a flower shop) and got drinks at a manision-turned-bar called Milion. We went to a pool hall that had tables with no pockets (games take for-ev-er!):

And even got photo evidence of us talking to girls, Mom:

When we had seen all there was to see, we hailed a cab that had no defoggers and zoomed blindly in the rain to the airport, as the driver frantically rubbed fog off the windshield with his fingers. 

We enjoyed a final glass of Malbec in the airport before boarding the plane and making our way back home. 

-----------------

Well that's about it from South America. Thanks for following along, dear reader -- we'll try to do better next time.