We took the overnight bus from Porto Alegre to Punta del Este.  While we didn’t get a great night’s sleep the journey itself was very efficient.  We were provided with hot food, drinks, a working wifi, blankets etc. for the journey.  Also the hostess looked after all the frontier formalities for us so we could relax throughout the journey.

Crossing the border in the early morning, the Uruguayan countryside looked incredibly neat and tidy.  The verges all nicely maintained and the farmsteads well organised.  The fields were full of cattle, the British breeds brought to South America back in the nineteenth century seem to really thrive on the pampas grass.

Punta del Este on the drive in looked a very clean and tidy town.  The Rotary Clubs take responsibility for maintaining all the roadside verges.  Indeed I can’t recall seeing any towns in Europe with that consistent look of well maintained roadsides.  The central bus station is in the narrow piece of land which leads out to the spit where the original settlement is.

The driving in Punta del Este has to be some of the most polite and disciplined we have seen for a long while.  Even if you are waiting at a zebra crossing as you can see a big gap after the approaching car, the driver on seeing you will simply stop and wait for you to cross. Certainly a far cry from the aggressive driving back home.

The spit of land that juts out into the South Atlantic Ocean has the original settlement, including at its highest point a lighthouse and opposite across a small square the old blue church, which would not look out of place in the Caribbean Islands.  The rest of the town has multiple tower blocks facing the beaches, however behind the tower blocks are many very elegant bungalows set in large gardens complete with swimming pool and big modern cars.  With all their manicured lawns and sprinkler systems these streets would not look out of place in an exclusive golf course resort.

Sandy beaches provide a pretty continuous ring around the city apart from the harbour on the West side complete with a full range of multi million dollar gin palaces that would not look out of place in the South of France or Spain.  The beaches themselves are pretty clean, though not as clean as the ones we visited in Florianópolis, but still credibly clean by any standard.  The average tourist on the beaches was much more conservatively dressed than those in Brazil and it appears to be a resort for more mature  and monied Latin Americans.

A particularly impressive bit of social responsibility on the beach is one area which specialises in looking after disabled people.  There is special platform for their facilities and volunteers manage special wheelchair facilities that allow individuals to bathe safely in the sea.  We also saw a volunteer assist a blind person safely into the sea.  Uruguay does seem to be at the front of the pack in this area.

The most unusual site in Punta del Este is the La Mano or Los Dedos (The Hand) sculpture by the Chilean artist Mario Irarrázabal which shows the image of a hand drowning in La Barra beach which has the biggest waves in Punta del Este.  The site gets very crowded during the day, but one of the advantages of the overnight bus was that first thing in the morning we had the site to ourselves apart from a pack of three feral dogs guarding the sculpture that you can see in foreground in the first photograph.

Date: 19/02/2018 to 21/02/2018