After a frustrating night of internet issues, getting locked out of the visa application several times and only having had 2 hours of sleep, we finally managed to complete and pay for Andrew’s visa application. We had breakfast and I got a refreshing swim in the roof top infinity pool in before we checked out just after 11:00am.

We had 284km to ride which took 5 hours. We took Ruta 5 all the way – after fuelling up in Montevideo, we rode along Ruta 5 which was a highway with initially two lanes and maximum speed of 90 km/hr with traffic lights and lots of roundabouts. We also noticed a lot of palm trees that had all leaves cut off and only the trunk left and others with brown wilted fronds. We later found out that there is a devastating infestation of palm trees in Uruguay by the Red Palm Weevil (Rhynchophorus ferrugineus) which was first detected in 2022 and had killed 1000s of trees in Uruguay with fears it will spread to Brazil 🥺. We passed one toll section and rode up to the boom gate but the light did not change – after a little while someone came out and waved at us indicating to ride around the boomgate 😂 not sure why it could not read our plates since we had registered them on line 🤔

We had to negotiate several construction sites and one of them with a section of dirt road right at the roundabout where we pulled off to refuel in Florida 😉 at a ANCAP. There was a restaurant and we were blown away by the choices of sweets and food and a full supermarket – we had spinach and cheese empanadas and I spotted a bottle of green juice that said detox which I convinced Andrew to share with me 😂 I expected it to be Spirulina similar to a juice I like in Australia. Unfortunately, it was nothing like it – it smelled like someone emptied the grass of the catcher of a mower behind a barn of cow latrine into a bottle 🤢 – Andrew thought it may have been seaweed? I could only drink it while holding my nose shut 😂🤢 but the rest and the biscuits we bought were very nice. Still the land of contrasts- we had ridden through farmland the entire day with shacks and very poor looking houses and there was a very well built, modern restaurant with good food in the middle of nowhere.

We continued another 2 hours through more farmland and one more toll booth where we were again told to ride around the boom gate. We arrived at 4:06pm at the accommodation and nobody was there – I messaged them on WhatsApp and they sent someone to let us in and show us the room – we were the only guests. They said they would not be able to provide breakfast which was fine as we had our coffee, cereal, yoghurt and milk with us and there was a fridge and a kettle in the room.

We turned the air conditioning on – yes it was warm enough now that we needed A/C not heaters in the rooms 👍🤗 and tried to find a restaurant in town for dinner. We walked over the long bridge over the Río Negro just on a beautiful sunset to get to the town centre. We took pictures of the sunset and a statue of a woman in a blue dress who represents lemanjá – the queen of the sea. We walked down the main street to where the restaurant was located right next to the beautiful church (Santa Isabel de Portugal), and the restaurant was shut😞 – it was supposed to open at 7pm and 20 minutes before 7 it looked very much closed for the season – we kept walking around looking for other restaurants but only found street food vendors and cafes with limited food choices – we eventually settled for one of those which had Schnitzel and salad, and a young guy who spoke some English. The Schnitzel was not really good – thick burned crumbs and thick dry meat 😞 but the cabbage salad was nice and I don’t even like cabbage😂 and we then treated ourselves to some of their nice cakes for dessert. Not one of the best meals we had on this trip and when we walked back to the hotel, the restaurant we wanted to go to had actually opened 😂 next time we will be more patient 👍😂. We walked back over the bridge to our accommodation and there were lots of small motor scooters and motorcycles on the road most without lights, multiple riders up to 3-4 including toddlers on the bikes and nobody wears helmets 🥺. In the distance we saw the glow of a big factory or plant that looked like a refinery – you have to read the next post to find out what it actually was 😉

We used the fast internet in the place to finally get one of the long overdue blogs out and had a very good night sleep in the large king sized bed.