Punta del Este

So, this weekend was supposed to be a big group trip to Punta del Este, the beautiful, beach resort town on the coast of Uruguay. Unfortunately, the weather was dismal and rainy, which doesn’t lend itself to sunny afternoons on the beach and picnic lunches on a breezy island, so the trip was postponed until next weekend.

Two smaller groups, however, had already put deposits down so that they could stay for a night (or three) and spend the whole weekend in this pretty place, and neither group decided to back out because of the weather. One of the groups (seven girls and one guy lol) stayed in a luxurious hotel near the beach, enjoying the shopping and the nightlife rather than the beaches because of the rain. They’re staying Thursday night, Friday night and tonight and coming back tomorrow.

The other group – my group – was composed of a more penny-pinching set: me, Morgan, Ashley, Lawson, Ben and Sam. We left yesterday afternoon for the two hour bus ride (the ticket’s something like 7 bucks) and arrived in Punta del Este at 5:30 or so, then walked (taxis in Punta are outrageously expensive) to our hostel, “Roger’s House.”

This place is run by a couple of surfer dudes, and it honestly feels like a bachelor’s pad; I swear, these guys just looked around their house one day and were like, you know what? We’ve got a couple extra rooms in the back. I bet if we stuck some bunk beds in there, we could charge people to stay. And so they did. The feeling of this place was totally laid-back: as soon as we walked in the open glass front doors, we were greeted by a couple of guys lounging shirtless in the living room on the couch and floor, watching a movie like they had nothing else to do in the world.

We had asked for a six-person room (someone wisely advised us to try to always go with enough people that we could buy out a room in a hostel, so that we didn’t end up sleeping next to weirdos), but we ended up with two rooms that shared a bathroom, one with four beds and the other with three. We split it up half and half, guys in the smaller room with three beds and girls in the other.

Our group arrived at the hostel about the same time a plumber did, which was good, since our toilet was leaking all over the floor. We assumed, when the plumbers went into the bathroom, that they were going in to fix the toilet. Not so. Next thing we knew, our toilet was being carried out the door and into the backyard. It came back eventually, and no longer leaked, but I wish I had a picture of our faces. Our expressions said something like, “Excuse me? Did we just pay $25 a night to pee our pants?”

We didn’t stick around in the hostel long; the pounding of the waves called. We changed into swimsuits and made the trek down to the almost entirely empty beach, where the weather and the scenery were beautiful. The sun never came out yesterday, but that was definitely not a problem. The weather was a humid 75 degrees or so, with just the hint of a breeze, and fog hung over the sand so you felt like the beach went on forever into oblivion. The waves were towering, surfers’ waves, and the water that ran up on the sand was constantly whipped into foam.

I have never seen waves like these. They’re a little bit ominious, actually, because you can wade out into the water up to your thighs, and as you see a big wave rolling toward the beach, the water sucks away from you, feeling like sandpaper because its dragging silt past your calves, and the water level drops down to your ankles, and then suddenly you’re smashed with the force of the breaking wave, driven backward in a spray of foam. It was incredible. If I could relive that afternoon every day for the rest of my stay in South America, I would be thoroughly happy.

Fighting the push and pull of the waves, running up and down the beach and having foam- and sandball-throwing wars exhausted our group pretty thoroughly, and although it was pretty hard to grasp the passing of time because the sun was hidden in the greyness, I’m pretty sure it was about eight-thirty or nine at least by the time the rumbling in our stomachs was enough to tug us out of the sand and back onto las calles in search of a restaurant.

Point of interest: advertising works. All the way up and down la rambla, there were signs advertising the Burger King Steakhouse Burger. By the time we’d rejoined civilization and were walking past touristy stores and cafes, we had to have Burger King. Nothing else would do.

It took a lot of walking and a little directional help from our friend the policeman, but we finally found it, right next to (what else?) a McDonald’s. But the Mickey D’s here are much worse than they are in the States, if that tells you anything, so the choice was an easy one. We had it our way.

Burger King was quite expensive, something close to twice what we would have paid back home, but I have never tasted anything so delicious in my life. I’m sure it helped that we were absolutely starving (as a local Uruguayan saying goes, “the best sauce is hunger”), but these burgers really were good. Perfectly seasoned, flame-kissed beef and fresher-than-fresh veggies, mixed with hot, salty fries and icy cold drinks made for a thoroughly satisfying dining adventure. One thing I really miss about the U.S. is bottomless drinks; I could have had a dozen refills that night and still wanted more.

We walked back to the hostel and hung out in the girls’ room, which was the larger of the two and had a “couch” of sorts – really just a pair of cushions set up in an “L” shape, but they were comfortable. We played a bunch of games and I drew a huge tattoo – essentially, a big conglomeration of doodles – on Ben’s shoulder, and then we turned off the lights and told scary stories, which was something of a bad idea, considering the night that was to follow.

You have to understand a couple of things, to understand why we might have been spooked. First, as soon as we’d gotten of the bus and started walking through the streets of this strange South American city, we were joking about how this would be the perfect setup for a horror movie. Second, the sliding glass door that opened straight into our room from the backyard/patio did not shut, so we had sort of made do by finding a broken screen door leaning up against the back wall of the house and leaned it over the opening, then drawing the curtains over that. Not very secure, really. Third, Ben was telling stories about creepy sounds, and as he was talking about them, we could hear corresponding ones in the hostel – the “drip, drip” of the stories’ murder victims’ blood was accompanied by the slow drip of the toilet, the banging of attackers coincided with the banging on the door of a couple of hostel guests who had stayed out too late and gotten locked outside, and the howling of the wind matched with the sounds of the growing rainstorm we could hear outside.

At something like 3 in the morning, it started to rain extremely hard, and the guys who ran the hostel and some guests came outside on the back patio (we could hear everything, of course, without a closed door between us) to shake the water out of the chairs and have themselves a good ol’ time in the yard. Also, because of the weird air pressure, when another female guest came stomping through our room to get to the bathroom, the door slammed behind her, and the sound of the flush was near-deafening.

When we woke up the next morning and started packing our things up, expecting to have to check out at 10, one of the guys in charge of the place came in and said that, although people would be coming in to take the beds at 11 a.m., we could leave our stuff in the closets or wherever and go in and out all day if we liked, just go to the beach and come back for a shower or whatever. Like I said, the place was really relaxed. So I give our hostel a 9 out of 10 on relaxed, fun atmosphere, and a 2 out of 10 for a good night’s sleep. But seriously, that afternoon on the coolest beach in history would have made a way worse hostel worth it.

Anyway, after a very tasty lunch at a pizzeria (they had real pepperoni for their pizza, which is both rare and fabulous) we boarded a bus home and returned this afternoon, thoroughly happy with our weekend.We also cooked taco salad (everyone misses Tex-Mex food) and the whole house shared the cost, so it ended up being only about $2.50 a person for a fantabulous dinner, so that was great, too.

And the weekend’s not over yet! Tomorrow, we go to the Carnaval parade and then come home to watch the Super Bowl! Can’t wait…stay tuned for a blog about it!

~ by Sara McPherson on February 1, 2009.