Ah, Rocha, my love…

Mondays are always hard, but especially difficult are those that follow an exceptionally beautiful weekend. Our group traveled together to Rocha, a province of Uruguay east of Montevideo, along the coast. We stayed in a beachfront hotel, Hotel Palma de Mallorca, in La Paloma, a small city in that area. It was pretty, all white with open spaces everywhere and gauzy curtains blowing in the breeze. It had a pool, although I can’t imagine why, when you can just walk out the back door and step onto the soft sand of the beach, the waves lapping up on shore twenty feet from where the hotel property ends.

We had a really incredible impromptu worship service on the beach the first night we were there. It was amazing…a group of us went outside at 11:30 or so to look at the stars, and we were so in awe that we just stood together and sang praises to God while the waves kept time in the background. 🙂 A beautiful night.

We left for Rocha early Friday morning and got there in time for lunch, which was simple burgers at the hotel. Aftwerward, we bussed to Cabo Polonio, a place so remote that we actually had to get out of the bus a few miles out and pile into big 4×4 trucks with frames rigged over the beds so that people could sit in several layers, swaying against each other as the vehicles bumped and thudded over rough terrain and through huge puddles of muddy water. When we finally broke through what seemed like an endless wilderness and found ourselves on the sands of another beach, untouched except for the tire tracks left by these trucks, the sight was breathtaking: blue, blue water crested with white foam, laying itself out on grey sand as an even brighter blue sky watched it all, white-hot sun illuminating it all.

The actual town of Cabo Polonio was just a bunch of unconnected shacks and shanties, brightly painted, with no fences or boundary lines to mark property, just big expanses of grass and sand between. People were selling handmade clothes and jewelry and hammocks and wind chimes from under little tents of breathable fabric, and everyone walked barefoot in beach attire through the streets. Such a peaceful place. The beach was lovely (and I got totally, totally sunburned, thanks to the cool water and refreshing breeze that never allowed me to feel the fiercely searing sun) and we had a great time dancing around in the waves and the clear water, searching for shells.

Dinner that night was on our own at 11:30 that night (people eat late here in South America), and I had a hamburger. In fact, I don’t think I ate anything but hamburgers in the meals we ate on our own. They’re cheap here, and decent. Side note: It’s impossible to eat a meal here without meat in it. That’s just silly. Why wouldn’t you want meat with that? Why on earth would you want vegetables? Here, have another slab of beef and a piece of bread.

Saturday morning was spent on a tour of the Ombú forest. This is an extremely interesting place. First of all, we had to boat down to the forest through this place that reminded me a lot of Louisiana. It had that deep bayou feel, with the kids chasing each other with fishing poles and throwing crabs into the water with cries of “¡Estás libre!” while adults dragged canoes full to the brim with freshly caught shrimp through the shallows along the edges. The tour guide on the boat gave all sorts of really amazing facts about the water, which is directly connected to the ocean so that, depending on the tides, it is sometimes salt water and sometimes fresh water, and you can fish in the same place at different times and catch different kind of fish there. Unfortunately, I don’t remember much of what he was saying; I was too busy thoroughly enjoying the wind in my face and the sight of free-roaming cows wading through the water.

Ombú trees, though, are an incredible phenomenon. Everywhere else in the world that they grow (and they only really grow in the Río de la Plata region, I think), they are solitary trees, because cows graze on the young trees and do not give them a chance to grow. Because of this, people have always assumed that they are solitary plants. In their ideal state, though, they grow in forests. This place, this ombú forest that we visited, is the only one of its kind, and so it is of vital importance that it stays the way it is, unmolested by humanity. It is the only place that the trees can be studied in their truly natural habitat. Here, the trees have been protected from cows by helpful thorny plants that surround them while they are young.

And I’ve said trees, but these plants are really not trees. They look like trees, but they do not grow in rings with bark like trees do. The guide said that they are actually genetically closest to grass – huge, towering grass! They actually grow kind of gelatinously, so that they look like they were poured into the shape they are, not grown into it. The weird thing is the way that the tree will mold to itself. It may grow a branch, but then three feet later, when that branch touches another, they grow back together, forming one bigger branch, all smoothly connected.

Also weird are the trees’ signature holes. Because they do not have tough, impenetrable bark like trees do, they absorb a lot of the water from humid air, and this causes holes to form in the trees, sometimes big holes – big enough to fit our entire Study Abroad group! The guide said that if the trees are genetically strong, they reinforce the walls of the lower part of the tree so that they can stand under their own weight even with the holes. If not, then they fall. Here’s the amazing thing, though. Their fall doesn’t mean their death. From the remains of what the tree was, it will grow upward again, this time with its old self as a stonger, more solid base, and it will thrive in this new form.

I thought, what a great metaphor for people in life these trees are! They grow best in a community, near others but with their own room to breathe. They are almost fluid, changing their shape according to circumstances, wearing only the thorns of neighboring plants as armor to protect them against predators. And because they are not impervious to life, things affect them, punching holes in their foundation, and if they fall, they regenerate with their failure as a lesson and an opportunity for a stronger foundation on which to build again.

Anyway, that was how the morning was spent. For lunch, we drove to Estancia El Paraíso where we ate lunch while peacocks and ducks and chickens wandered between our feet (we tried not to think about the fact that the meat we were cutting up on our plates probably looked not so long ago like the chicken that was pecking at our toes under the table).

That afternoon, we went to Punta del Diablo, which was also a very nice beach, but I was already sunburned and pretty tired of ocean, so I just slathered myself with sunscreen and hunkered down on my beach towel, writing in my notebook for the couple of hours we spent there.

Sunday, I slept in, which was fantastic. In the afternoon, a big group of us went horseback riding for a couple of hours. It was fun, and I had a feisty but really sweet-tempered horse, which was excellent, but I ended up very, very sore. I hurt today, from the sunburn and the saddle-soreness. Still, definitely a weekend to relax and let some of my worries and fears and doubts and stresses be calmed.

p. s. I will live in Rocha someday. No ifs, ands or buts.

~ by Sara McPherson on March 2, 2009.