Dec. 13, 2008: I ended up staying in Buenos Aires until Sat. morning, which was cool.  Nate really helped me out....running around town in Silver AL, through mad traffic, taking care of last minute business.  I got my car insurance settled and we bought tickets to Colonial, Uruguay for the next morning.  When errands were through, we went to 'The Puerto Roja' (The bar Nate works for/at) and did a few hours of work.  Nate has been building a new office on the roof...from pretty much nothing...and we did some painting and a lot of cleaning up from the last couple projects (cement, plywood, steel) to prepare for the next (a new floor Nate shall be putting in).  When work was through we popped over to a local rock concert, where one of the bartender's wife was playing (drums).  After music we had one of the best dinners ever, which was at a very cheap little unassuming restaurant that Nate frequented.  The portions were huge and we sat on the street and ate a huge salad and a mega thick steak and a heap of potatoes puree.  If you didn't know about this place in advance, you would never think anything of it if you happened past, but it was soooo good.  By this time is was after 1 AM so after dinner we decided not to go out to the bar and and ruin the following morning and our trip to Uruguay.

     The next morning we got up at 8 and got coffee, etc.  We were at the 'Buquebus' high speed ferry terminal by 10 and after lots of immigration and customs paperwork we got the car onto the huge ferry by 11:20.  The ride across the vast river that divides Argentina from Uruguay...and Buenos Aires from Colonia took about an hour on the high-speed ferry.  The water is a chocolate brown with silt and there is not too much to do on the ferry but drink Guinnesses and joke around.  When the ferry finally stopped, the crowds lined up to get off and we got caught in a hoard.  It took us so long that we got paged on the ferry announcement system, to get to our car, which was sitting there all alone.

     We botched the proper Aduanas ritual leaving the Buquebus, and had to turn around to get the right papers.   When everything was straightened out, we grabbed some ATM cash and lunch in Colonia, Uruguay and then cruised to where we are now: Punta Del Este.  Our ride took us through Montevideo and we drove through the long way to get a little look at the riverfront city. 

     When we finally rolled into Punta Del Este, we pulled over and sat on the beach to get our barrings, then we drove around for a while scoping out a good hotel.  We ended up at a really nice place...super posh, which we convinced ourselves to do for one night just to live the vida pura.  It is the off season, so we got a really good price.  And this place is totally Mac.  It looks like a shopping mall down stairs.  There was a fashion show going on in the lobby, a casino, beautiful view from every room, killer beach bar and pool and hot tub outside.  They have full on cushy couches outside...must have to bring them in when it rains.  Silver Al was parked by the valet, which doesn't happen too often.  I can only imagine what the valet thought when he climbed in her...first disgust and then probably love!

     Last night we bought a bottle of really cheap and delicious rum called 'Ron del Navigante', but we dubbed 'The Navigator'.  We did it up drinking it on the rocks, listening to music in our nice room, before going out.  We didn't go out until around 3 AM.  We caught a cab to the bar 'Moby Ricardo' which was raging, and we hung out there until the sun rise.  Back at the room, we finished off The Navigator and hit the hay.  Now I have just woken up and need to check out of here.  It looks beautiful outside and I feel .... alright.  Nate is doing pretty good too, which, considering that he mixes his Rum with Coke, is impressive.  Maybe the worst is yet to come?  But I have to go, for real.  I am sorry to leave out many details of our last night in BA and our first day and night in Uruguay.  I hopefully go back in later and fatten up some descriptions, but just getting all this down is a colossal effort right now and check out already happened. Gotta run, but loving Uruguay.  Today will head up the coast to find a remote beach to camp on...that's the plan!

Hola!  Que tal amigos?  Lo siento que yo no escrito por dos o tres dia.  La vida aqui es todo tranquilo, no hay muchos cosas para dicer…solo la playa, el hostel, mi nuevo amigos, pescado, ron, heilo, limon, un poco fumo, el sol, y mi trabajo para vender mi coche (Plata Al). 

(Hello friends, what’s up?  I’m sorry that I haven’t written for two or three days.  Life here is totally chill, there is not much to report, only the beach, the hostel, my new friends, fish, rum, ice, lime, small fires, the sun and my work to try to sell my car (Silver Al).)

     Let’s see….The taxi driver never called back and I think the reason was because it is really complicated and expensive to nationalize a foreign vehicle.  I still have some leads, however!  Most of my chips are on the owner if the hostel, and American guy (I’m guessing a bit younger than I am) named Brian.  He is really interested, to the point where I have sat back a bit waiting for his final answer before I go elsewhere…which would be a little walk down to the police station.  They have expressed interested, and if Brain isn’t interested, they would be my best bet, since they can pull strings, and sort of launder my cars papers.  In the states the police station isn’t your first choice of locations to waltz in and propose illegal activities, but down here, they are more able to accomplish what the regular guy cannot.  Anyway, Brain had to leave unexpectedly today (power outage last night blew the reception computer) so I’m going to try to pin him down tonight.  I did talk to his girlfriend today just as I was thinking of driving down to the police station.  I told her I didn’t want to go behind Brian's back, but I needed to move on this car sale thing, and I had heard he was going to be gone for a couple days.  She told me he was still very interested and she explained the whole difficulty of getting a car down here and she told me that Brain would be back tonight..  She seemed really into it as well, so, with the girlfriend now supporting the idea, I have new found confidence and I’ll hold out a little longer.

        The hostel here is very nice….friendly and fun.  I have a bunch of friends to kill time with.  We cook big fish dinners every night, drink, go down to the bar (also run by the hostel).  The place is called Hostel Diablo Tranquilo…the bar:  Diablo Tranquilo Bar. 

     This update might be shortish, but I’ll give you the blow by blow anyway.  Let’s see…where did I leave off….Well…On Monday night, Nate and I ate at a really nice restaurant…not expensive, just really nice.  It was on the edge of town, down a dark dirt road that wound through mostly dark little shanties.  The name was ‘El Veigo y El Mar’ Old Man and the Sea, and it was the real thing.  An older, wily, bearded chef owner, candles, low ceiling covered in fishing nets, very friendly and attentive waitresses.  We ordered fish and salads and a beer.  Wine would have fit the atmosphere a tad more, but we had already had a few beers and wanted to keep the same thing going.  (Beers here, by the way, are always served in a liter bottle with two glasses, so in that way, even if it does not hold quite the same charm as a bottle of wine, it is a little more, dare I say, intimate…or communal….that’s the word I was looking for...than getting a couple beers in the states.  Nate also had a plate of calamari and I had some stuffed tomatoes.  The food was really delicious…fresh, fresh fish.  It was served….damn, I can’t remember how it was served anymore….I’ve eaten so gad-dang much fish this past week I can’t even remember…just drawing a blank, because I do remember that it was exceptional…(if, apparently, not quite memorable).  The proud owner-chef was always checking on how the food was, the waitress watched our every move.  A big old lazy dog spread out at our feet, but growled quietly at any attempt we made to pay him attention.

     After dinner, we went back to the hostel for a couple glasses of rum with our new peeps here.  I believe that it was around 3 AM when we finally went down to the bar.  At the bar we shared beers for a while and then switched to ‘the usual’ which was poured tall into the glasses.  Sunrise at the bar (with a beautiful view of the beach) was a little sloppy.  At around six, as the music at the bar was turned from low to off, we wobbled our way back to the hostel with one local guy we call Chicho, because we can’t remember his name.  Believe it or not, at 6 AM the tiny corner kiosco was open to sell up little bags of flavorless potato chips and a bottle of water through their night-time chicken wire security shield.  (no coconut trees here to depend on for mid-sleep hydration, unfortunately)

     We slept until two the next day and had a lazy one.  I drove the car back into the center of the village with the 'for sale' sign on it and locked her down.  We walked out on the actual Punto del Diablo, which was a bunch of wave smashed rocks with an angry looking statue out near the tip.  Then we went back to the hostel with a sack of fish right out of the monger’s wife’s hands, and  a couple tomatoes, a big onion, some olives and butter and garlic, a couple cans of whole peeled tomatoes, a red pepper, a couple bottles of rum, some ice and limes, and some spices from the market.   We cooked up an enormous pan of Pescado Veracruzana (Fish Veracuz) and some others cooked up some rice and shrimps.  More and more gathered on the porch (the kitchen is on the upper porch, outside) and my new Swedish friend Frederico (who works here and wants to do a similar drive through the Americas) arrived with two bottles of cachaca (Brazilian cane alcohol) and made a vat of Caipirinhas.  It was a party. 

      Yesterday I drove Nate to Montevideo, to catch a ferry back to BA.  We left around 12:30.  The drive was supposed to take around three hours -and it did- despite a couple of setbacks including the only road out of town completely torn up by an excavator and running out of gas (I always carry a gas can so that only cost us a couple minutes…the security of the gas can makes me push the limits of the depths of the gas gauge little).

      Montevideo was nice and we got to spend a couple hours walking around the city.  We had a beer in a nice plaza and walked to a few others.  There was a craft market going on on one street with Mate cups (mate is the very addictive and stimulating tea-like drink hugely popular in Argentina and Uruguay, which people carry around in thermoses and drink out of mate cups, literally all day.  I’ve had plenty today already) and antiques, and hippie wares (jewelry and woven hats)  Nate bought a really nice wool hat organically dyed with various herbs.

      When the time came, I dropped Nate off at the Bouquebus terminal and drove home.  (ahh, I just called this place home...neat!)  The drive out of Montevideo was a bit traffic choked with the usual fender benders slowing things down.  People don’t drive in rows here, people drive in a much more anarchical fashion, squeezing and pushing into any little gap between the two cars in front of them.  After getting out of town, however, the ride was smooth and uneventful.  I rolled back into Punto del Diablo at nine PM, just as the sun was setting.  At the hostel another big fish dinner, strikingly similar to the Veracruz, was under way and moments later I was fish-whipped again.  Last night was the earliest night yet for me.  I was in bed by 2:30.  (Early by Uruguay standards). I would have been in bed before that, even, but as I passed reception, Shawna, a nice girl from London that works the graveyard shift, bought me a liter of beer as a thank you for cleaning up the kitchen and porch after the colossal mess that followed the dinner and drinks the night before.  (Everyone had headed to the bar around 4 AM and I was feeling mellow after catching sunrise at the bar the night before, so I waited back and fell into my kitchen-cleaning-meditation that I sometimes enjoy…I also have a lot of sympathy for those who have to clean up after messy tourists, being in the business that I am in.)

     Today I was up the earliest yet…maybe 10 AM or so.  I had my coffee, and hung around for a while, going through and cleaning out Silver Al. Around 2 o'clock  I went out to lunch with Matt…a guy from Colorado that I have befriended.  Lunch was fresh squeezed mango-pineapple-orange juice,  grilled fish with a small garnish salad, and some interesting seaweed fritters.   All very good.  After lunch it was about four and I went to the beach where I laid in the sun for a couple hours.  I didn’t swim today, because a helpful Aussie with a hardcore first aid kit dressed my burnt finger….oh, I didn’t tell you about my burnt finger.  Besides burning a hole through two layers of shirts during the gale-force beach chicken, I burnt the hell out of the top of my middle finger on my right hand.  I must have pressed into a glowing ember while pulling out a potato.  Anyway, it hurt more than the other burns I got that night and then it blistered in the meanest and biggest blister that I have ever seen.  After draining the blister (do you want to hear this?....)   After draining the blister, there was this huge flap of skin…I’m sure everyone thought I was a leper….and it started to get a little sore and red.  Today, cleaning out the car, I tore the thing right open and got it filled with various dirt from all the Americas combined.  That only made it more angry and sore.  It really did look disgusting.  So anyway, this helpful guy gave me the goods to clean and dress the thing up.  It makes typing hard cuz I can’t bend my finger that well, and I didn’t want to swim with the dressing, even though salt water would help it, because I want to enjoy this dressing as long as possible….

    So I sat on the beach, got a little pinkish but not burned (even at four PM) and hit up the bar for a couple rums before coming back here to update you all.  Now I have been here while day has changed to night.  I am being accused of being a nerd, which I guess that I am, so I am going to un-nerd myself for a while…adios.

I wrote this off-line on Friday, but couldn’t upload it at the time:

Hello again.  I am still having a lot of problems with my laptop’s connection to the wireless signal, here in Punta Del Diablo.  Ever since I let those two Swedish guys at the Freestyle use it, it has seemed really busy doing some secret task, while I want it to be working more on my behalf.  Judging from the noises it makes, I think it might be racing miniature motorbikes around and around somewhere beneath the keyboard.  The races sound short so the track must be small, but they have scheduled the races closely together and the winner revs its engine at the finish line, getting a series of green blinks from two of my computer’s front three lights.  Either that or this computer is grinding stones into sand...whatever work this lap top is doing, it is not working for me.

   So life here hasn’t change much.  The weather: sunny, The beach: hot and breezy, The hostel: tranquilo, The food: fish and sandwiches, The drink: Ron the Navigator.  The task of selling Silver Al has sort of dissolved into a seemingly impossible feat, even though I somehow have keep grasp of a stubborn confidence that it is just going to work out, like everything has on this blessed journey.  I am cut out for this and this is not for everyone.  To think of all the things that could have gone wrong along the way…that should have...I honestly feel like Al and I are protected by some magical force.  And I don’t knock on wood anymore.  I don’t reserve in advance, research the schedule, make a plan, exercise great deals of caution.  On this trip I don’t worry about anything and the lightness of that feeling is …Esplendirosso.  Doors open for me, ferrys leave according to my schedule, people I don’t know come through for me…go out of their way to help me out.  And it is this journey, not exactly I, that is blessed.  I just happen to be one of the key players.  I’m going to sell this car.  If I don’t, I’d be alright with that, but selling the car is our destiny, Al and mine, and on this journey destiny is the only thing that can be counted on.  Apparently it is illegal to nationalize a foreign car here and Brian told me this morning that he simply doesn’t have the time to buy the car right now..  He is very busy.   His job is stressful, like mine can be back home.   Something will materialize, though.  I can feel a certain density building in the sky above and it will blow upon the tree.  I just need to sit back a little while longer here and wait for the apple to fall from her branches. And that will happen in the next eighteen and a half hours, because I have now bought a bus ticket to leave here tomorrow at 1:30 PM.  And this time, Al can’t come along.

       A little more about the non-mystical world around me now:  My group of friends has slowly shifted a little more to some of the employees here, just because they are a constant, while many others come and go.  Kiki, Juan Pablo, Shawna, Ignacio, Bailey, Frederico, Santiago and Susana all have been welcoming as the time has past.  I think when you work at a place like this you are a little distant at first because people come and go, but when someone starts to hang around a while like me, people open up their hearts a little more.  That was the case with the Uruguyans, anyway.  Frederico and Shawna were just hugely warm from the moment I stepped into the place.   A Spanish women, Raquel, who had the bunk above mine before I switched rooms has been a good friend.  She is backpacking around by herself for four months.  She says she is a graphic designer, but I call her professor because I can’t say a word to her without being grammatically corrected.  She will be on the same bus to Montevideo that I will be catching tomorrow, so I’m had better start studying up now.  Another good friend has been this Dutch guy, Abrahm, who just glows with positive energy and makes me laugh at almost everything.  He has a big tuft of wild windblown hair and a sun burnt nose.  Yesterday he took a surfing lesson and today he is feeling sick, which he blames on getting seawater driven deep up into his face.  He is also on an extensive vacation.  Johaunus is a tallish skinny soft-spoken Swedish guy who just reeks of kindness and good will and quietly drinks back bottles of wine until the alcohols glow overtakes the sunburn on his face.  A couple, Don and Jess have also been friends.  Don is a 49 year old chef (from Minneapolis I think) and Jess is from Buenos Aires.  Don is way into the punk rock scene in Buenos Aires and gave me the low down on all the good bars and the debauchery that goes on in them.   We have a lot of musical tastes in common, so it was fun talking with him.  A little earlier Jess played me a few funny YouTube videos of an Argentine comedian that did farcical music interviews and it was a riot, even if I didn’t understand every bit.   There are others too…good folks.  I am just so bad with names, it’s embarrassing.  (for instance, Don might be John or even Tom…or Tim). 

      So tonight there is a party in the forest.  A guy from Montevideo was walking all over town handing out rave-like flyers for it and a lot of us shall go. I have no idea what to expect.  I’ll try to get this posted and write more later.