Since Punta del Este was very close to Montevideo we decided to wake up a bit later and leave after breakfast. The plan was to spend the night in Punta del Este and then head to Punta del Diablo the next day (which is close to the border of Brazil). We arrived in Punta del Este at noon and once again were craving Caesar salads so we decided to go and indulge ourselves at Havanna with a huge salad.
After the slowest service I have ever received, and soaking up a lot of free WiFi, we finally left to look around the city and try to find some souvenirs. The thing about this city is that it is a huge touristy beach city, not so different from Mar del Plata in Argentina. We drove around the city a bit and the coastline is very nice, lined with expensive houses and apartment complexes. But that’s the thing, the city is just the beach and houses/apartments, there’s nothing else to do there. You have many beaches but they are all very similar, sand and open ocean and so many people! It’s the summer hotspot for Uruguayans, Argentinians, and even Brazilians (even though I’m not quite sure why because the beaches in Brazil are much nicer). It’s a cute city and you can go see the famous hand sculpture (which we also saw in Puerto Natales) but other than that it was just a commercialized beach. So we decided to save some money and head towards Punta del Diablo, which we heard was much less touristy and really nice.
After grabbing some (or a lot) of Freddo we cashed out U.S. dollars at the ATM and were on our way to our next destination by 3pm. It took a couple of hours and one toll of UY$55 to arrive in Punta del Diablo. From there we were quite surprised…We stumbled upon this adorable little town that had some beach houses but no apartment complexes. The whole place was much more humble than Punta del Este and seemed way more welcoming. There was no commercial anything, it was really nice!
We found a campsite (one of two) that wasn’t so far from the beach and it cost us UY$400 for the night. We decided to pay just for one night because we weren’t sure how long we wanted to stay and the sign above the register said they would not refund us if we wanted to leave early. We set up camp and went to explore the town a bit.
We drove to “downtown” which consisted of a few dive bars and restaurants and a couple of small markets along the beach. It was very quaint and kind of what you would a call a “hippie” beach. We decided, since it was evening and we drove a lot, that we would make dinner and sleep early and go to the beach the whole next day. So we went to the market, which is much cheaper than the ones in the city, and bought some awesome food for dinner and sandwiches.
After making some spaghetti carbonara and sandwiches and setting up camp it was about 8:30pm and we thought to just head to bed so we could get an early start on the next day. Well our night was awful, I would say the worst on the trip (even worse than the night we slept in our car)! There were people drinking, singing, and partying at the campsite until about 4 or 5am and no one at the facility said anything! After people finally shut up, the sun was rising and shined right through our ten and basically turned it into a sauna. So we had to wake up by about 8am, it was ridiculous.
###Map:
###Numbers:
- Left Montevideo @ 10AM
- UY$110 = Tolls
- Arrived in Punta del Este @ 12PM
- UY$485 = Lunch @ Havanna
- UY$340 = Ice cream @ Freddo
- UY$55 = Toll
- Arrived in Punta del Diablo @ 5:30PM
- UY$400 = Camping
- UY$279 = Market
- Total = UY$1669