Dec. 6: Scooters and Colonial (and Mormon missionaries); zoos and bus rides

Part one: Uruguay

The last three days have been pretty busy, busy but fun.

On Wednesday night Tara and I went to a dinner party at Marc's friend's Geoff's house, a fellow Australian who Mark met randomly on a bus some where down here. The two Danish girls we met the other night were also there. Marc cooked some sort of pasta dish with chicken, mushroom, wine and some other stuff that looked a little odd but tasted delicious.

On Thursday, Tara an I took a boat to Colonial, Uruguay. Once there, we rented scooters, ate lunch, then split up for the afternoon. The scooters were fun.

About half of the streets were made of cobble stone, no doubt laid before the concept of paving was introduced in the country, so it got a little bumpy on those street.

The streets were laid out in some sort of one-way grid that took more time to figure out then I apparently had as more than once I found myself going the wrong direction on a one-way street. The one-way streets made getting places confusing because I would look at a map, decided which way to go then would have to go every which way but the way I planned to maneuver the one-way streets.

The good thing about getting lost on a scooter is you're on a scooter so backtracking is much faster then if you were walking. The bad thing about getting lost on a scooter is you can get lost much faster then if you were walking.

The traffic was light, there seemed to be lots of scooters, and the locals seemed to be used to driving around so many tourist-mobiles on the street. After I realized one of the reasons I was getting lost so much was because I was using the wrong map, I was able to find most of the tourist points on the map in the local area.

I got to climb to the top of this super-high light house and visited a handful of museums. What they called museums were often small houses with a few rooms with things on display. The houses were still built when the city was established in the 160's, so I can't fault anyone for not having the foresight to build a huge building as they settled the land in hopes someday it would be used as a museums in 3-400 years.

I got asked directions in Spanish by this older gentleman that afternoon. I was trying to figure out how to tell him I didn't know but he was welcomed to look at my map without knowing the Spanish words for 90 percent of that sentence when he asked me which language I spoke in English and when I said English, he said he did too.

It was much easier to have this conversation in English, though I was just as helpful since I still didn't know where it was he was looking for. I explained I had only bee in the town for about two hours at that point, which he understood. Though, I would have thought being one of the only white people in the town, sporting an American professional sports team hat and the fact I was ridding a scooter and holding a map in the most historical, touristy part of town would have helped him reached that conclusion on his own.

After I saw all the points on the map in the local area, I had plenty of time left so I decided to check out some of the points further away since I could with a scooter. Some of the places were a little hard to find since I had to rely on road signs I'd never seen before and had to negotiate two tricky traffic circles.

The first point on the map was listed as an infantry base. I thought it would be cool to see an old infantry base, so I went to check it out. Once there, I was greeted by a soldier with their version of the M-16 swung in front of him. I immediately hoped he had received a law of war briefing on the escalation of force as I did not want to get shot.

It turns out it wasn't an old infantry post, it was a current infantry post and understandably, the soldiers there weren't too happy about me turning it into a tourist site. Which made me wonder why someone had decided to put it on a tourist map as a point of interest. I had that thought several times the next hour or so as I went to a church, a bullring and somewhere else.

The church looked run down and no one was there, the bullring was falling apart and had a huge fence around it and the other building just looked like it was following apart.

However, it's not always about the destination, but the journey as well. On the way to the church, I had to drive though a really poor neighborhood. I started to have second thoughts about continuing on, but I felt better about not having my personal rob magnet with me and I thought God would be more likely to watch out for me since I was on my way to a church after all..

I found the church, but it didn't look like I thought it would, and there was one car in the parking lot, so I assumed it wasn't it. A short distance later, I was able to communicate with this lady who was walking down the street well enough to determine that had in fact been the church I was looking for and wasn't lost.

As she walked away, I noticed two Mormon missionaries walking down the street and waited for them to catch up to me and talked to them for a minute. They were Peru and had done their training in B.A. I thought it would have been cool had they done their pre-mission training in Salt Lake City.

I parted from the pair but caught up with them a short time later when I was looking at the bullring.

I decided to go back to the town a different way then I had come and to follow the coast back. I stopped a few times on the beach and read a little bit at my first stop.

On the way back, I went as fast as I could on the scooter, though I' not sure how fast that was since the speedometer was broken.

I ended up getting to town about an hour before I had to meet Tara, which was what I had planned to do. The town looked as touristy as McCall so I spent an hour walking around its downtown.

After we returned the scooters, we made our way back to the port, where we managed to some how bypass customs, immigration and security and walk to the boat itself, where we discovered it was the wrong boat.

We were sent in the direction of our boat company's dock and walked past our boat as it was 40 feet away from the pier.

The ticket agent scheduled us for the next boat, which was an hour and a half away. We decided just to wait in the waiting room so we wouldn't risk missing the boat again. We ended up having our first real conversation since we started traveling together and it carried over into the boat ride back, so that nice.

Part Two: the Zoo

We met up with the group from the dinner party Friday at the zoo. The zoo was huge, it took us several hours to walk though it all. I thought it would be cool to see animals that I never saw before and they had tons of those there. Bids and a few other animals were allowed to roam free without cages.

I think it would suck to be a zoo animal. All your other species brothers and sisters are free to foam free while you're in what is essentially a jail while people come and watch you all day. What good would it do to have wings if you couldn't soar high above the trees? What could would it do to have the speed of a lion if you couldn't roam free and run full speed in the jungle?

I felt bad for the animals there that were the only ones of their kind, like the giraffe, he didn't have a giraffe buddy. If I ever have more money then I know what to do with, I'm buying two giraffes.

I imagine it would be like owning a horse, only a lot cooler.

Something was wrong in the subway on the way back because it kept stopping for what appeared to be no reason. But it cost $0.30 to ride, so it worked out OK.

Part three: the Bus

Going though the station was stressful, since Tara got robbed the last time we were there. We had to pay 2 pesos to get new copies of our tickets since the original tickets had been among the stolen items.

We got to sit at the front of the top of the two deck bus, which meant we had a panasonic view of the roadway and scenery. The bus was as first-class as bus travel gets. We were served dinner, breakfast and drinks, including the weakest, worst tasting whiskey ever.

We had blankets and pillows and best of all, they shaved 2:30 off our 20-hour ride.