Disclaimer: The following is an email I sent to friends and family in July 2014, preserved here for posterity.

Subj: Uruguay Update

I finally got the courage to leave Easter Island.  Two planes, two busses and a boat later, I woke up my friend, Kenny, at 4am in a hostel in Montevideo, Uruguay.  For some reason, he thought it would be a good idea to spend his month before entering the MD/PhD program at UMD Medical School being a vagabond with me.  I was relieved to finally have a friend who understood me and shared old jokes, it really helped take some of the stress off.  

When we got up, we snagged our free hostel breakfast and made it to the bus station just in time to head to La Pedrera, 400km east of Montevideo.  The 6 hour bus ride went by in a snap because we had so much to catch up on, and I was so relieved to be speaking English.  We joked it wouldn't be so bad if we just rode busses the whole month.  We were headed to a surfers hostel where we would volunteer to help make the beds and cook some meals.  We had rather vague instructions of how to get to our host, but it did include exactly which km marker to get off the bus, and we told the incredulous driver because it is not a normal stop.  He dropped us off on the side of the highway and wished us luck.  There were some signs, and it wasn't that far from the road, so we hauled our luggage over and plopped down at the "Casa de La Luna," finally arrived after 3 straight days of travel for me.  Well, we didn't even make it inside when we were greeted by a rather confused owner who told us to wait while she got her computer so she could explain.  To Kenny's chagrin, my confident Spanish had landed us in a pickle.  I had emailed back and forth organizing exactly when we would arrive completely in Spanish, but apparently there was a mistranslated sentence in the first email that indicated that she would love our help, but she would think about it and let me know for sure in a few days.  I must have stopped reading after "I would love your help" and she took my enthusiastic planning to mean that I wanted to just stay at her hostel as a paying customer.  After realizing that we had come a long way, and it was getting late, she kindly offered ... that there was a bus going back to the closest town in 15 minutes, and we should hurry because it will be dark in an hour.  So we huffed it back to the highway with all our luggage, and went along the road a while until we found a bus stop.  We waited for the 15 minutes, then 20, and 25, 30, 35, 40, and 45 minutes later, while we were contemplating how much leg we should show to hitchhike, a man riding by on a bicycle, with his two children hanging off of it asks us what we're doing.  He informs us the last bus of the day was over an hour ago (15 minutes the other way, for that poor lady that's terrible at communicating).  We explained how we got shafted and he told us to follow him back to his place.  So, trusting in the generosity of this complete stranger, in a country where we apparently only barely spoke the language, on the side of a degenerating highway, with no one to hear us scream, we followed this man into the woods.

He was building a summer house for some rich guy, and since June is winter, it was vacant.  After a bit of a trek through the woods, he dropped us off there with some rice and canned sardines for dinner, which was delicious.  The next day we thanked him profusely for lending us the house and not murdering us and took the school bus back to town with his kids.

We found a hostel with internet so we could frantically email other hosts (in English this time) while watching world cup matches.  The next morning we heard back from a woman near Colonia and took a bus 400km back to Montevideo, then another 200km west to Juan Lacaze.  This time we were greeted enthusiastically by an Argentinian family who made a great barbecue to welcome us to their farm.  We found out that they are wealthy business people from Buenos Aires that are trying to start a tourist attraction in Uruguay with an elaborate garden that they describe as a "Mandala of Aromas and Colors"

They only come for the weekends, and have Uruguayan employees to manage the garden during the week.  So we were under the charge of Antonio, the gardener. We worked in the green house a lot because it was winter, but also out in the "mandala" to plow a large section.  It probably could have been done by a horse in a couple hours, but with hoes and shovels it was close to two weeks for us humans. 

We planted seeds, watered, weeded, built a table and a gate, and whatever else Antonio wanted.  Work was only part of the day though.  Antonio was sure to start every day very casually.  When he arrived, the first thing we did was to prepare the mate ("MAH-tay") which is the South American version of Japanese tea ceremonies. Much like tea, mate is ground up leaves of a special plant, but while tea is mostly water with a few leaves, mate is a cup full of bright green herbs, to which you add about a shot of boiling water.  There are all sorts of rules and traditions that govern the taking of mate, and we are familiar with only some of the Uruguayan ones.  It seems like everyone has his own opinion of how to do it "right" and is willing to share their knowledge.  We got advice in the bus station as we were leaving the country by some locals that overheard us talking about our mate cups. Whether we were doing it right or wrong, it was definitely an amazing way to experience real Uruguayan culture, get Antonio to open up, and jumpstart the day with a boost of caffeine and other stimulants.

Anyways, it was over mate in the morning that we learned so many fascinating stories about the past lives of Antonio: as an optometrist, brazilian fashion model, dvd salesman, taxi driver, and many other professions.  He spoke exclusively spanish, but was very patient if we didn't understand, and in return we attempted to explain the difference between "close", "close", and "clothes."  Kenny had been practicing Spanish for months leading up to this, but I was so confident that immersion would be better I told him not to worry or feel self conscious about speaking.  Turns out he corrected me all the time and got compliments about how well he conjugated verbs, something I'm terrible at.  I guess practice helps.

The independence allowed us to cook for ourselves, and they were insistent on providing meat for us every day.  Me and Kenny switched off cooking and ate very well the whole month.  Ribs "asado", rosemary chicken, sweet potatoes, and garlic bread, et cetera.  They had some wood carving tools, so I used some of this extra time to improve my Moai sculpture too. 

It was a great month at a beautiful place with wonderful company.  We ate well, read books, and got addicted to a local custom (mate) that we'll bring home and foist on our friends, so it was a pretty successful month.  I'm extremely grateful to my friend, Kenny who took this gamble with his vacation, and I hope it payed off. If anybody else has the same idea, you can still meet me in Argentina or the Dominican Republic (that's really not that far off the coast of the US!).

Now I'm in a rainforest in Brazil with monkeys!  Stay tuned for the next update.  As always, feedback is appreciated, but an update about your life is even better!

Obrigado!

Colin