A Casual Day Trip to ... Uruguay

So this past Sunday, I went with my two friends Amanda and Emily to Colonia, Uruguay, which is around a 3 hour boat ride from Bs.As.  It was really really fun, and definitely worth the travel time spent and the boat fare (which actually wasn't even that much).  Our boat left at 8:45 AM from Bs.As, so that meant a pretty early morning getting over to the bus terminal.  I was literally expecting a ferry-type boat, really rocky and somewhat open air ... but it turns out the BuqueBus was like an airplane kind of.  It had a couple levels, lots of seats, dining room tables, a cafe, a store, and even an open floor for tango performances.  So the 3 hr. boat ride was actually really fun! 

The weather report for that Sunday was absolutely horrible, 100% of heavy t-storms .. .but it turned out to just be rainy at sea (and somewhat rocky, but not really) and just windy and a little cold in Colonia.  So, another weather.com fail, thankfully.

Colonia is a little colonial city on the coast of Uruguay - lots of cobblestone streets, hidden cafes, cute shops, and old parks and old ruins.  We pretty much walked around the city (don't know if I can even call it a city, actually), sat down in a really cozy restaurant for lunch (where we met another American solo traveler), and shared a mate like true Uruguayans. 

After lunch, we rented go-karts to drive around the city.  This was really strange that they actually let anyone (with a driver's license) just take their gokarts and drive through Colonia with all the regular cars.  Literally their only restriction to us was "don't drive on the beaches, please!"  Haha, we even had to go to a Uruguayan gas station to top off the tank when we were done.  It was definitely a different way to explore the city, and it was really fun! Anyway, from there we got back on the BuqueBus for another three hours, and another 4 passport stamps later, were back in Argentina 14 hours later.