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Buenos Aires: Two Days in the Paris of America
October 10, 2026
I arrived in Buenos Aires (Santa María del Buen Aire) via the ferry from Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. Buenos Aires is a big city of about 13.4 million. Within that greater metropolitan area is the "smaller" city of Buenos Aires, with about 3.1 million. When I left the ferry terminal and walked to the city center I was rather disappointed in what I walked through. That part of the city is nothing special. Then, as I continued, I passed through some of the historic district, again a bit disappointing - dirty, too many people sleeping on sidewalks. Eventually, I arrived in the city center and things changed a lot - the city became what I expected of BA - very old, clean, and interesting. The city center is loaded with very old buildings and I found to be more interesting than the official historic district. NOTE: You will find people here speak with the Rioplatense accent. This is an accent of Spanish common throughout the greater Buenos Aires area and also heard in Uruguay. If you come across a person with a thick accent, there's a good chance you won't understand them, I sure don't. It's almost as if they're sticking an 'sh' or 'zh' sound between every other syllable. Don't expect to find many who speak a "clean" Spanish, and even fewer who speak English or any other language. I did come across a young woman who speaks very good English, she works in a store that sells wine and other alcohol, but mostly wine. I didn't buy any, and we chatted for a while. I also came across a couple of restaurant servers who attempted to use English, but they were just individual words, not full sentences.
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Colonia del Sacramento: Walls, Lighthouses and a Bullring
October 6, 2026
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, has a population of about 33,000. It sits a couple of hours west of Montevideo. The town is very historic. The town's historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's a small town sitting at the estuary where the Río de la Plata (the River Plate or the Plate River) dumps into the Atlantic Ocean. Google Maps has it labeled incorrectly at this part of the river. Also, this is where you cross from Uruguay to Argentina by ferry.
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Montevideo: A City Full of Surprises
October 2, 2026
One of the best things about traveling without a rigid itinerary is that a city can surprise you. You arrive with a general idea of what to expect, and then you start walking. Before long, you discover that the city you imagined and the city you're actually seeing aren't quite the same thing.
Montevideo has surprised me several times.
The first surprise is the architecture. I expected old buildings in Ciudad Vieja, some newer buildings in the downtown area, and the usual mixture that comes with a city that has been around for a few centuries. What I didn't expect was the sheer variety. Montevideo's architecture reflects different periods and the influence of the many immigrant populations that helped shape the city. The city's own tourism material points out that the architecture ranges from colonial and neoclassical to Neogothic, modernist, eclectic, and Art Deco. Montevideo also has one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco architecture in the world.
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Piriápolis: Where the Sun Sets Over the Atlantic
September 28, 2026
Piriápolis, Uruguay
Piriápolis is a beach town and has a marina for boats of all sizes including big motor yachts. Piriápolis has a population of around 13,000 but that swells considerably during the summer. This was the first resort town in Uruguay. From the beach you can look out over the Atlantic Ocean to the East, walk down the beach a ways and you'll be looking South, then walk around the point and you're looking due west. That caught me by surprise when I saw the sunset directly due west, and thinking, "Wait a second, I'm on the Atlantic coast, why am I seeing the sunset?" Yeah, it's a rather odd thing - see the sunrise and the sunset from the same location. Piriápolis is a resort town, and it caters to visitors from Europe as well as South America.
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Rocha: Nothing to See Here? Look A Little Deeper
September 24, 2026
Rocha, UY
Rocha, Uruguay has a population of around 27,000. It was founded in 1793. There is nothing special here, nothing to draw tourists, so it is a town you would pass through. If nothing else, you might stop for a meal. Rocha is a pleasant town, a few nice parks and decent plazas, a couple of grocery stores, half-a-dozen ATMs. Rocha never became a major industrial city, a huge port, or a fashionable tourist destination. It remains primarily a regional administrative, commercial and service center. It's generally quiet. But does it have anything for tourists to see? No. But it has something much more unusual: an exceptionally intact example of an ordinary Uruguayan provincial city whose historical urban fabric was never completely erased.
Rocha is not interesting because it contains a few old buildings. The town itself is an unusually intact historical urban landscape. Rocha was planned from the beginning.
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