Zoo

This morning, it was raining pretty hard, so I took a taxi to the bus station in Montevideo. From there, I left at 6:30 to my first destination of Paysandú, the third largest city in Uruguay. I got to the bus terminal without a problem, and I then purchased a ticket to the Argentinean town across the river, Colon. While I was waiting for my bus, I had the opportunity to walk around town and see the local sights. One accidental surprise was a short visit to a zoo. I was just wandering around when I found a municipal park on the outskirts of town. Inside the park was a free zoo that had a lot of local animals and birds as well as some lions, monkeys, and peccaries. It was a nice surprise and I hung out there for a while. One thing I noticed around town was that the number of people riding motorcycles, scooters, and dirt bikes outnumbered the cars by at least two to one. Sometimes the entire street would only have scooters going up and down it.

No description of Uruguay would be complete without mentioning the mate. “Mate” is an herb (usually a member of the holly family) that is mixed with hot water to make a tea. However, it’s drunk in a special way, specifically in a small gourd and a straw with a strainer at the end. There’s even a whole set of social customs that go along with drinking mate. It completely replaces coffee, and if you can imagine Seattle, but with every coffee cup replaced with a mate gourd and a small thermos of hot water tucked into the crook of an arm, you get the idea of how popular it is. If you have any more questions about it, you can ask Nicole because she once wrote a report about it.

I eventually made it to the town of Colon in Argentina, and found a cheap place to spend the night. I didn't end up doing too much else today because it took a while to cross the border and then find a hostel to stay in. Mostly I wandered around town for a little while and then ate dinner and wrote up stuff online. Tomorrow I'll try to get to the Parque Nacional El Palmar.


Rio Uruguay on the bridge between Argentina and Uruguay


The zoo in Payandu