Dogs, sea lions, peacocks, Fray Bentos abattoir and Montezuma’s revenge. Our good, bad and definitely ugly travel in South America:
- Drive 4500 kms through Uruguay and Chile in 2 weeks
- Be amazed by the stray dogs lining up at traffic lights, ready to cross by themselves when the lights change
- Watch scruffy sealions line up and fight for the best position to catch the bits thrown from the back of the fish market stalls
- Stay at an old Uruguay ‘resort’ with hot springs and 50 peacocks, and be adopted by a friendly dog called Luna
- Plan to take the tour round the Fray Bentos about-to-be UNESCO World Heritage-listed abattoir, where all the corned beef came from when we were children
- Sympathise with my husband getting Montezuma’s revenge after eating fried risotto burgers at the ‘resort’……(well, really, you’d think he’d know better by now!)
- Hurtle 250 kms across Uruguay to Fray Bentos (yes, an actual town) in our hire car while driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time since 1976 and driving a manual left-hand-drive hire car for the first time ever – just because my husband was too sick to drive, but I really wanted to go to the abattoir tour!
- Miss the tour, so get shown round by a hot (whoops, sorry!) South American architecture student, who happened to be the only one there who spoke English
- Be enthralled by the old machinery of the derelict factory, the enormous drum of offal soup that was heated up and stirred with a rotating paddle to make the original oxo cubes, and the thick decaying sheets of asbestos dripping off the disintegrating pipes and columns
- Miss out on some of the tour, because a swarm of bees had taken over part of the factory
- Be filmed for the Fray Bentos abattoir Facebook page, holding a meat pie tin and reminiscing about the culinary delights of Spam
- Try very hard (but unsuccessfully) to persuade the student that he really shouldn’t be spending his days in all that asbestos
- Get a puncture in the hire car on the way back to the airport, with no garage in town and only a hard rubber tyre that apparently couldn’t be driven more than 80km/hr (like that was going to happen)
- Catch husband’s Montezuma’s revenge and miss seeing Santiago.
Sometimes I really wonder if travel is all it’s cracked up to be!
Discover I had picked up the wrong camera when packing, so I had an old Canon 5DMkII with a broken mirror, not my new 5D MkIII.
