Slow Boat

Losing your luggage is sort of a mixed bag.  Yes, you´ve lost a lot of stuff that you won´t ever get compensated for, but you also realize just how little stuff you really need to get by on the road.  Outerwear doesn´t really get that dirty, and when it does it still has a few days in it before it gets too smelly, and even then it still has a few more days in it until it gets too smelly to bother anyone but you.  Toothbrushes, toothpaste and soap are easy to find, beards (even pubescent patchy ones) are natural.  Reading material can always be found, and nobody really wears sunscreen anyway.  You know those old images of hobos traveling around with just a bandana full of crap tied to a stick?  It seems way more plausible to me now than it did a week ago.

The other big boon is that, if you want, you can replace your wardrobe with locally bought garb.  Ask me if I´m wearing Argentinean flag underwear right now.


Truth be told I´d started to get used to the idea of not having my pack with me for the next few weeks, but its all moot now.  Last night a United truck pulled up to my hostel door and re-United me with my long lost beloved, whether I wanted her back or not.  This morning, coffee in hand and pack on back, I made for the docks and a date with the Slow Boat.

The Slow Boat is the cheapest way to get from Buenos Aires to Uruguay, taking three hours to cross the Rio de la Plata.  How can a boat take three hours to cross a river?  Because it´s not really a river; it looks like this: 

It´s a bay.  If you considered it a river it´d be the widest one in the world by a factor of "shut up it´s a bay."  Its water is brackish.  And "Rio de la Plata" means "river of silver" but neither is the water silver nor have I read that there was ever silver in or along the river.  The water is Mississippi brown because most every major south American river, carrying a continent´s worth of silt and muck, eventually drains into it.  In order to keep the shipping lanes open for Buenos Aires and Montevideo they´re constantly dredging the thing. It has its name because the colonists who named it thought there was a magical Silver Mountain Range further inland.  Who told them that?  Probably local tribes who were hoping they would go away.  They stayed. 

The Slow Boat, as opposed to the Fast Boat (which takes only one hour and is therefore I assume powered by pixiedust), is run by a company called Buquebus, and I assumed it was going to be a barge.  I figured it would be the South American version of the Staten Island Ferry.  Instead I got this:

It was a motherloving cruise ship, complete with reclining chairs, duty free shop, restaurant and video arcade.  Let me stress that this was the cheapest way to get across the river.  Luxury seats and the Fast Boat cost more, as did other boat companies. 

And that seems to pretty much be par for the Uruguay course as far as I can tell.  Uruguay, it turns out, is the nicest place you´ve never heard of.  I´ll see if I can drum up some empirical proof of this for another post, but anecdotally speaking I can tell you the feel of the place is remarkably European. As are the prices.  On the plus side, you can drink the water.

That is, I AM drinking the water.  Whether that turns out to be a good idea or not I will leave in the hands of the Fates and Uruguay´s water system engineers. 

Anyway, it was raining during my arrival today, so tomorrow will be the first full day of poking around this piece.  But I´m in.  Good as my word.