Colonia, via pictures
As a day trip from Buenos Aires, I went to Colonia, Uruguay. It's a little town just across the "river" from Buenos Aires. (I put river in quotes because it's more than 20 miles wide there, and brackish.) There's a small historical area, and then quite a lot of laid-back but not exactly thriving town.
I rented a bike to wander around, though I didn't end up traveling as far as I'd planned. As a reference for how safe things were, the bike rental place didn't even recommend locking my bike, and I didn't, and that worked perfectly well.
Old Colonia was pretty but small.
I'm unclear why I had such persistent problems keeping the camera quite level. I couldn't fix this picture because it didn't have free space around the margins to crop a properly-vertical lighthouse out of it.
This was my first experience with the many epiphytic plants in the region. In English, we often call them "air plants", since they live on other plants, but only for support. (Unlike mistletoe, which is a parasite.) I'll be damned if I can figure out where they get their nutrients, though. Do birds really give them enough droppings, or is there lots of dust, or what?
I think one of the cutest things is that some of them start life up a tree and then grow roots down the tree to find the ground.
It turns out that persistently taking a million photographs will eventually net you a few cool ones.
I was really pretty fond of this picture. These two were locked in a staring battle for quite a while, until a thoughtless tourist scared the cat, and then the dog dashed after it.
I rode my bike out to a beach, and there were two kids fishing from a rock pier. I walked out to them, but my Spanish was so abysmal that all I managed to get was that the catfish they'd caught had sharp spines and wasn't tasty.
For my lunch, I'd had this weird egg scramble in french fries. It wasn't bad, it was just the craziest food I'd laid my eyes upon the whole trip.
I rented a bike to wander around, though I didn't end up traveling as far as I'd planned. As a reference for how safe things were, the bike rental place didn't even recommend locking my bike, and I didn't, and that worked perfectly well.
Old Colonia was pretty but small.
I'm unclear why I had such persistent problems keeping the camera quite level. I couldn't fix this picture because it didn't have free space around the margins to crop a properly-vertical lighthouse out of it.
This was my first experience with the many epiphytic plants in the region. In English, we often call them "air plants", since they live on other plants, but only for support. (Unlike mistletoe, which is a parasite.) I'll be damned if I can figure out where they get their nutrients, though. Do birds really give them enough droppings, or is there lots of dust, or what?
I think one of the cutest things is that some of them start life up a tree and then grow roots down the tree to find the ground.
It turns out that persistently taking a million photographs will eventually net you a few cool ones.
I was really pretty fond of this picture. These two were locked in a staring battle for quite a while, until a thoughtless tourist scared the cat, and then the dog dashed after it.
I rode my bike out to a beach, and there were two kids fishing from a rock pier. I walked out to them, but my Spanish was so abysmal that all I managed to get was that the catfish they'd caught had sharp spines and wasn't tasty.
For my lunch, I'd had this weird egg scramble in french fries. It wasn't bad, it was just the craziest food I'd laid my eyes upon the whole trip.