Back to the Coast
We made a quick stop at the Minas Sunday market on the way out of town. A wheel of cheese, lemons, and flips flops. All for about $5 USD. Gotta love a Sunday market.
We back-tracked a bit and drove to the coast. This time detouring around Punte and hitting some gravel that took us to Puebla Jose Ignacio. This is fancy-pants territory. The entire town seems to have been pulled from the pages of Architectural Digest. Sotheby’s and Christie’s real estate offices await you at the town entrance. We didn’t dare attempt to dine at the lone cafe, but instead gawked at some of the houses and checked out the nice beach. We were wrong earlier… this is Carmel.
A bit farther up the coast and we hit the Laguna Garzon ferry. The old bridge is long gone, but a 15 hp panga strapped to a barge will drag you across the gap for free. Lot’s of wide open coast on this stretch and plenty of places to pull over and have your own beach for the day.
The only up the road is that Laguna de Roche is a dead end. So, you have to drive up and around the lagoon to get to La Paloma.
I love the little ‘designer’ house boats!
I also like your description of Jose Ignacio; our impression matched yours (except it reminded us of our home town): “…we came to the much smaller José Ignacio. This town reminded us of Byron Bay a bit – it had a lighthouse; it had some very nice restaurants; it had some trendy shops; and it had very expensive real estate! A lot of the recent architecture was too boxy for my liking, but it was obviously well-designed and quite upmarket. After a coffee and cheesecake in one of the restaurants, we went in search for a place to spend the night. This we found just out of the town in a subdivision which had yet to attract any of the trendy box-shape houses it was meant for. We chose a lot which suited our purposes and settled in for the first quiet night since arriving in Uruguay.” (We were in Uruguay in early January = peak season – you always end up hitting it somewhere…).
That looks so nice and thanks for the quantity of updates 🙂 makes a work day so much more pleasurable.
Gui – it’s the least we can do. Well, actually we could do less 😉
And, if you have Brazil connections, now would be the time to pass them along!