This is just off main street in the little town of Carmelo in Uruguay. We were up at 5:15am to catch the bus to Tigre to get the catamaran to Tigre, but it wasn't so bad, we slept a fair bit on the way.

It was a shame, the weather was grey and dull, not good for photographs and not good for people in Uruguay, they seemed to keep indoors, and the ones who did venture out had a flask tucked under one arm and a mate in their hand... it's a stereotype apparently, the Argentines say that the people in Uruguay drink mate all the time... It appears to be the case.
The guidebooks said it was a sleepy little town and we thought that we'd never get to see all of it in the little time we had between our outward and return (ida y vuelta, if you ever need to ask for a return) trips. We needn't have worried. You can see most of Carmelo in under 20 minutes.

That said, there is a beach, or a set of beaches, although the weather was not really ideal so we didn't go there.

The guidebook suggested a certain estancia (country house), the oldest in the country. The tourist information guy said it was 12km away. The other thing the guide said was of note in Carmelo was the swing bridge, opened in 1912... so we walked over that...

The man in the tourist information office (office, ha. It was a portacabin, he was, of course, drinking mate, and he had a book of the local sites that had been made using a cheap printer and some pritt, the non sticky sticky stuff) showed us some stuff.... The oldest building in Uruguay looks like a barn. He also suggested where we should eat. Well what he actually said was there was only one place in town to eat, everywhere else was only open in the evening. So we went where he said and had chivito, a layered creation of beef, ham, cheese and eggs over a mound of potato salad (for my chivito al plato) or in a bun (for Liz's chivito piccolino). Nice.

The weirdest thing was that the painted buildings and the grey skies and the wood smoke smell meant that me and Liz turned to one another and said that it was almost exactly nothing like Miltown Malbay but it reminded us of it nonetheless...

Miltown Malbay is a little town in county Clare in Ireland... and is not high on the list of 'towns most likely to be replicated in Uruguay' if there is such a list... which is unlikely...   ¶ 12:20 AM