Part Two: from Couch Surfing to Punta del Este / A Study in Contrasts
Brent and Jaik are members of this really cool organization called couchsurfers.com. This on-line community seeks to bring people together globally by offering participants a place to post their profile and open up their lives and their homes to travellers. Millions of people around the world are members of this organization started by a man in San Francisco when he inherited three mansions in that city. Brent and Jaik have hosted couch surfers in their beautiful country house “Poof Bluff” in Manitoba and couch surfed in Italy and in Minneapolis. We decided that, certainly, we were up for a couch surfing adventure and cruised the profiles in Uruguay to find Juan with a rustic farmhouse. It was very close to Colonia, a town we wanted to visit. Juan kindly wrote that he could host all 4 of us. We arrived at the address in the little town of Juan Lacaze, Juan’s parents gave us directions to the farmhouse and Juan was there to meet us with Opheline, another surfer from France. Well the farmhouse rocketed “rustic” back it’s original meaning since the toilet wasn’t working and the farmhouse, also an art deco design like our apartment, was in great need of some fixing up starting with a good clean, some proper beds and a hardy round of paint and decor. Juan is a lovely young man who told us many stories of his life and his other couch surfing friends and about the website marryacanadian.com. We all spent a great day rambling around in the beautiful town of Colonia marveling at the buildings and gorgeous setting…then the long night as best we could was spent in the rustic farmhouse. The welcome rooster’s cry alerted me that morning was coming and at first light Yvonne and I hightailed it to town to get a cup of coffee BUT though we searched; both a women at the bakery and a bartender told us that we just weren’t going to find a cup of coffee in that town. Juan has become an emblematic figure in our journey now…Jaik coined the phrase “What would Juan do?” I was inspired to write a couple of haikus (or almost haikus) about Juan and my first couch surfing experience. I will share
them with you now:
Juan collects pencil sharpeners
Loves to make strangers friends
Gives away his shoes.
…..and this one I wrote especially for Yvonne:
Rustic farmhouse friend
Couch surf me away quickly
Soft, clean sheets, ensuite.
We made our way to Piriaoplis and checked in to rooms at the Hotel Budapest, a modest, pleasant hotel where, after the assumption of heterosexuality on checking in, and the coming out for room assignments it was all good. The owner served us a breakfast that included coffee with hot milk. Piriapolis is a resort town that has seen better days. You can tour the castle of the alchemist, take the cable car up their sugar loaf and pretend you are in Rio, but sadly we didn’t do any of those things. We slept very well and heard abut the earthquake in Chile, and in the morning drove off to look around the swanky, manicured, picturesque, upscale
resort of Punta Del Este, where all the houses have names. We discovered that just over the undulating bridge from Punta is little town called La Barra, which was much more in tune with our vibe. We ate at an outdoor restaurant run by a very friendly couple, she was an amazing baker who made us a fish appectizer and a welcome burrito lunch. Delicious! Amongst the very cute cabins, we spotted a place we had almost stayed, (but it was slightly beyond our means) called Casa Zinc, and asked for a tour. It is a gorgeous guesthouse constructed ëntirely from recovered materials. The architecture themed bedroom made us all gasp at the beauty of it. I was so awe struck I could not even take a picture...B&J have picts of this one and check out their website: http://www.casazinc.com/I think Casa Zinc was the kind of ¨rustic¨we were expecting !
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