Things to do in Montevideo

It’s barely mentioned in any of the guidebooks, but if you’re prepared to ignore the Montevideo tourist office who don’t believe it exists and you happen to poke your head around the side gates of the customs office at the old port &ndash where the Buquebus comes into Montevideo &ndash and if by lucky chance you happen to meet the same extremely friendly and excellently multilingual military policemen at the gates &ndash just brazen it out; at worse, they’ll shoot you &ndash you can find a commemorative plaque and bell.

These were presented to the Uruguayan navy by the captain of HMS Ajax, one of the British destroyers involved in the Battle Of The River Plate in 1939, the first sea battle of World War 2. And if you happen to wander round the corner in the rain, you’ll find the anchor and at-the-time-revolutionary radar range finder that the German Navy were so keen for the British not to get hold of that they scuppered their treasured pocket battleship the Graf Spee.

Just a thought if you’ve got half an hour to kill and you want to walk off your massive parilla from the old Mercado; you’ll be down that way, and it’s an interesting part of military history if you’re into that sort of thing.

A steamy encounter

There’s a train cemetery just outside Uyuni in Bolivia. We came to the town like many others: we’d travelled over the Altiplano and salt flats from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile – a small group of new friends who’s spent the last 48 hours or so acclimatizing to the freezing cold and altitude. We’d stayed in a refugio with the basic comforts of a briefly-lit wood-burning stove, blankets, a table and an excitingly simple bathroom.

We’d seen countless flamingos on the salt lagoons, we’d stayed the night in a hotel carved out of blocks of salt, we’d been to an other-worldly island covered with cactuses, we’d woken at 4am to spend the day on the salt flats to see the sun rise and take a number of apparently-obligatory ‘jumping in the air’ photos that seem to follow the travelling community around South America and we’d started to adapt to the almost constant need to wee behind any available rocks as our bodies began the tedious process of acidifying our blood and increasing our red cell counts so, for in a fortnight’s time, the small flight of steps in the coffee shop in La Paz wouldn’t leave us gasping for breath.

We stopped at the train yard, which is home to twenty or so rusting hulks of steam trains that once plied their trade taking cargo and passengers across the salt flats to Chile; it’s quite an eerie place. Two rows of dismantled, decaying steam trains sit crumbling under the clear blue sky of the desert, their massive skeletons abandoned and largely ignored.

And the exciting bit is that thanks to the lack of any sort of barriers or consideration for personal safety, you can happily climb all over the trains! What a great way to kill an hour. There’s bugger all else to do in Uyuni, so follow the tracks from outside the station in town for your date with tetanus.