Not really a lot to say about today except it was long, tedious with not much to do (not always the high life on the open road!). We got a taxi to the bus station at Fray Bentos for our bus north to Salto, which is the northern most border crossing into Argentina. The journey was similar to our other experiences whereby a relatively short distance was elongated by locals getting on and off. When we left to Paysandu, which is the 3rd largest city in Uruguay after Montevideo and Salto, there were over 20 people standing in the aisle for the last 90 minutes of the journey. We arrived in Salto with a plan to have our last couple of hours in Uruguay having lunch and using up some of the Uruguayan pesos we still had. However Diane noticed that it looked like the only bus over the river and border into Argentina, was leaving at 2pm. It was vital we got there before 9pm, when our overnight bus from Concordia to Posadas was leaving. Noticing the ticket desk was swamped with people, Simon circumvented the process and spoke to one of the bus company's phone operators. Luckily his Spanish was just good enough for him to be understood and the lady shouted to her colleague in the ticket desk to serve us first. As you can imagine as we pushed our way through the queue we weren't too popular by the looks we got and luckily our Spanish is not that good to understand what they were saying! We got our tickets with a couple of minutes to spare and jumped onboard the bus. Our journey then was crossing the River Uruguay, over the dam head (the 2nd largest in South America) and to the border crossing. To our surprise we did not got through Uruguayan customs (we've now only got an entry stamp in our passport without an accompanying exit one), we were stamped back into Argentina (that's the 3rd one in as many weeks) and after a sniffer dog checking our bags we made the short trip to the bus terminal in Concordia. With over 6 hours to spare we killed a couple of these by going over to the local cafe and having a late lunch/early dinner. We then went back to the terminal concourse and spent a seemingly never ending 4 hours waiting until our bus departure at 9pm. As the sun dropped at 6pm the terminal filled with the usual mix of travellers and local nutters who left us alone when Simon made it quite clear "no hablamos espanyol!" Time really dragged especially the last hour, Simon managing to read his book, whilst Diane perfected her looking out of the window skill. At last it was 9pm and we boarded our bus for the overnight sleeper to Posadas. We were 'treated' to dinner before the lights were dimmed. The seats were comfortable and fully reclined and we drifted off to sleep wondering how much we would grab before the bus arrived in Posadas at 0525.
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| Leaving the not so grand hotel |
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| Crossing the Rio Uruguay into Argentina |
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| Concordia bus station - much nicer on the outside! |
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| "Looking forward" to dinner on the bus |
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