The Amazing Race 36, Episode 7

Córdoba (Argentina) - Montevideo (Uruguay)

It’s been twenty years since The Amazing Race made its only previous visit to Uruguay in Season 5, despite multiple visits by to neighboring countries by the world travel “reality”-TV show.

That’s in line with patterns of real-world travel, especially backpacker travel. As the wealthiest country on the continent, Uruguay has become for travellers on a budget what Argentina was before the devaluation of the Argentine peso during the financial crisis of 2001: interesting and potentially attractive, but too expensive to justify more than a brief visit except by those for whom price is little object.

Montevideo is the most expensive large city in South America. Uruguay’s primary tourist destination, the smaller but glitzier beach and casino resort of Punta del Este, is even more pricey, making it a Southern Hemisphere counterpart of the Côte d’Azur.

Long-term travellers and digital nomads are most likely to visit Uruguay, as I did, only as a weekend getaway and/or on a visa run across the mouth of the River Plate estuary to get a new 90-day entry permit to Argentina. Although the duration of permitted entries is at the discretion of immigration officers at the border crossing, ferry port, or airport, visitors with passports from the USA or most other First World countries can, in practice, live in Argentina for extended periods as “tourists” as long as they leave the country, and re-enter, every 90 days or less. Many of those making visa runs from Buenos Aires choose to spend at least a night in Montevideo or Colonia del Sacramento, both of which are served by ferries from Argentina, although you can make a round trip in a day on either of the high-speed ferries.

Fittingly, the first challenge for the racers was staged at the working commercial port that’s Montevideo’s raison d’être and major advantage, even today, over its much larger rival Buenos Aires across the estuary. Montevideo, at the foot of a rocky promontory near the mouth of the river, has a natural deep-water harbor. Buenos Aires is located along a gently sloping, marshy stretch of shoreline further upriver, and its port requires constant dredging. Montevideo’s container port, in particular, remains a significant competitor of ports in neighboring countries despite Uruguay’s much smaller size.

The racers found another of their clues in the plaza next to the Mercado del Puerto in the Ciudad Vieja (old city), but missed seeing what was inside. As with some other “public markets”, the attraction is as much the cooked-food stalls — really an array of restaurants under one roof — as the stalls selling meat, fish, cheeses, and produce. Angelenos familiar with the Grand Central Market in downtown L.A. will understand the concept, although the market in Montevideo is larger. As I noted when The Amazing Race 5 passed through Montevideo, “One of the best meals in my life was… at the restaurant El Palenque in the Mercado del Puerto, while waiting for the high-speed ferry to Buenos Aires to depart from the terminal across the road.”

Some of the racers’ greatest difficulties in this episode were in driving and navigation. Unlike Buenos Aires, Santiago, São Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo has neither a Subte or Metro nor a suburban railway system — not even a train along the strip of densest development between Montevideo and Punta del Este, although a light rail line along the coast within metropolitan Montevideo is under consideration. There are buses, of course, and the historic and touristic Ciudad Vieja is walkable, but despite the much greater size of greater Buenos Aires, the Subte makes it easier to explore without a car than greater Montevideo including the long string of beachfront neighborhoods and outlying towns that extend out from the city center.

The racers’ troubles on the streets of Montevideo were exacerbated, for some of them, by their having to drive stick-shift rental cars. Whether or not you’re in a race and required to drive whatever vehicle you are assigned, there are times and places, not always predictable, where the only available vehicles will have manual gearshifts. Do yourself a favor: Before you set off on a trip around the world on which might want to rent a vehicle, learn to drive a stick-shift car on familiar roads (or in a large empty parking lot to start) at home. Don’t put yourself in the position of trying to learn to shift and clutch for the first time while you are also dealing with unfamiliar traffic patterns, signs in an unfamiliar language, and perhaps driving on the opposite side of the road than you are used to.