Do you ever have the experience of setting an early alarm only to wake up on your own before it goes off? That just happened when I took the early Nunez bus from Montevideo to Salto at 6:30 am.
The scenery on the 7-hour bus ride was mostly through rolling gentle, green hills with several herds of cows. I would occasionally see some gauchos riding herd wearing high boots and jaunty caps. The towns are few and far between. I was lucky to get the front second-level seat with great views.
It looked like some of the ranchers are making extra income by hosting big windmill farms and solar panel arrays.
When I got to the Salto bus station I began my mile-and-a-half walk to the Home Sweet Home Hotel where I would stay for two nights. Unfortunately, the hotel had put a different address on their location since they had two places they were renting out.
After walking around a couple blocks around the plaza where I thought it was located, I asked some women in a clothing store for help and they told me that it should just be a half a block from where we were. I looked on the booking.com website and they had a picture of a wrought iron railing which I saw.
Salto is famous for its thermal baths, and I was planning to visit them the following day. However, shortly after I arrived, I was greeted with thunder and lightning storms which made it a wet walk to dinner.
In the morning, it was still raining hard along with thunder and lightning so it was unlikely that I could go to the thermal baths and spas and be safe. Fortunately, they had a large living room with a balcony overlooking the street below, so I was able to just relax for the day.
When I went out for breakfast, I bought an umbrella to reduce the amount of rain that was collecting on me. And it was useful when I went out for dinner that night when it was still raining.
After staying there for the night, I woke up to no more rain so it must’ve been because I bought the umbrella it stopped raining.
When I got to the Salto bus station I caught an early bus to the border and went through immigration fairly rapidly from Uruguay to Concordia, Argentina.
Since I didn’t know how long the border crossing would take, I didn’t make any reservations for onward bus travel but when I got to the Concordia bus station, I learned that there were no buses north to Posada until 8:10 PM and that same bus was continuing on to Puerto Iguazu.
I had planned to stay overnight at Posada, but since the same bus was heading onto Puerto Iguazu I decided to continue my journey there.
I spent the day walking about 10 miles around the large park that fronted the river and also having a few meals before boarding the bus. This castle was started, but never completed.
My Cruces Del Norte bus was supposed to leave at 8:10 but we did not leave until 9 PM and we would arrive at about 10 AM in the morning in Puerto Iguazu—some thirteen hours on the bus.
It was a fairly comfortable ride over a pretty even highway however my middle-aged seatmate was on FaceTime on speakerphone for about an hour with his girlfriend and it really sounded sad as he hung up and cried a bit— what a way to break up so publicly and I barely understand Spanish.
When I woke early morning as the sun was beginning to come up the territory was changing to hills in jungles as we approached Puerto Iguazu.
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Thanks Richard, stay safe
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