November 1st

We ate homemade yogurt and granola along with bananas and honey for breakfast.  Then we headed out to do more work.  We weeded more olive trees for the first few hours.  It's hard work for the hands and knees.  Eventually it was lunch time.  And then more weeding.  We also burned a brush pile in the afternoon.  We made a fire and had a wonderful Turkish style dinner.  It is the coldest day in Uruguay yet.

November 2nd

After a breakfast of eggs and cheese we headed out to do more tasks.  We did a few hours of weeding before we needed a break.  After lunch Bart chopped down pine trees while I cleared some rocks on a path.  Then we hauled a couple loads of wood from the back hills up to the house to be used as firewood.  After that we burned another brush pile followed by cleaning out a pond of some plants.  We introduced Mascha to bloody marys while she cooked us a lovely dinner of mashed potatoes, homemade sour kraut, and sausage.  It was delicious, one of my favorite meals.

November 3rd

We had breakfast together and then we relaxed while Mascha taught a class.  Then we all packed up and headed back into Valizas.  When we arrived we ate lunch at a beach restaurant, picked up our truck, and repacked the truck with all of our belongings.  It only costed us around $100 for the entire tow/fix of the truck.  We are happy about that.  We made homemade spaghetti for dinner.

We relaxed for the morning with breakfast and coffee.  Then we enjoyed some Yerba mate, which is very popular in Uruguay.  It is a more bitter green tea that you drink out of a gourd type cup with a filtered straw.  We can’t understand all of the hype with it.  Locals walk around all day with their cup and thermos of hot water.  We are catching the 11:50 bus to Cabo Polonia.  The bus ride took only around 15 minutes.  The big 4-wheeled vehicle that brings you to the beach doesn’t go into later so we decide to walk it to get some exercise and save a couple bucks.  It was a very long 1 1/2 hr walk in the deep sand.  It was nice once we got to the beach.  We walked to the nearest life guard house and enjoyed lunch with a view.  Then we walked to the only store in the town.  We ate chocolate and drank beer.  The place is a ghost town.  There are a few hostels and restaurants open, but generally everything is boarded up.  We walked through town and found a restaurant serving bunuelos de algas(basically seaweed donut holes).  They were very salty and tasted mostly of oregano.  Bart has been looking for these for a week now, so he was a bit disappointed.  We made our way trough town heading towards the lighthouse.  This is where people see penguins, sea lions, whales, dolphins, etc.  The smell of urine hit our senses before we even saw them.  Hundreds of sea lions.  Most of them sun bathing and some swimming.  We sat and watched them for a long while.  They would pick fights with each other and make some funny noises, but mostly they just slept.  It was a pretty neat sight.  We were also very happy to see 2 dolphins swim by.  We decided it was time to start the hike home.  We would be walking along the coast and up into the dunes to get home.  A dog followed us the entire way.  We saw multiple of this one type of endangered species of frogs.  It was sad to see all of the Dead Sea lions on the shore, must have been more than 20.  It started out a cloudy day and it was now starting to sprinkle.  It took us just over 2 hours to make it to the river.  This part was not planned out.  We learned afterward that there are normally boats that will pick you up and take you across, but since it was now raining heavily the boats were not out.  We had to walk across the river in our clothes with our bags above our heads.  We were lucky that the water only came up to chest because we had no plan B.  The dog even crossed the river with us.  Our new dog friend spent the night and Mascha called her owner in the morning.