Costs pp: bus from Tacuarembo to Artigas 215p, room at Hotel Uniao in Quaray 240p / 20rs
We arrived in Artigas at 6am and Carol went walkabout to look for a place to stay but of course no-one had checked out yet and places were mostly too expensive so we walked up to the border, debated camping on the banks of the river where there is a big park, then decided to cross into Quarai (Quaray in spanish), the matching town on the Brasil side. This involved the usual getting our passport stamped at immigration on the Uruguayan side then walking across a very long bridge into Quarai where there is no immigration. Immigration is apparently in Uruguaiana (Uruguayana) where we are headed to next, there we will get and entry and exit stamp at the same time when we cross back into Argentina. We were feeling very shattered after no sleep but were directed to a nice, cheap hotel where we immediately fell into bed and zzzz'd for a few hours.
After a good sleep and the washing done we rekkied the town. Not a lot to it but we bought some really good pears and apples to eat, haven't had fruit like that for a while. A good thing was that we were able to pay for our room and food with the Uruguayan pesos we had left and also we had no trouble withdrawing cash from the ATM. At the supermarket the food seems a little more expensive although not too bad, we bought a lettuce for 1.20rs and a half kilo bag of bread buns for 2.40rs. In South America they have jam that comes in a block, it's great for us as it is easy to carry and you can slice it even tho it is soft to put on whatever. We got a 400g block for .90rs.
Decided to stay another day as the town is cruizy tho nothing much to do, the room is good, clean and good beds, large and with its own basin. We bought some more of the wonderful apples but they are 4.4rs per kilo, about NZ$4 so not cheap. We were unable to find a bank that would change our Uruguayan pesos but the supermarket had no trouble accepting it for our purchases so we got it changed that way.
The bus to Uruguaiana, our next stop, is a 2 hour journey and will cost us 21rs each. Using our bus price measure that means that 1 hour = 10rs (NZ$8) which is very expensive. We will have to wait until we take some other buses when we reenter Brasil to see if this is the general rule. Time is the only constant for measuring journeys, if we compared distance covered we would find that the cheaper countries were possibly quite expensive on the bus given that it often took us and hour to go 30km because of the type of road.
