After spending a few days in Buenos Aires we took the ferry across the River Plate to the colonial town of Colonia, on the Uruguayan side of the estuary. Colonia is a beautiful town which we had visited before on our previous trip to the region. This time it had an out of season feel to it, very few people about and very cold and windy, rather like a Cornwall village in December.
Uruguay is one of those odd countries, created as a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina with the help of the British; it is one of those places which one wonders if it is viable as a country at all. It is very dependant on it’s neighbours and when one of them catches a cold economically, as Argentina did, poor Uruguay suffers badly. Most of the population lives in Montevideo, while the rest of the country is one giant farm.
Montevideo was quite a pleasant city built around its port. It has lots of grand buildings built in the 20’s and 30’s, many of which are now looking a little worse for wear and which give the city a rather grey, dated feel. There is also not much in the way of sights: the anchor of the Graf Spree, the German Battleship scuttled after the Battle of the River Plate in 1940, and the former meat market now converted into an up market dining experience, with the emphasis on meat in every variety.
The people are very pleasant though, and big drinkers of Mate, a herb like drink that is particular to the River Plate countries. To call Mate a drink is an understatement, it’s more like a ritual which almost everyone in society takes part in. The Mate itself looks like dried grass which is put in a Mate pot, a small bowl like cup which can be made from wood, leather, silver or especially in Uruguay, a cows foot. Hot water is then poured in slowly, from a thermos with a special funnel so that it goes in slowly until the Mate is moist, putting the right amount of water in is something of an art. The warm liquid is then sucked up through a metal pipe. The Mate is then refreshed with more water and is often shared by friends; it’s common to see couples walking down the street passing the pot to and fro. It tastes like wet grass. There are shops dedicated to Mate and all the paraphernalia that goes with it where you can buy a pipe for $1 or one made of solid silver for $300!
From Montevideo we took a bus across country to Fray Bentos, the town that gave it’s name to the pie and corned beef brand. We came here to see one of the most unusual sights on the continent, the meat processing factory from where all the pies and cans of meat were made. The factory which was one of the first industrial concerns in South America and was originally set up in the 1860’s by a German to produce a meat extract from Uruguayan cows, whose carcasses had until then been dumped, after their hides were taken for leather. The extract was known to the world as OXO. After being taken over by a British firm and renamed the ‘Anglo’ the factory was expanded (helped along by the jump in demand during the two World Wars) to produce cheap meat for the world, which it did until 1971, when it finally closed. In it’s heyday it employed 4000 people, immigrants from all over the world, with a production line of 2000 cows a day in one end, and tins of corned beef out of the other. The site is next to the Rio Uruguay from which ocean going ships took the products directly to Europe. The factory was more like a small town, with workers houses, a hospital and even a golf course.
We had a look around the excellent museum and had our very own guided tour around the buildings, which are much as they were when production stopped. None of the big machines have been removed and the huge compressors for the refrigeration plant and the meat cookers have just been left as they were. In one room thousands of meat hooks are piled up.
When we left the town we passed a new industrial plant that was going up, a pulp mill which is being built despite huge controversy on the banks of the Rio Uruguay which is shared with Argentina. The Argentineans complain that the mill will destroy the environment and there are huge bill boards everywhere to protest against it. We then took the bus back to the delights of Buenos Aires.
This entry written by Will
