Hello
How are you doing? Greetings from Uruguay 🇺🇾
When you receive this, I will be on holiday in Rocha. Every year since my family arrived in Uruguay 23 years ago, we have holidayed in the same small village on the ocean. When we first came, there was no running water or electricity. We’d pull up water from a well. We’d leave buckets of water in the sun to warm and throw them over ourselves to shower when we came back from swimming. At night we lit candles. And we’d often go to bed not long after it got dark.
Our son would hang out with his friends. Many were neighbours and school friends from Montevideo holidaying. He’d go out on his bike and leave us messages on a notepad on the kitchen table if we were upstairs sleeping a siesta when he returned. This was when he was seven years old. This was one of the reasons that we moved to Uruguay. So that our son could experience a childhood with freedom, and simplicity, which was more in line with the childhood that I had when I was small. As opposed to the childhood that his friends of the same age in the US (we lived in Washington DC before moving to Uruguay) and cousins in the UK were experiencing.
I can’t say we have returned to the same house—or ‘rancho’ as simple beach houses are called here—every year, because the one that we really loved got washed away after being beaten during a number of storms. But we have been returning annually to the one I’m at right now for more than a decade.
I’ll be visiting a lot of the places that I discovered when I wrote the Guru’Guay Guide to Uruguay. Check out the chapters on Rocha.
I can’t promise to add anything to social media while I’m away, because I’ve got to admit one of the reasons that I love this part of the world is that it’s deeply replenishing to be totally off-line. But I will save some up to post when I get back. I promise.
I’ll be back as usual from my desk on the last Saturday of the month.
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