A spot of lunch in Uruguay

I took the boat to Colonia del Sacrementa - Uruguay´s most westerly port and an hour´s rapide boat ride from Buenos Aires. The round trip costs $160 (about 30 pounds), so when you consider the number of steaks you could buy with that here (about 10) it´s not cheap, but it´s an adventure - a voyage. They even serve you complimentary snacks and drinks at your seat on the boat. And Uruguay´s in a different time-zone to Argentina, so you feel like you´ve really arrived somewhere.

Uruguay is a little triangle (or rectangle, depending on which map you look at) sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil and is famous for winning the first ever World Cup and Frey Bentos pies. The old meat factory is now a museum, but in its 1940s hay day it slaughtered up to 2,000 cattle a day. You may well have eaten part of one when you were younger. I have.

The most mortifying thing happened just after I walked into the town from the port. My camera died without any warning. Moments later, the most awesome photo opportunities jumped out at every corner, as if they knew I couldn´t get hold of them.

So I am going to have to describe Colonia myself.

Imagine the loveliest white-washed, single-storey town on a remote Greek island. Now paint half the buildings bright red, yellow, pink and blue. Leave the rest white. Some can be a bit crumbling or have exposed brick-work.

Take out all of the inhabitants, then put just a handful back. Let a few tourists in, say 10 a day, as long as they´re nice and quiet and spread out when they get there and leave promptly.

Plant lots of old leafy trees and let pretty flowering shrubs grow up and over every wall. Let the birds sing.

Cobble the streets and erect wooden tables and chairs at the corner of each, for these shall be the bars and cafes.

Then set the thermostat to around 25°C and fix the breeze low-to-medium.

Oh, and did I mention that it's completely surrounded by the sea?

I sat myself down outside the third restaurant I walked past and ordered a chivitos - which, according to the menu, was the national dish of Uruguay. In a rare moment of translation, the menu also declared, "All things that we have in our restaurant are for sale" and I wondered quite what they meant by this.

Anyway, chivitos. Chivitos is sirloin steak topped with bacon, cheese, a fried egg and peppers. The one I ordered arrived on top of a mound of chips and a dog-sized bed of shredded lettuce. Which in turn was surrounded by wedges of about three large tomatoes and a mixed salad of tinned peas, carrots and potatoes folded through mayonnaise. It was all so huge and pilesome that they give you an extra plate to decant it onto so that it doesn´t fall off into the sea while you eat it.

The steak was smallish and bashed out thinly. It was just cooked - juicy and with that faint-to-medium whiff of meat that´s been hanging around a bit, which is generally okay with beef, though not advisable with poultry. So I decanted the steak and toppings first and got through with relative ease to the underlying section.

The chips weren´t properly cooked - they were white and floppy - but I wasn´t really bothered about these, so I left them. I made a courageous stab at the lettuce and tinned salad. Although lettuce doesn´t taste of much and isn´t particularly filling, there´s only so much of it you can be bothered to eat in one sitting. After about half an hour, it looked like I´d barely made a dent in the whole dish and felt like a phoney fuss-pot pushing food around my plate, wishing it would disappear, or at least look like less. In the end they took it away from me.

It occured to me halfway through my lettuce attempt that I still hadn´t quite pinned down the exchange rate - Uruguay having a totally separate currency to Argentina, and rightly so - and prices on the menu were pretty scarey. The chivitos, for example, was $250. I´d read about the economic crisis in the 1960s and the country´s downfall after the foot-and-mouth disease ("the fight against which", posters at the port´s immigration tell you, "is everyone´s responsibility") and about how they were bailed out by the World Bank. I had only Argentinian dollars - 100 of them, about 20 quid - which I´d been told by other travellers was legal tender. But I stalled paying for a while and read my book for an hour or two. I could always pop to a cashpoint if need be. If there was one here.

The bill in the end topped out at 45 of my $100. Which would buy about five steak dinners in Argentina. A hell of a lot of dosh, really. I climbed to the top of the nearby lighthouse to get over it, then mid-afternoon I paid a staggering $24 for a coffee and water (now that´s more than London prices). Though, oddly, a huge early-evening beer was only $6. I put it down to a somewhat loose conversion system and would advise changing up into Uruguay´s own currency before you go there for lunch.

A rare photo of a bar in Colonia...