A&I went to Uruguay for the weekend. We had to cross the border to get our passports stamped, or we'd be over-stayers, so we spent a couple of nights in Colonia, which is a wee quiet town on a peninsula poking into the Rio de la Plata, just across from BsAs. It's an old smuggling town that's been there since the end of the 17h century. Lots of old stone buildings and cobbled lanes. Lots of identical tourist shops selling knitting and mate gourds; the only two things you can buy in Colonia. Lots of stray dogs and Argentine tourists. We had a different mangey canine chaperone each day, but they were as personable and unobtrusive as the shop owners; on the last day our doggy companion escorted us all the way to the ferry.

There's absolutely nothing to do in Colonia other than eat and stroll around, so it was a bit of enforced tranquility. Mostly we looked at ancient stone edifices, watched the yachts drift by over a glass of wine, and slept. The Lonely Planet said that if you approach Colonia from inland, there are several 'slower-paced' towns on the way - their inhabitants must all be either dead or asleep.

We walked along the huge stone wall, complete with cannon, that the Portuguese used to repel Spanish invaders before the Portuguese signed it over in the 1760s (although apparently the pesky Jesuits still wouldn't leave, tenacious clerics that they were). And we hung out in the ruins of the original Portuguese governor's house (not really ruins, just rocky formations on the ground that let you see what the floor plan used to be).

Not a milonga in sight.