Days 18 – Punta del Diablo
After a couple of days of leisure, we were on the move again. Feb 27 started early for Michael. The morning sunrise was so tempting, he rose early and took a ton of photos as the light kept changing every time he lifted his eye from the camera. So lots of early morning shots 🙂
We decided to catch the bus to Fortaleza de Santa Teresa and then hike back. It was a well orchestrated plan until Michael realized, as we sat waiting for the shuttle van to take us to the bus terminal, that he had failed to put his memory card back in the camera (again!) So I went ahead and sat at the bus terminal and people watched while Mike ran back to the room and caught the next round of the van.
The fort was very impressive – a blueprint right out of Spain. It had fallen to disrepair and was restored from the 1920’s through to the 1980’s – quite the undertaking. One of my favourite components were the ‘hanging’ outhouse toilets which hung over the outside wall to drop below, outside the fort – very ingenious! The horse corral was also unique – it was designed to allow only one horse at a time to exit to avoid a stampede inside the fort. We had a quick lunch at the little restaurant outside the fort – very nice with the requisite resident dog.
From there we took the long walk back to Punta del Diablo. The first half of the journey was through the park – quite strange to walk through tall pines on one side, overflowing with pine cones, and giant eucalyptus on the other side along with palms and pampas grasses (not the photo here however). It was a very nice park with camping and beaches throughout. The 2nd half of the hike was a beach walk. It started on loose sand and gave us quite the workout, but the sand finally firmed up and the walking got easier. There were several interesting finds along the deserted beaches – mostly dead unfortunately! So 2 1/2 hours later we were back home feeling quite pleased that we taken the journey after several warnings that it was too far. Another successful day in paradise.
