As we wanted to see the coast of Uruguay before going to Florianopolis it would have been crazy to travel back to Montevideo to catch the bus so we tried to find a way to get from the border town Chuy instead. A direct bus was out of the question as they only go twice a week but the bus company EGA has one bus a day to Porto Alegre from Montevideo. It’s possible to book your tickets at the bus station in Montevideo which is what we did before we left so were pretty sure that a bus would show up in Chuy to pick us up at 23.55. The girls left us in the centre of Chuy which is where the emigration police told us the bus stop was. So Peter and I waited in the restaurant until 23.30 and went out to where we thought the bus stop was but saw nothing resembling such a thing. I went back into the restaurant and showed the guys our bus ticket. “Emigracion.” They told us we had to go back out to Uruguayan border control to catch the bus. After a bit of back and forth during which I just kept asking “are you sure?” and the very nice guys used Google translate to assure me they were sure and one of them had caught the bus before we made tracks for border control which was 1.6km away. We walked/jogged with our bags and made it with seven minutes to spare. I was very happy with this small journey in itself because I haven’t run at all since my race with my bad leg and here I managed to jog a bit with about 15kgs on my back – I consider this a big win! 

So now we’re at emigration and have confirmed with a guy having a cigarette that our bus would stop for us here. So we stand at the side of the road and wait. And wait. Aaaaaaand wait. Every time we see lights we take it in turns to be hopeful and pessimistic. “This is definitely it now I can feel it!”

About 20 feet away there were a group of heavily armed emigration officers who took absolutely no notice of us which we to to be confirmation that our bus would arrive and that we were indeed in the right place. Eventually, shortly after 1am our bus arrived. We were two very relieved, cold, tired Irish people boarding that lovely, warm, comfortable bus. A woman took our passports and took care of emigration and immigration checks. We got them back at the end of the journey with all necessary stamps and our Brazilian visas. 

We had a quick turnaround in Porto Alegre and got on a bus at 9am bound for Florianopolis which arrived at 3pm. We met an Irish couple on the bus and shared a taxi to our hostel in Campeche. 

A pretty easy journey in the end with a little bit of stress thrown in the middle about whether our bus would show up or not!