Punta: Day One

I arrived at Montevideo airport (for those of you that don’t know, Montevideo is the sketchy Uruguayan city one usually flies into to then drive two hours to Punta del Este) feeling refreshed (I was that passed out drooling person with a blanket over my head on the plane) and shocked at how wonderfully warm it was. Considering I spoke zero Spanish and had never even been to Mexico, for my safety and peace of mind I’d organized to fly in with our trip’s organizer, a fabulous party Nazi who’ll for the remainder of the saga I’ll refer to as Cavalli.

A note about Cavalli: while an amazingly generous friend and kind-hearted person, he drives like a Nascar driver dropping acid. I had been forewarned about this by our mutual friends, but wrote of their concern as ‘silliness.’

WRONG!

Cavalli and I burnt rubber pulling out of the Montevideo airport parking lot and for the remainder of the two-hour trip (which speeding, took us 45 minutes) I was gripping my broken seatbelt and smiling through clenched teeth.

Note: Renting a car in Punta isn’t like renting a car anywhere else in the world. Be forewarned that the locomotive they present you with will resemble a reconstructed dump unit. In La Barra and Jose Ignacio, most of the roads aren’t paved. Cars are expected to get seriously beaten up by irresponsible vacationers who don’t know the terrain. What we rented looked less like an automobile and more like a junk-heap on wheels.

Airbags? Forget about it.

We didn’t even have seatbelts, and if we hit a pothole the car stereo would fall out. Regardless, we were all too quickly on our way.

After checking into our house in La Barra, blocks from Mantra hotel and the ocean (by blocks I mean dusty dirt road blocks) we headed out with an Argentine girlfriend to Jose Ignacio beach and the trendy La Huella bar/restaurant on the water. The idea was get on the list for the annually, notoriously difficult to get into Lacoste party hosted at La Huella for people like Giuseppe Cipriani and Ralph Lauren models. It was at La Huella that I began my first analysis of Punta:

-That everyone enjoying sunset aperitivos on beach were from a classier, better looking planet

- That wearing four inch wedge heels and stilettos with heavy, expensive jewelry on the beach with your bikini was ‘normal’

- That going anywhere without your bathing suit and sunglasses on was considered a crime

-That the girls could wear clingy, transparent, white ‘cover ups’ over their bikinis that somehow managed to be more revealing than naked flesh, and

- That Spanish was actually an incredibly sexy language when not hearing it whilst on hold on the telephone (‘prima una per espagnol’)

That night we went to the house party one of my New York/Argentine friends. House parties in Punta are ‘the thing.’ Clubs are pretty much looked down upon, except for the infamous Tequila, which I never even made it to. The problem is Punta has

a) A lot of dirt roads with no light and
b) Practically no street names (only the houses have names)

So for a foreigner there’s pretty much only a 20% chance you’ll ever end up at your destination. More likely, you’ll waste hours cruising through pitch black cow fields and calling friends for directions that sound something like this:

“Turn off the main street after street sign 48 onto a dirt road that has an incline. Drive up the hill for two kilometers and turn left onto the third dirt road you intersect. Drive a kilometer past the golf course, and take a right onto the second dirt road. 700 meters above on the right, turn at the high, oddly shaped rock and we’re the third villa on your left called “’D’Angelo.’”

Keep in mind you’re always doing this in pitch black around 1 A.M. after several cocktails.

Luckily, my two friends are I were on what we called “mission party” (kind of like “mission impossible”) and by gathering all of our long distance eyesight, night vision, and limited knowledge of the terrain, made it to my friend’s house party with only one wrong turn.

And the house was stunning: long gravel driveway, tennis court, pool, acres of grass, a pool house with speakers the size on my Manhattan bathroom, two DJs. We immediately started mingling and drinking the insane vodka supply.

Don’t worry, Rocco, who I had no idea was even in Uruguay (although I should have guessed) showed up at the house party with a male entourage. Surprise! So much for leaving New York behind.

At around 3 A.M., we headed out to Ocean Club’s grand opening in a follow-the-leader string of barely functional cars operated by drivers who weren’t as sober as they should be. The door out front (literally hundreds of people) made our Manhattan club line-ups look pathetic. Once inside, I entered a mediocre dim hallway. But before I could condemn the place as ‘so so,’ I stepped into the main dance area – an arena area so full you could easily body surf from one corner to the other. If people in New York party, these people were party maniacs.



Everyone was so happy, especially the gorgeous girls. Apparently, Bob Sinclair is right: “Love can save the world.” Or at least the Latin aura of love inside a Uruguayan disco has the power to heal. I’m convinced of this, because from this moment forward, and for the duration of my trip, I felt elated and anxious free in what I’ve been defining as an attitude altering Zen-like experience.

We left at 5:30 A.M. and Cavalli drove us home Shumaker-style, which would might have been okay in a Ferrari but is absurdly terrifying when you’re in a car that wouldn’t pass a one basic US safety test. We pulled up in front of our house and smelt burning.

Then we realized we’d driven the entire way home with the emergency break on.

Great car.

And this was only day one.


To Be Continued…