Ola Uruguay Real Estate and Investments

In less than three weeks, the summer will officially come to an end. It has been a busy one for us with visitors from Canada and France. We’ve spent a lot of time touring them about. Although Punta del Este, Piriapolis, Colonia, Montevideo, and other parts of coastal Uruguay are wonderful, we’ve seen enough of them for a while. Now, we need a holiday!

While we could plan a trip for ourselves, we decided we would like someone else to do it for us. There are a lot of travel agencies and tour companies in Uruguay. There is a fine one right here in Atlantida, where we live. However, we decided to try Geant Travel, an adjunct of the large Geant supermarket.

Why Geant? Well, I guess it’s advertising mostly. Over the past few months there have been a couple of television ads featured repeatedly. In one of them, a pleasant middle-aged travel agent approaches a hotel seeking a good rate for his clients, an anxious but enthusiastic family, who are standing in the background. After much friendly negotiating with the hotel manager, he procures the lodging for a fraction of the quoted price. In the other commercial, the same agent negotiates successfully with an airline. The commercials are humorous while effectively presenting the message that Geant can get you the best deal. This message sounded good to us.

We checked the offerings posted on their Internet site and found one that appealed to us a lot. It is a ten-day bus trip to the region around Salta in northern Argentina. You spend two nights on the bus, which has seats appropriate for sleeping and excellent services including meals, and seven nights in hotels. The hotels, which we also checked online are all fine quality and include breakfast. Your other meals while not on the bus are extra. The tour package was an amazing $614 per person. We quickly made the decision that this was the tour for us and went to the office where Pamela, a most pleasant agent, made the booking and accepted our deposit of $200. The receipt promises el precio mas bajo para viajar, the lowest price for travel. For this trip for sure, that is true. By the way, making the commitment early is also a good idea. The package cost now, closer to the departure date, has risen to $675 per person. Still a great deal, but we like our deal better.

We were excited about our plans and soon shared them with another expat couple living in Atlantida. They were so impressed that they immediately booked to come on the same tour. We are happy to enjoy the experience with friends. We can hardly wait until the departure date, near the end of March.

If the trip works out as well as advertised, we just might try one of their other offerings, like a nice package tour to tropical Brazil in July, as an escape from part of the cool Uruguayan winter. Our holiday escape of the moment, however, will be Argentina.

Easy access to interesting neighboring countries like Argentina or Brazil or Chile or Bolivia is just one of the many wonderful things about life in Uruguay.