Yesterday I went to Uruguay

It's an hour on a fast ferry from Buenos Aires to the city of Colonia de Sacramento, built on the opposite bank by the Portuguese: as a haven for smugglers, if you ask a Porteño, or as a protest against Spain's unreasonably rigid colonial tariff regime, had you asked in Portugal at the time. It's a world heritage site, and the ferry terminal is five blocks from my hotel, so off I went, the skyscrapers of Puerto Madero - the new Docklands development of BsAs - receding.

The river is coffee-coloured, as were the non-opening windows of the catamaran. For a country populated by Spanish and Italian immigrants, the coffee here is strikingly watery, though I doubt the river is directly to blame.

Colonia is tiny - the world-heritage site, which is basically the area within the walls, is maybe four hundred yards on a side. It reminded me quite how awesomely filled with close-packed history Britain really is: this gate, which is apparently a site worth the journey, would have passed unmentioned in one of the walls of my old school.

Being once Portuguese, it has azulejas:

Otherwise, it has a bit of the aspect of Blakeney in the rain.

A nice evening meal: fish in a cream sauce with carrots, peas, pumpkins and chopped peppers. After three days of steak (glorious steak, tender and juicy and an inch thick, burned crispy bits on the outside and oozing jus when you cut it) accompanied by chips, a meal of more than one component was a nice change.

(Ruins of the old convent, from the top of the lighthouse)

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Flora and fauna of the Rio Plate

As always, in the big city the bird that thrives best is the pigeon; in more rural areas large groups of sparrows dust-bathe fluffily.

These ones are ubiquitous (I'm assuming they're the female and the male): starling-sized though looking as if they ought to be tit-sized

In a park by the river in Colonia we had these attractive, but loud, parrots

This handsome white-bandannaed fellow who gave a regular alarm call

And this pair of pigeon-sized perchers

As for flowers:

And this, the least huggable tree in all Creation

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An art museum to make you laugh out loud

As you enter the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, your attention is first caught by a sort of tangled wooden thing at the side

As you go a bit further into the museum and turn round, you see another one

Turning right and carrying on counter-clockwise round the museum, you pass some gorgeous galleries of Sixties op-art and kinetic art, such as this spectacular fish tank

And suddenly turn a corner to see this

I must have stood there with a silly grin on my face, occasionally laughing out loud, for about a minute.

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