Montevideo then Cape Town

Careful watch

Now, that's a proper gun!

Faded grandeur

Beer in the square

Harbour view

Breakfast on deck

British war memorial

Celebrity Infinity on the 'runway'

That's better!

The countryside

View to the sea

Independence Square

Graf Spee in harbour

End of the line

Head to head

Once the tallest in South America

Revolutionaries

As it used to be

Local colour

Made in China?

Market restaurant

Montevideo dawn

Harbour view

Not quite Copacabana

Now THAT'S a BBQ!

Our berth

Our escort

Background presence

Port market

Queen Victoria

Recylcer

The wreck's out there

City view

Suburbia

The fort

Leaving Montevideo

Next sector

Avoid that Cape

She only just fits!

Traffic lights

No need for comment

Who invented the tango?

Uruguay – a Nation created by the British to separate Argentina from Brazil (and stop the fighting between them) and to give the British influence in South America after the loss of the US after Independence. No natural resources to speak of, but a deep-water port accessing the enormous estuary known as the ‘River’ Plate, makes Montevideo a busy port capable of handling larger shipping than Buenos Aires. The mouth of the estuary is 120 miles across, but the channel is dredged to between 12m and 14m - QM2 draws 11m, so we had a cautious entry in the dark! It’s so huge that the water is permanently brackish, so the ship will float even lower in the water.

The channel markers are laid out like an airport runway, with the port and starboard buoys flashing in sequence down a channel probably 8 miles long but only 150m wide – quite surreal as we glided into the port, followed by Celebrity Infinity just 3 or 4 miles astern. Of course the US buoyage is the wrong way round for a European sailor, so one has to think twice when trying to work out what comes next! A 180 turn and 300m sideways move into the berth was a neat manoeuvre thanks to loads of thrusters and azipods on this ship.

We had breakfast on our balcony to make the most of the port entry and then off on our tour ‘Trail of a Legend’ tracing the events of December 1939 and the Battle of the River Plate. We explored the city and saw the buildings where the British, Uruguayan and German diplomats oversaw the political battle, which played out into the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee after much scheming and deception by the British. Then out to the fort which looks out over the harbour and the estuary and from which thousands of sightseers saw the warship destroyed by scuttling charges 4km offshore, via the Montevideo cemetery in which the German casualties are buried and the rather bizarre British Cemetery – very few naval graves in fact, but as there was a large British community (We used to own and run most of the infrastructure here), there is a wide variety of elaborate Victorian memorials. A quick visit to the Naval Museum, displaying a 150mm gun salvaged from the ship in 2004 and back to the QM2 for lunch and a cool, off – a hot day!

Montevideo is famous for its port market, in which you can get any sort of meat dish barbecued on wood griddles and any amount of tourist tat, but what an atmosphere! The steaks are simply HUGE, much larger than the plates on which they are served with mountains of chips and inches thick!! Have to admit that we didn’t attempt anything, but wandered round the faded grandeur of the city and enjoyed a beer in the shade of the Plaza Independencia plane trees.

R & F returned safely from their Iguassu trip and we enjoyed our dinner as the ship tiptoed out of the harbour in the evening sunset, headed for Cape Town, merely 3321 miles to the East as at Noon today and we are cruising at just over 25 knots – next land to be seen could be Tristan da Cuhna. We have covered over 7178 miles since New York and it’s amazing to think that we are so far South on the globe, although less far South than the UK is North of the Equator.