Fly-by Paraguay

At the bus station there was already a bus waiting which said “international service” on it, and when I asked if they went to Ciudad del Este, the driver said yes, then something about frontera. We paid and got on the bus and then the penny dropped that he had probably been saying that we would be dropped at the border where it would only take five minutes to walk across the bridge. I wasn't totally sure, though. We really should have waited for the bus which actually said “Ciudad del Este” on the front, because that one goes direct and just transits through Brazil so you don't need to go through their passport control. At the Argentina-Brazil border, the bus just went straight through and I began to believe I had misunderstood, but when we got to Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil, the bus just pulled up to the bridge to Paraguay without going through any borders. This was a bit of a problem because we hadn't been stamped into Brazil and now we were about to try and leave it. We just had to brazen it out: en transito, I announced confidently to the border policeman as I handed over my passport, but it didn't work. They were quite nice and only lightly scolded us, reminding us that we had to get stamped on our way back. “Bus the bus didn't stop” we said, but he just said that we have to ask the bus to stop.

The other slight problem with the bus we had taken was that someone at breakfast had told us that their guide book (Lonely Planet) warns that the bridge is too dangerous to walk over, so you should not do it. It seemed OK, so we just walked and, although there were definitely a few unsavoury characters hanging around in no mans land, they didn't seem any more dangerous than you might encounter on a walk into Glasgow city centre. Certainly during the day with so many people around it didn't seem at all dangerous; maybe at night I would have second thoughts. At the other side we found passport control and asked them to stamp our documents.

Ciudad del Este, at least at the border, is quite a crazy place; we hadn't seen anything like that level of activity since Asia: there are loads of stalls lining the streets, touts who offer you cards then try to drag you into their preferred photographic or computer shop. It does seem a bit dodgy, but I certainly wouldn't have put it down to “the Arabs” our Israeli room mate had warned us about; in fact I didn't see anyone I would have recognised as an Arab. The city is apparently known as the supermarket of South America because of all the contraband goods smuggled in from Brazil, but even the legal goods are probably cheaper than Brazil because of taxation and the relative value of the currencies, cost of labour, and so on. At first it was a bit over-whelming, but then I decided to follow a tout or two, just to find out where the computer shops were and try to get some kind of feel for the prices. The prices were much higher than I expected and nobody seemed keen to haggle much, probably because of the tout's cut, I thought. I had checked the prices on Google UK the night before and it was definitely not looking like a good deal here. It was very confusing because electronics are supposed to be cheap in Ciudad del Este. Is Britain just really cheap for electronics now?

We decided we had to try it without the touts, but it proved quite difficult because I didn't know Spanish for hard-drive (disco duro it turns out – doh!). I had picked up a word from the box of one of the hard-drives offered to me by a tout, but I think that just means “storage” or something and I kept getting confused responses and it all just seemed to be whole laptops and mobile phones everyone was selling. Finally someone pointed us to a particular building, which was very different from the shiny, flashy shops, with lots of products in the windows, we had been taken to before: it seemed very sedate in comparison to the rest of the town, with people just sitting behind desks. After a couple of tries we found a computer place (with no products on display) and, when I asked, the woman brought up a catalogue on her computer and was able to show me the price on the screen, rather than plucking one out of the air. The price was much lower than any we'd had before, but their smallest had more capacity than I needed. A nearby shop with the same setup had a smaller drive at an even lower price. Cheaper and much more respectable than all the showrooms. Unfortunately we had been misinformed by people who had told us you could use Argentine Pesos for everything: it seemed to be the only currency they wouldn't take there; US Dollars, Brazilian Real, and of course Paraguayan Guaranies were all OK, but I hadn't drawn any yet, but we didn't have to worry because there was an exchange downstairs. US Dollars, in which all the prices were set, was their preferred currency.

Job done! Now all we had to do in Paraguay that day was get a bus to the Hydroelectric project which was the world's largest until the recently built Chinese dam. I'm not much of an engineering geek, but who wouldn't find the idea of a mile-long machine room exciting? Unfortunately our hangovers had dented our organisational abilities and we hadn't registered that the guide book had no map of the city. It had an address for tourist information, but without a map what use is that. They really should have a tourist information at the border crossing. I tried asking people for directions to the bus station, which the tourist information is supposed to be close to, but it wasn't the right bus station and we were getting hungry, hot, thirsty, and tired. So we had to give up and find food instead. We had been told that you can get Asian-influenced food, very different from most South American fare, but we couldn't find anywhere selling food at all, save for a couple of empanada stalls. We were making our way back to the border, increasingly defeated, then just at the border we spotted a food hall. It was disappointing and not Asian, but we just wanted to eat.

We stamped out of Paraguay, crossed the bridge, and stamped into Brazil, mission only partially successful, but the hard-drive was the main thing. Now we wouldn't have to delete non-backed-up photos.

written by  The Happy Couple on October 9, 2009 from Ciudad del Este, Paraguay
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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