Treating Ourselves

We made our way back to the hotel and up the long driveway to check in. It seems even in the tourist industry in Paraguay there is no English spoken. We managed, but the receptionist was one of those people who makes no allowances for people who have said they can't speak Spanish well. The hotel didn't seem anything like as posh as the guide book had led me to believe, and the price the girl at the last hotel had quoted me was a bit higher than in the guide, but it did have four swimming pools, as promised, and there seemed to be plenty of birds around. To settle in, we decided to have a beer by the pool, before taking the plunge ourselves, but by the time we had finished our beers, there was an ominous rumbling and some distant flashes of light. We barely had time to seek shelter before it started pouring with rain and the clouds were so thick that Joanne took some convincing that it was already about 6pm and getting dark: it was only 2.30pm and not because my phone was still in another time-zone.

Too wet even for a toad

How dark it looked before playing with camera settings

It rained...

... and it rained

So we spent the one day we had by four swimming pools watching incredibly heavy rain from the hotel bar. At least the beer prices didn't seem to be too inflated for somewhere supposedly so posh, though they had a terrible selection of drinks and wouldn't even mix cocktails. When I had tried to get some more information about the place online, several days before, I had gathered from the Spanish only site (the English section was “under construction”) that the hotel was for sale, also there was no way to book online, so I hadn't seen sure it was open until our last hotel's receptionist phoned for me. Now I could see why it was for sale: they had no idea what to do with the place, and they weren't charging enough for drinks. Good news for us, though. Here I reflected on something that had been bugging me in Argentina, and was clearly the same in Paraguay. The beers come in three sizes: un litro, tres cuartos, and chico. Chico means small, only in Latin American Spanish, I think: in Spain it means only “guy”, whereas South Americans never seem to use the word pequeño for small. Anyway I have no problem with the chico size: it's 330ml, which is quite small, however the litro bottles are only 970ml, which is clearly not a litre; OK it's only slightly short and maybe nothing to get upset about, even if it is clearly a lie. My real problem is with the tres cuartos bottles, which are only 620ml, far short of their advertised quantity and, in fact, even less than dos terceros I might let them away with on the same grounds as the litro. The most baffling thing about all of this is that the bottles are usually priced according to their professed volumes, rather than the real ones, so buying two chicos is cheaper than buying one tres cuartos, though un litro is almost always the best value, which really leaves little choice...

After an hour or so of non-stop very heavy rain and increasingly close lightening, the power went out. I had just built myself up to ask the tourist-unfriendly receptionist about internet use, only to be told no because of the weather, which I had thought was a bit daft; now I understood what she was saying. Back in the bar I tried to speak a bit with the barman, but found him very difficult to follow as well. He was either speaking Portuguese or Spanish very heavily influenced by Portuguese. There seems to be a lot of Portuguese in Paraguay: in Ciudad del Este, it seems to be most people's first language, but it makes sense there as it's just over the border from Brazil, but here the closest border is Argentina, so I wasn't expecting it at all. After a very uninspiring “buffet dinner” closely resembling school meals, we gave up and retired to our room, which was very nice, to be fair. On the TV, all the channels seemed to be in Portuguese. Strange.

View from our room

Our room

Joanne catches some rays

Our room from across the pool

In the morning it was nice and sunny, so we were out at the pool by 8am. We swam a bit and lounged around until we had to check out, after which we returned to one of the non-resident pools and continued sun-bathing. We had gone there for the pools, so we were going to take advantage of it. One mystery we never got to the bottom of was the fact we hadn't been able to book in for two nights; that had been my plan, so that we would get one full day there, but the previous hotel's receptionist had reported that they were full the second day, however there were very few other guests around. Maybe there was a huge tour group arriving later that day, or maybe the receptionist had got it wrong, just as she had with the price, as I discovered at check-out: she had told us 350000 guarnies for the night, but it was only actually 200000, which is really quite cheap. Maybe I should buy it and do it properly; I'm sure there's money to be made there.

Nice sunny view

Non-resident pool

Best shot I got of the birds!

Our only other plan in Paraguay was to visit the Santísima Trinidad del Paraná
Jesuit ruins which are near Hotel Tirol; after the ruins in Argentina, we weren't that excited about it, which partly explains our extended sun-lounging, though we did finally get around to ordering a taxi, not at all sure about the buses we might be able to catch.

written by  The Happy Couple on October 12, 2009 from Hotel Tirol, Paraguay
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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