Garganta del Diablo

Even at the entrance to the cataratas park, we couldn't work out what was what. Why is Brazil so confusing? The tickets were split into entrance and transport. Did we need the transport? What was the transport for? We just asked for two foreigner tickets and paid the amount, then we were back outside again waiting for another bus. Ah – the set up isn't like Argentina: you pay at the entrance to the park which is a few miles from the falls.

View across to Argentine side

View across to Argentine side

The Brazilian side isn't as breath-taking, mostly because you aren't as close to the awesome power of the falls, but it does afford very nice panoramic views of more-or-less everything, which you can't see in Argentina due to the your proximity: you can only ever see one little bit at a time. Unfortunately, we were there at the wrong time of day: the view was a bit too dazzling because of the sun right behind the falls; morning would have been the time for the Brazilian side, but our stupid guide book didn't think to mention an obvious detail like that. Nonetheless, details like the impression of the clouds constantly rising up out of the forest are very nice, then la Garganta del Diablo is actually better on the Brazil side: a platform takes you out onto a lower level calm bit, halfway down the cascade, so that you are facing the main force of the deluge, while precipitously hanging over the next stage of the cascade. You can see much more of this spectacle from Brazil.

Gorge up to Garganta del Diablo

Steamy forest

Garganta del Diablo

Garganta del Diablo

Walkway to the edge of Garganta del Diablo

Steamy forest

Then we were waiting for a bus again, back to the park entrance; then another bus to take us to the changing point, where we could finally get our bus to Argentina. But we went past where we expected the change to be, even though a German guy we had started talking to had asked the driver in much more proficient Spanish than mine to alert us when we should get off. Finally he asked someone else who told him to get off now. Then we were waiting again, and the time of the last bus was approaching, but it arrived before we started giving up, however there was one more obstacle to clear: we had to get our passports stamped out of Brazil. We were thinking about not bothering because we had no plans to re-enter Brazil, but then some other people stood up to get off and we thought it would be OK with others doing it; the bus would presumably wait. But as soon as we were off the bus, it left, and only then did we notice the other people had not got off, but just sat down again. The stamps took no time and the poor German guy had got off with us for no good reason as he hadn't been stamped in, so would have been in trouble if he'd tried to stamp out. Some passersby told us the border crossing here is three kilometres long and very dangerous, and that there was only one more bus, so we had to get it. When the bus arrived we showed our tickets, which are still supposed to be valid for the next bus, but the driver said “wrong company, twenty minutes more”. We had been told this was the last bus and it was definitely after last bus time now, so we weren't taking any more chances and we just paid again. At the Argentinian side the buses wait.

Waiting for the bus

What a stupid stupid system: all this pointless competition when they could have an integrated public transport system; this stupid system of not waiting at the border; and finally, why isn't there at least a tourist bus, travelling from Puerto Igazu direct to las cataratas on the Brazilian side? And another travelling from Foz do Iguaçu direct to las cataratas on the Argentinian side. They could be buses that wait on both sides of the border and they could charge double what the two-bus combined trip costs and most tourists would do so happily to avoid all of this hassle and uncertainty. The Brazilian side was nice, but not as impressive as the Argentinian side, and by the end of all that, we wondered if it had been worth the effort.

Back in town, our grumpy mood was amplified by the discovery that nearly all the eating places were closed by 10pm – on Friday – which is worse than Glasgow! And this is supposed to be Latin America, where people never even leave the house before 9pm. The place we did find was packed and I was struck again by how many fizzy drinks, particularly Coke, South Americans drink. There would be tables of families with two big bottles of sugary soft drinks in the middle of the table; no wine and no water, in fact you don't seem to be able to buy big bottles of water in restaurants, just two-litre bottles of pop! How strange, it's not a children birthday party; even tables with just adults had the same. They may not be alcoholics, but they must have a terrible rate of diabetes.

written by  The Happy Couple on October 9, 2009 from Foz do Iguacu, Brazil
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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First stop, though, was San Ignacio, a place famous for the Jesuit ruins there. I didn't know much about the Jesuits but there are plenty of examples of their ruined community buildings all over this part of South America, abandoned when the King of Spain expelled them, then destroyed during South American international wars. I didn't really know what to expect of the ruins either, but thought we should check them out since we were in the area.

In the town of San Ignacio it was the first time we had seen anyone who looked more than slightly native American. And the tragedy is that the South American Indians here, Guaranis I think, were probably the poorest people we had seen so far on the continent. They all seemed to be living in the streets and they looked utterly miserable. Maybe not so much has changed in Argentina since Guevara's time after all.

We were a bit unsure what to do when we arrived. I tried to tell someone that I was looking for tourist information, but I think he understood simply that I was wanted information and pointed us in the direction of the ruins, rather than somewhere we could maybe store our bags for a few hours, get a map, and maybe access the internet to book a place to stay that evening. We stood around contemplating lunch and where the entrance to the ruins might be, rather than the exit we were standing outside, when a woman came out of one restaurant, and invited us to leave our bags for no charge. I'm not sure if she was explicit or hinted that we eat at her restaurant, but we were quite happy to do so anyway.

Lots of birds around the ruins

What would Dan Brown make of these symbols?

Entrance to the ruins

Church entrance

Tree growing through a wall

Even here they can't resist grafitti

The ruins themselves were not very exciting; actually they were quite impressive, but any ruins on the same trip as Angkor have to be really impressive to be of much interest. They seem to be rebuilding large parts of it but haven't got very far yet.

Living quarters

The stonework has seen better days

Original tiles! Wow.

Reconstruction work

Central courtyard

A big cactus

When we finished at the ruins, we picked our bags up from the restaurant where the staff kindly told us where to wait for the bus. After half an hour of waiting, I was starting to get nervous about the possibility of our intended hotel filling up before we got there, but a bus arrived shortly after and we were in Posadas soon after, where we quickly and easily caught a bus to Encarnacion, across the border. At the Argentine border post the bus waited as almost everyone got off to get stamped out, then at the Paraguayan side the bus stopped and the driver looked at us meaningfully. We had considered not bothering with Paraguayan stamps this time, after all the hassle at Iguazu, but a few other people getting off the bus persuaded us it would be OK. As soon as we got off the bus the others all wandered off in the direction of no-mans-land, where they probably lived, but it looked like the bus was waiting, so it would be OK after all. The queue for the immigration officials wasn't very long but it wasn't moving very fast, and one of the two windows was taken up by an official having his lunch. After a couple of minutes, the bus crept forward, the driver craning to analyse the situation briefly, before putting his foot down and disappearing.

Luckily the next bus was along in only fifteen minutes but by that time I was convinced all of the rooms in Encarnacion would be gone. After longer on the bus that I expected, with no sign of any bus terminal, the bus stopped in the street, everyone else got off, and the driver asked us where we were going; el terminal I said, but he pointed backwards and said something about fifteen blocks. Surely the point of a terminal is that the bus terminates there? It looked a bit dodgy where we were so, completely against our usual policy, we took a taxi. Before we got in I had to tell the driver that we had no guaranies, but he said it didn't matter, he would take pesos, dollars, euros, anything.

written by  The Happy Couple on October 10, 2009 from San Ignacio, Argentina
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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I had a secret plan to book us into a posh hotel for the next two nights, so I couldn't tell her. I told her I'd ask the receptionist for advice but actually asked her if she knew and would book for us Hotel Tirol, which our guidebook suggested as a place to visit for its bird sanctuary or the swimming pool, also mentioning that this former favourite hangout of the King of Spain is surprisingly reasonable to stay at. It turned out that they could only take us for one night too, although Hotel Germano were able to take us back again for our last night in Paraguay. Joanne was still unhappy about the accommodation situation so I had to spoil my surprise about Hotel Tirol before she continued into an inconsolable despair about how we shouldn't have come to Paraguay; Joanne hadn't wanted to enter Paraguay in the first place and Ciudad del Este had been enough to convince her, whereas I had wanted to spend quite bit longer than the three nights I had compromised on, but Joanne's time was running out and she really wanted to get to Bolivia.

The girl on the desk had recommended an “international restaurant” nearby so, to make life easier, we just followed her advice instead of spending the time to find a more traditional Paraguayan place as I would have preferred. The “international restaurant” turned out to be a Japanese restaurant, where the sushi was very good, and much cheaper than it had been in Japan! Judging by the clientele, it was one of the posher restaurants in Encarnacion, but the prices were extremely reasonable compared to Argentina, and the Paraguayan beer we had was far superior to that horrible, tasteless Quilmes stuff that is ubiquitous in Argentina.

Judging by the short walk we had around town, it was a very religious place: the schools had religious names; the parks had religious names; there were banners up promoting religious festivals; there was even a hairdresser called El Niño Jesus; and when we got back to the room I discovered that the chest of drawer next to the bed contained a copy of The Gideon's Bible in Spanish and English; I don't know how many years it is since I last found one of these in my drawers.

Beef and egg soup

The next morning, in pursuit of something a bit more authentic than Japanese, we went next door to the basic-looking cafe. Feeling brave, I ordered something in the breakfast section that I had no idea what it would be, but turned out to be a very tasty beef and egg soup. As it was late morning and other people were drinking beer, I thought it would be OK to order one myself, and it arrived in one of those very civilised bottle containers for keeping beer cool. We hadn't seen one of them since Thailand and Cambodia, but it was very hot in Paraguay, so it made sense. As we ate, two flies landed in beer, reminding me of the unlikely coincidence in a joke Andre had told in Montevideo (stop me if you know it):

A Scotsman, an Englishman, and an Irishman are all in a pub having a beer. Coincidentally, a fly lands in each of their beers at the same time. The Englishman pushes his pint to the side, saying that he can't possibly drink it now; the Irishman nonchalantly picks the fly out, throws it away, and continues drinking; the Scotsman picks the fly out of his beer, lifts it up to his face, and shouts at the fly “spit it oot!”

Nice cold beer

We had time for another little walk around the town before our bus to Hotel Tirol, but there really didn't seem to be much to see. Compared with everywhere we had been recently it seemed a nice, laid-back place, where people were just going about their business, but it was also extremely ugly compared to anywhere we had been for a while. I think, other than Asunción, Paraguay is not about the towns; what a shame we were only going to be out of town for one day! We left most of our luggage at Hotel Germano and waited at the bus station.

written by  The Happy Couple on October 11, 2009 from Encarnacion, Paraguay
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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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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