Paraguay is one country I missed out last time and I didn’t know anyone who had bothered to visit. When Vix and I told people in our hostel in Montevideo that we were planning to go, they said “Paraguay?! You must be very religious or drug dealers”. Even more reason to visit this landlocked country that borders Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia and is part of the Triple Frontier where the Iguazú and Paraná rivers meet.
There were multiple bus operators at the bus terminal in Puerto Iguazú running services to from Argentina to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. It looked pretty straightforward as long as you don’t get left behind when the bus stops first at the Brazilian border. The easiest option is a taxi all the way – taxi drivers were offering this service as we walked down the street. The most fun way, however, is as a foot passenger on the car ferry (called La Balsa) across the Paraná river.
It was hard to find any information about La Balsa as nobody seemed to know about it. We were met with blank stares at the Hostel Iguazú, although to be fair that’s how they responded to everything. But we did find a helpful blog that detailed the journey and discovered that the port was only a 20 minute walk across town. When we asked the hostel how much a taxi to the port should cost, just as a rough idea, the woman helpfully said she has no idea as she walks everywhere. Well, so do I when I’m not dragging all my belongings around and limping from an allergic reaction to a wasp sting. We definitely got ripped off with over £5 for a five minute drive but as four different currencies are accepted (Brazilian reals, Argentinian peso, Paraguayan guaraní or good old US dollars) I paid with left over currency that made it feel like a free ride whatever it cost.
La Balsa ferry seems to be relatively new. We had to ask a few times before we found the little portacabin selling the right tickets and we could easily have missed getting stamped out of Argentina (it’s electronic now so no evidence in the passport that we were ever there).
We went to sit on the floor by the river to enjoy the view whist we waited since the timetable is just a rough guide – it leaves when full – and immediately got asked to move inside by security who weren’t happy until we were ring fenced in the seating area with it’s concrete benches. We’d been sitting there for a while when Vix happened to look up and noticed that everyone else had left.
When we eventually got on, the boat only took about 15 minutes and the views are beautiful as it goes past the International Friendship Bridge that connects Brazil with Paraguay.
There were no other tourists on the boat and there is no way to blend in – as I got off some fellow passengers said “Welcome to Paraguay” 🙂 We lugged our bags up the hill to yet another portacabin to possibly the most relaxed passport control I’ve seen. We were very happy with our perfect Paraguay entry stamps – the friendly officer must have either just filled up his ink or else not had any other visitors recently.
I assume if we had walked further up the hill we may have found some buses but we had no idea of the timetable. Taxi is definitely the easiest way out of the “port” – a man offered us a ride for $10 for the 45 minute drive to our hotel north of Ciudad del Este which we were more than happy with.
The taxi driver spent the journey telling us facts about his country in hard to understand Spanish, which was lovely but we would have preferred him not to have been finding YouTube videos of Monday Falls (Paraguay’s alternative to Iguazú) whilst he was driving. He also stopped the car to show us the red soil, which we felt obliged to get out and take a photo of, unless we misunderstood 🤷🏻♀️🤷♀️
As soon as we got close to Ciudad del Este, it became clear he didn’t know the way at all and showing him the map didn’t help. We burned through Vix’s mobile phone data with Google maps and all those school lessons in asking directions in Spanish came in useful as we directed him around the back roads. When we eventually got there he complained that it should have cost more and he could have gone on the highway – that’s what you get for asking two foreigners “left or right?” at the last minute at EVERY SINGLE JUNCTION.
Ciudad del Este is a duty free shopping haven and the city centre didn’t have the best reputation. But the weather was good and four star hotels are cheap so we decided “Las Ventanas” boutique hotel inside the Paraná Country Club, a 15 minute drive out of town, was just the place. The intention was to stay a couple of nights then move on.
But it wouldn’t be a trip for me unless it involved an insect related hospital visit. I woke up in the morning with a foot twice the usual size and was unable to walk thanks to the wasp in Iguazú Falls. I limped down to reception and told the horrified man at the desk that I needed a hospital – he was visibly relieved that it hadn’t happened in his hotel. Thankfully there was a decent private hospital ten minutes away.
They clearly hadn’t had a foreign patient before, as when they took my passport to copy my name they were looking at completely the wrong page and a radiologist took a break from casually sipping his herbal mate tea to have a peak. Luckily there was a nice woman who seemed to know what she was doing and made sure I got seen within ten minutes by a lovely doctor who called my name out as “Marianne British”. I tried to explain that my surname is not “British”, it’s just a British passport then decided it wasn’t the most important thing to communicate. Vix had typed out a description of the situation in Google translate to avoid confusion but this just meant the doctor spoke about me to Vix, as if she was my carer. I can actually see the funny side now. After telling Vix several times that the patient was NOT allowed to drink alcohol on top of the cocktail of antibiotics and anti inflammatories and two other medications even Vix in her actual capacity as real life nurse hadn’t heard of, we left with instructions of bed rest and ice. The whole thing cost about £30.
God knows what the lovely hotel staff thought about two scruffy backpackers who checked into room 211 (“dos once” in Spanish), stuck the “do not disturb” sign on the door and weren’t seen again other than via room service requests for large amounts of ice, toilet paper refills and vegetarian food. On our first night the chef made us a meal of gnocchi and vegetables, which is what they came up with when we asked if there was a single option without meat. Trying to communicate on the phone in Spanish that the chef had made a special meal the night before and could he do it again, was very challenging. Vix managed it but when I tried it just never turned up.
I found it very hard to understand Paraguayan Spanish and they didn’t understand me, until we realised they just don’t pronounce most of the syllables. When Vix politely asked for a taxi from the hospital back to our hotel Las Ventanas, the driver looked confused for a while then repeated back ‘ah, la vetaaaaaa’. Likewise, an ‘americano’ coffee is simply ‘amerraaoo’. The next week was spent watching movies on the huge TV, stealing food from the amazing buffet breakfast for lunch and hobbling around by the pool we mostly had to ourselves. The other guests were nicely dressed Paraguayans visiting for the holiday weekend, and overweight men from what we think was a diabetes drug convention during the week. Meanwhile we wandered around looking like wasters.
After a few days I could walk a bit more, very grateful to have avoided a hospital stay – thanks to my lovely kind travelling companion Vix! There there are quite a few things to do around the area, although I didn’t want to risk any more waterfalls or nature type places… We went to visit the Itaipu dam instead. We had just got in the taxi at 12.55 when our helpful hotel man called the driver and told him to hurry up so we would make the 13.00 tour. With classic getaway driving, we did the predicted fifteen minute journey in five.
Itaipu is the 3rd largest hydroelectric dam in the world and produces the second most electricity, powering all of Paraguay and a significant amount of Brazil. It’s free to take the bus tour around the site, including the Brazilian side, although the commentary is in Spanish. The power of the water is amazing and it’s well worth a visit. There’s also a lovely gift shop with local handicrafts – our taxi driver went to sit in his car and wait.
There are also a couple of museums in the area but unfortunately they were both closed, which we found out when we pulled up in yet another taxi only to see the gate fully padlocked, so we went straight back to the hotel via the supermarket. By this point we were ready to leave Ciudad del Este and head to Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, but our plans were thwarted again as ALL of the highways out of town were closed to protestors. There had just been an election and supporters of the losing right wing party were starting fires on the roads. Our initial thought was to try to get there on the backroads, but when we heard they had overturned an ambulance, and police were disbursing crowds in the capital with rubber bullets we decided to wait it out.
Each day we would ring down to the front desk, ask if the roads were open yet and confirm we were staying another day. We became so used to just saying ‘dos once’ when we wanted anything that we half-jokingly discussed getting tattoos – until I Googled it and found that 211 is a notorious white supremacist prison gang.
Where better to kill time than in the The Growler Bar, aka local rock music venue, which happened to be right next door and finally open after being closed all week. They even went to buy fresh pineapple juice to make me a non alcoholic cocktail and we stayed about 6 hours listening to tunes, eating cassava fries with a ridiculously spicy sauce and getting intel on the capital. The barman, who was from Asuncion, warned us how dangerous the city was and said we couldn’t possibly stay in the old town like we wanted, mimicking stabbing someone to drive home his point. When he wasn’t telling Vix all about his open marriage and how he too was a nurse and a physio and ever other detail of his life, he took some great photos of us next to the rock and roll memorabilia wall. He obviously thought we had more money than we did, as he personally phoned the Crowne Plaza hotel in Asuncion to check the price.
The riots were over and the roads were open again in the morning, so we could finally leave. Buying bus tickets in Paraguay is neither easy nor efficient – you need to enter your passport number about ten times, you only get three minutes to enter all your details and the website rejected all of our credit cards. We finally booked by taking over the front desk computer, otherwise our hotel man had kindly offered to go in person at 6am in the morning to physically get them for us. Anything to make sure we actually left this place – I’m not entirely sure our jokes that ‘we live here now’ were taken as humour.
And that’s proof you can spend a week in Ciudad del Este! The Country Club has some really good restaurants if you can be bothered to leave your hotel – we had a great meal at a Japanese/Pizza fusion place. And plenty of pharmacies to stock up on drugs you can’t get at home. The only thing we didn’t get to do was ride around in one of the golf buggies we saw parked around the place although I’m sure if we’d asked our hotel they would have obliged. Las Ventanas did have the nicest hotel staff I’ve ever come across, who went out of their way to help us with anything we needed. Our favourite front desk man recommended a nicer, cheaper hotel than the Crowne Plaza, in the old town like we wanted and he laughed when we recreated the ‘stabby stabby’ warning from the barman next door – it’s perfectly safe in the daytime apparently. Final stop Asuncion!
Maz On The Road 