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Published: January 31st 2012
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Our blissfully private room!! Spent most of our time in here due to the rain. We had planned on taking the bus to the terminal, but feeling lazy we ended up getting a taxi. It did mean we managed to fit brekky in before we left the hostel though, so it felt justified…kinda! And Lisa got to buy some tat while waiting for the bus so everyone was happy! The bus wasn’t too shabby at all (we had heard horror stories the night before from some French guys) – there was air-conditioning and we bagged reclining seats next to the door entrance so had lots of space to stretch out. Nice. Music blared from the speakers which took us back to travelling on Ecuadorian buses but Ian slept through it for the first 4 hours as Lisa watched the world go by spotting lots more wildlife including falcons, storks, herons and cows with humps like the ones you see in India. Paraguay, in the east at least, is extremely green, interrupted only by secluded estancias and small roadside villages. These villages did mean we stopped a lot, at every one, picking people up, dropping people off (the most memorable passenger being an arsy gold-toothed dwarf!) and giving the hawkers and food sellers time to jump on
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Bizarre transport museum along one of the streets to earn a quick buck, another reminiscence of Ecuador. The bus got stopped by the police along the way somewhere and questioned Lisa, eyeing her up dodgily, before letting us go on our way.
The roads were terrible though, bumpy and uneven, but the driver was gunning it so we got to our destination on time…well the outskirts of Concepcion, from where we had to take a taxi to our Hotel – The Hotel Victoria. The cabbie was friendly and we were even more pleasantly surprised when we were shown to our lovely room with air-conditioning, cable, wifi, ensuite bathroom and double bed. Yay! No more bunk beds! No more listening to other people’s bodily functions!! The building itself was also pretty impressive, or at least we could see it would have been in its heyday, with spacious verandas and stylish tiling.
After a quick turn around we left in search for food and found a small joint serving up snack food, so we plumped for empanandas, fugazza and croquetas, again served up with spicy sauce. Paraguay was the first country since Ecuador that had an idea what spicy-hot meant and we loved it! On leaving the snack
bar, we saw hundreds of school kids out on the streets practising for some kind of parade, which we hoped we might see the following day. Concepcion is a small place, with a one-horse town kind of feeling, full of motorbikes and scooters though, as opposed to gauchos and their steeds. Excited to discover more of this back-of-beyond town, we went back to the luxury of our private room for an evening of movies, beers and pizza.
However, Friday dawned grey, rainy and windy. Adventures were going to be hard! Brekky was good though, a buffet job, served early as in all proper hotels. This was a good thing as it meant we got to the bus terminal in time to buy tickets before the weather worsened. We were helped out by a friendly guy at the terminal and then went for a bit of a wander to see some of the town, which we found out was pretty under-developed with only 2 paved streets, the rest just red sand. There were also a lot of horse and carts around too (maybe it is more of gaucho-esque town after all). Sadly the heavy rain and onslaught of lightening forced
us back to the hotel for an afternoon of skyping, chilling, movies and onward planning. And the weather just got worse – the grim rain turned the streets into red rivers – but we felt quite cosy tucked up in our room although it was a huge shame that we couldn’t get out to see much of Concepcion and the surrounding area.
We only left the comfort of the room to go for some late lunch, once the rain had eased off a little and darkness was nearly falling, but by that time everywhere was closed (siesta-shmiesta) and so it was back to the same place as the day before for more baked goodness. Lisa succeeded in taking a few crappy shots in the rain (see below) and we did see the Museo Del Aire Libre, a bizarre collection of random machinery set up along the main street’s dividing strip. We didn’t get to see the parade obviously but what with the torrential rain, we were sure it must have been cancelled. A quick stop at the pharmacy for some supplies and then it was back to the room again for some more of the same as before.
Some observations we did manage to gather from our limited experience of Concepcion was that it’s a city full of motos and a fair few armed police and security guys (was this a deterrent or a necessity?), but a quiet town even so, and we couldn’t imagine people choosing to move there, only moving away, so will this town one day become abandoned? We hoped not because, although we speculated as to what actually goes on there – where did the people work? have fun? socialise? - the townsfolk were very friendly, with guys waving to us from their motos, the only apparent gringos in town. An interesting little place….we’ll have to come back one day to discover more of its quirks.
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