Today was always going to be a bit of a nothing day as we were shipping out in the evening, so after wandering into town to get my first dvd burned I found an acai for breakfast and wandered back to the hotel; 7 of us had elected to go to Paraguay for a couple of hours - an illicit border raid, if you will as we didn't get the passport stamps. Customs was just a chap sitting under a tree.. The contrast to brazil was striking - yes it was still scorching hot, but unlike the reserved streets of Foz [View Full Entry]

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Steve's words: Another great border crossing into Paraguay, the locals just catch the boat, non locals catch a series of local buses to a bridge with big rusty holes in it, then wade through some mud, dodge our way past hundreds of people exchanging money, passport stamped then onto a tiny bus with far too many people on, and we're in. Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, the words of the lonely planet ringing in our ears "you could get mugged anytime" or something like that. We entered a quiet city of mostly low rise colonial design, with a few grand plazas, [View Full Entry]

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Itaipu Dam - Second largest in the world [View Full Entry]

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"Let's meet early". Words of dread. Everyone has a different idea of what time they consider to be early. Inevitably it is always earlier than I´d like it to be. I cautiously replied, "How early is early?". James and I were having a cup of cocido (Paraguayan herbal tea) and a mbeju (floury pancake-like thing made from manioc which is cassava) in an Asuncion cafe with Nilsa, the sister of Marcela, a friend of Ellen, James' sister. A Paraguayan connection from back home. Nilsa herself lived in Dublin a few years ago. Apparently there are a few Paraguayan families living in [View Full Entry]

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Nous avons fait une visite rapide aux frontieres de trois pays: Paraguay, Argentine et Bresil en allant admirer les deuxiemes plus grandes chutes d'eau du monde apres celle de Victoria en Afrique: Les Foz d'Iguazu. Les photos parlent d'elles meme...Lorsqu'on arrive sur le site, on est un peu decu...enfin, je fut un peu decu car je m'attendais a quelque chose de plus grandiose, mais en fait, c'est simplement du au fait que l'on est super loin. Au fur et a mesure que l'on s'approche, on est mouille et emerveille car c'est vraiment baleze. On est cependant pas reste des heures car [View Full Entry]

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Apres notre aventure dans le Salar, nous avions decide de rejoindre le Bresil et l'ocean atlantique...encore un paquet de kilometre en perspective et son lot d'aventures. Nous avons quitte Sucre une fin d'apres-midi dans un bus qui ne payait vraiment pas de mine en direction de Santa Cruz. On pensait prendre un bus direct pour Asuncion au Paraguay, mais en arrivant a Sucre on a appris que seul La Paz et Santa Cruz font cette connection. Ce qui est pas cool, c'est que santa Cruz est plus loin de la frontiere que Sucre et surtout que la liaison Sucre-Santa Cruz n'existe [View Full Entry]

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An excellent breakfast with Helmuth and Nicoleta: yogurt and soft-boiled eggs, juice, tea, and hugs and pictures as we said goodbye, with promises to put them up should they come our way. We couldn’t really say we’d love to come back, much as we’ve enjoyed our visit with them. Not enough to draw us back to the Chaco! But we had a great morning getting a lot of our questions and misgivings about the Mennonite work with the native people answered. Heinrich Ratzlaff was there as we arrived at Yalve Sanga, the original native settlement, to explain the work of ASCIM [View Full Entry]

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Up early to be back in Neu-Halbstadt in time for the day’s tour, supposedly starting at 7 a.m. Our hosts fed us a full breakfast of buns with (guava!) jam, wild honey, cold meat and cheese, and tea. We were sent off on the bus to Menno Colony, where Walter Ratzlaff, a former mayor of the town, gave us an illuminating view of life in the oldest colony; the highly conservative one that left Manitoba in the 1920s over disputes with the government on education just as my own family was gratefully fleeing to Canada! Though he disavowed Jeff’s view that [View Full Entry]

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Up at 5 a.m. to catch our taxi to the Hotel Excelsior, already waiting for us in the Casa Mennonita parking lot, chatting with the guard. “Tranquilo,” he said about our general anxiety, offering me a sip of his mate. The Excelsior turns out to be a very fancy hotel - no wonder the price (over $100) we’d been quoted, which seemed outlandish for Asuncion. A long wait in the hotel lobby gave us time to chat with several people we’d bumped into over the week - Dave and Millie Dyck from my MCC days, and Tom and Rebecca Yoder Neufeld, [View Full Entry]

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I hate writing about this almost as much as I disliked living it, but today (Sunday) was a crashing disappointment. I almost wished I'd been one of the Machu Picchu people after seeing a morning service hijacked the way this one was. We arrived early, anticipating a great morning with a whole lot of Paraguayan church folk joining the paid attendees for our final service. The "chapel" -- a good sized room that had been devoted to musical stuff all week -- was set up for overflow viewing, so we made sure to get our seat early (not hard, since our [View Full Entry]

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