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Published: December 8th 2007
After a wonderful month in Bolivia, it was time to bid it farewell. Unbeknownst to us, we overstayed our welcome by 3 days. The border guards weren't too happy with that and yammered away at us in rapid spanish. After standing at the border control office for 15 minutes while the border guards talked amongst themselves and looked at our passports about 7 times, they finally paid us some attention and charged us a few bolivianos for the days we went over our visas. It can never be easy in South America...instead of just charging us for our extra days right away they made us sweat it out a bit.
Across the border, we encountered possibly the worst border town in our trip, Aguas Blancas. It was all dirt roads and trash. Thankfully we didnt have to stay there very long. We caught a bus from there to the city of Salta (and Argentine buses are by far the nicest in south america!). On our first day in Salta we stumbled upon a craft fair, which was followed by a typical Argentine sunday lunch, steak and a bottle of wine. Well, Brett's first steak, and Sarah had the typical Argentine
vegetarian fare...the salad.
We had a short stay in Salta, and headed for...Paraguay...that's right, who goes there? It was an epic, over 24 hour journey from Salta to Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. We first had to travel east through Argentina on an overnight bus to Resistencia (where we had planned to spend the next day to break the trip up) but after wandering around at 7am inquiring about available roooms realized that every single hotel room was booked. We were exhausted and hadn't had a shower in a while, but we decided to push on another 6 hours to Asuncion. We went back to the bus terminal, changed our tickets for that day, and then hopped on another bus heading north. We crossed the border into Paraguay at a no-name border town that wasn't used to seeing gringos. We ignored the stares our sandals and big backpacks recieved and finally figured out the correct way to get into Paraguay. Everything we had read and heard made us think that crossing into Paraguay was going to be difficult (emptying our packs, getting patted down, a lot of questions) however, it was our easiest and most straightforward crossing yet. We
changed some money, found a taxi, and headed into Asuncion.
Not many tourists visit Asuncion or Paraguay which means there´s not really not much for people like us to do there. We did our usual wandering around, took some photos, and found some pretty good restaurants. After a few days in Asuncion we´d had our fill and jumped on a bus to the lakeside town of San Bernadino.
We were in San Ber just before the busy summer tourist season started so most restaurants and bars were still shut. It was warm so we spent some time by the pool and relaxed. After two days in San Ber we were ready to head back towards Argentina. We grabbed a bus headed to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay and another border crossing.
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