Border Madness

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So, we hopped on a bus from Bonito to Jardim, where we could transfer to a bus to go to Ponta Pura, at the border of Brazil. In Jardim, we lunched and went to an internet cafe. As the bus terminal was a good 2km from the town, we needed to catch a taxi back to the station. And all we could get were MotoTaxis - essentially taxis where you ride behind the driver actually on the motorcycle (and not on a cab connected to the cycle, as in Iquitos). The idea of this scared Sarah, but she hopped on and greatly enjoyed the ride (I did too, but I was not quite as freaked out - plus I had ridden on the back of a motorcycle before).

We took our bus to Ponta Pura, a city known for being that city that borders Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay, where Southern Brazilians who do not want to pay crazy taxes can go to buy electronics and other things at Shopping China and other similar merchants. We spent one night at a hotel, which happened to feature our best breakfast of all of Brazil (fresh squeezed orange juice and scrambled eggs!). We then went to the Paraguayan consulate, with hopes of obtaining a visa. The official told us that we needed to go to Foz de Iguazu to the south to get our visas.

The guy at the hotel desk helped us out and let us know that we needed to take a bus to Cascavel, as there was no direct bus service to Foz de Iguazu. We could then catch an hourly bus to Foz.

We hung out in town for a few hours, ate lunch, then ate some hummus made out of Fava beans (chick peas seem to be quite the luxury in much of Brazil) and headed to the bus station.

While I had thought that the bus would arrive in Cascavel sometime in the early morning, we learned that it would arrive at 2 in the morning. As we knew nothing about Cascavel and the thought of spending the night at the bus station sounded terrible to Sarah, we temporarily freaked out. But as we needed to get out of dodge, we bought the ticket. But we almost could not. Marcos, the man who worked the booth for the only company that went to Cascavel, clearly needed his cigarette, and lost patience as we asked questions. Then when it came to buy the ticket, he claimed that our credit cards could not work in his machine. The bus was coming in 20 minutes and there was not an ATM anywhere near the bus station. I encouraged Marcos to try our cards many times in the machines, but he just gave up, until we asked another person who worked at the bus station to try our card. Miraculously, the card then worked, but Marcos had charged us 40 reai more than he quoted us. So then he gave me 40 reai in cash.

We thought we had maybe missed the bus through all of our bickering with Marcos, but the bus just turned up about an hour late. It had started 5 hours north in another city. We arrived in Cascavel, which has probably the nicest and one of the largest bus terminals we visited in Brazil, and were easily able to get a hotel room.

We took the next morning fairly leisurely and caught a bus that arrived in Foz de Iguazu around 3PM. Once we settled into a hotel, we called the Paraguayan consulate in that town. Apparently, we had just missed our opportunity to get a Paraguayan visa from the Foz consulate by just minutes, and we would have to wait until Wednesday, the 26th due to the holidays.

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