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Published: July 17th 2011
On the Friendship Bridge
Ciudad del Este approaching. Photo from WikipediaCiaran and I left the hostel in Foz and jumped on a city bus to the Friendship Bridge which spans the Río Paraná, the bordering river between Brazil and Paraguay.
As soon the bus had approached, the air had grown sour. For once it wasn't due to a trouser ghost.. The pollution in the air was horrendous. Car upon bus upon truck upon motorbike, vehicles covered the whole area, all pumping out low grade petrol. This border crossing is insane.
Crossing the bridge on foot should be done with a gas mask and a good idea of the hell that is to be entered. Massive billboards advertising every brand under the sun litter the smog ridden skyline of Ciudad. A neon sign for Coca Cola or Adidas standing tall over this Paraguayan side of the urine stinking Friendship Bridge.
We found the immigration offices and signed into Paraguay and entered the viscous mass of people lining the streets. I should give some context for the pulsating stench of a city and as to why it is the hell that it is; and I will try to do so briefly.
The area around the
Rio Paraná is the Triple Frontera, an area were the borders of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet. The latter pair of countries are far wealthier than landlocked Paraguay and therefore the people from those bordering countries clearly have some good market value which could be taken advantage of. Ciudad del Este was born very recently for this reason. Since its birth in 1957 the city has grown rapidly and is already Paraguay's second largest city. Every day thousands of Brazilian's and Argentinian's pour over the border in order to purchase cheap goods, often in bulk, tax free or on the black market. The city is a South American Tijuana where some sources have estimated the value of the smuggling market to be numerous times larger than the national economy!
We pushed our way through the heaving mass of people and stores noting just about every electronic item known to man, vast amounts of clothing and numerous weapons. One stall had a sawn-off shotgun lying on it casually for sale. Walking through the stalls quickly got tiring - carrying backpacks in the sun whilst constantly having to bat off people waving socks and leaflets in your face is not easy,
especially in a city that is devoid of oxygen. Carbon monoxide poisoning felt like a genuine threat.
Eventually we got through the worst and the stores of junk thinned out. We stopped at a service station to withdraw our first Guarani's although stupidly we had not checked what the exchange rate was so purchasing was down to trust. We carried on walking in the heat and went through some slightly more pleasant areas of town, although for the most part the city, despite its young, felt like it was in decay.
Finally we arrived at the bus station and purchased tickets to head to Asunción, Paraguay's capital city. A description of a bus is dull, but it is worth noting what the buses are like in South America where inter-city journeys are more often than not in excess of 12 hours, sometimes much longer. The bus was described as semi-cama, which translates as half-bed, a suitable description for a comfy seat that reclines most of the way back and has a folding slope to rest your legs on as well. The buses are almost always a big double decker with tv's in the aisles, a toilet and a
coffee machine as well. Meals are served and apparently are sometimes excellent, although in my experience in South America so far, they are generally overly sugary biscuits with the occasional odd cheese sandwich.
If anyone who reads this ends up in South America, take a tip from me. The coffee is ok, at least as much as coffee from a machine on a bus can be, but don't make my mistake. Don't drink coffee from the bus if the journey has only just begun. Cold, old bus coffee couldn't satisfy a sleep depraved coffee addict who's been lost in the desert for several days.
I slept on and off during the journey and after around 8 hours, arrived in Asunción.
Asunçion As you enter the city, there should be a warning. Perhaps there should also be one at the bus station above the exit. This is nothing to do with the vast numbers of riot and military police that are seemingly on every street of the city. Oh no. In my head I can one day picture reading a headline similar to the below:
"Seven tourists died in Ascunsion today, early reports indicate it
was from boredom. It was still unconfirmed this morning as to why they had bothered going there in the first place".
I decided to go to Paraguay to give it a chance. My initial half assed plans for South America were something alone the lines of going to Salvador, Rio, Foz and then Buenos Aires, Uruguay, Patagonia, Chile and up into Bolivia. I badly wanted a reason to go to Paraguay, not being touristy seemed like a good reason to go. The chance to explore a poor country with vast untouristed areas, places still relatively untouched by the guidebooks like the Chaco was a great pull to go. When Ciaran said he was going I figured I best give it a go as well.
We took a bus from the bus station after a huge amount of faffing to work out where they were. Local buses don't go from the bus station. Makes perfect sense in Paraguay. After a long journey into this short city we got off the bus, nowhere near our intended hostel. Fortunately as with most newer countries, the streets are blocks and so it was easy to work out where we were and we
made it to the hostel which for some reason chooses not to have an indiction outside it, that it is in fact a hostel.
A Spanish guy got out of a taxi at the same time as our arrival at the door and we entered this strange hostel together after being greeted by a woman who looks like the female version of Bilbo Baggins after he's aged many many years at the end of Lord of the Rings. She was like the Latino grandma I never knew I had. She showed us around the hostel which was an open space with her lounge in the middle as well as a dining table. A large part of the roof was open to sky. Sitting 'inside' and seeing the stars is a welcome difference to the normal. She showed us to a triple room and the three of us moved in and unpacked a little.
The Spanish guy (whose name eludes me so I shall refer to as Jeff) had been due to fly that evening to Buenos Aires, but like so many, he was delayed due to the ash cloud. We laughed as it took him several minutes to
unwind the plastic wrapping they had overkilled around his backpack at the airport earlier. He had not planned on spending a single day in Paraguay.
The three of us left the hostel for a wander and to see what we could find to do. It was the evening so of course the tourist sites were closed, but being a capital city and one in South America, there were some nice colonial buildings to look at. We got hungry of wandering and found a popular looking restaurant and ordered some food and beers. I got a huge tasty steak, deep fried. Was not expecting the deep fried. Ciaran got the same and his confusion over why they looked at him strangely when he asked for it to be cooked rare was resolved.
After eating we desperately tried to find a bar, for a while we even considered a karaoke bar before we thought better of it. The noise excreting through the windows was enough to put the hardiest of drinkers off.
Our committment eventually led to fruitition when we asked a local for directions and at last we found a surprisingly good pub, abeit one clearly aimed at a Western (and elite local) society. Also, it was dead. A local was perching at the bar, so Jeff stayed to talk to him as me and Ciaran went to the back to sit outside. It didn't take long for Jeff to join us, following shortly after by the local guy. Jeff left a little while later, he had to be up early to make sure his flight was reconfirmed. Also I think he left because he couldn't cope with the local guy who turned out to be extremely drunk. We had a few drinks, but got bored quickly of having to listen to him. He was from Conception, a city further north and had recently moved to the capital in search of work. Instead this youngish lad who had an extensive knowledge of British music justed seemed on impression, to be drinking too much. It was a Tuesday after all. He asked us our names a few times, my changed from Alan to Brian during the time we were there. He even forgot our names after we'd written our emails down for his, which included our names. We left bored and went to our beds,
The next morning, the Spaniard had left by the time we were awake. Ciaran and I decided to go and visit the city and see what there was to do, included hopefully somewhere to do laundry. We walked through the narrow, overtraffiked one way streets and found a laundrette to check in our clothes. From here we could see water and so as man always has, we walked towards it and found the river. And a shanty town. On our right was the shanty town, which I read to be a very dangerous area, and to the left, as it so very common in these countries of great divide, we could see the palace. There was a park before the palace which we thought we'd walk through, only to encounter a van of armed police who informed us politely in Spanish to sod off and go around.
We did that and observed the large white palace with the flag flowing at the crowning tower. The Palacio de Gobierno was built in the style of Versailles over 9 years during the 1860's, by child labour during the latter years due to the Triple Alliance War. We observed two large groups of armed police with full riot gear. You would think this would be disconcerning, but the first were all concentrating on buying cigarettes and drinks from a hawker and the second group were standing talking, with all their gear a few feet away from them.
Ascuncion seems perpetually terrified of the possibility of an uprising of something dramatic happening, but I have never visited such a placid capital city in my llife. Nothing seems to happen. Perhaps there was a time when it was a concern, but at this point perhaps they keep them on purely because if they got rid of all of these very unnecessary seeming people, then there would be mass unemployment.
We carried on walking around the city, visiting a weak museum and getting told off for drinking water from glasses not meant for us. If they are not meant for use by people visiting them museum, perhaps they shouldn't leave an open box of glasses next to a water fountain. There was a strange gallery of paintings by Carlos Colombino; they were painted/strained pictures made upon carved wood. All were bizarre, but quite amazing. In another room we found a painting of an old lady which I double took on and told Ciaran to check out. Next we saw the cathedral from outside and a plaza to remember the independence heroes. Bored the pair of us headed for home.
If I sound slightly flippant about the sights in cities such as Ascunsion, I don't mean to. But I am neither an architecture student nor a historian and as nice as some of the buildings and plazas are, you cannot enter most, to the untrained eye they do all look very similar and everywhere seems to have very similar small plazas celebrating independence from Spain, usually with a statue of Simon Boliviar.
On the way home we noticed that the train station was open. TO MY MEMORY. The train station was opened in the 1950's, from British and French contributions. Over the last 60 years since it opened it has expanded into a huge transport enterprise to the Paraguayans's linking it to every major city across South America and with Asuncion being almost in the middle of South America, it has become a truely enormous international hub of commerce, trading and wealth.
If only.
The train station is now a museum. For whatever reason, the train station rail ends at the station effectively, although miscellaneous tracks can be found elsewhere. Such was the crapfest of other sights we spent a good hour looking at a single train raised on a plinth and two different sets of carriages that make the modern British rail system look even more like a disgrace than (believe it or not), going on a British train in person. The first carriage set, was a sleeper unit and was fantastically decored with all sorts of neat seemingly Victorian technology from the bathrooms to the bedrooms. The second carriage set was a more laid back area, which looked like a sophitisticated saloon with leather chairs and a semi-circle bar in the middle of the next unit, exactly the sort of location you would expect to see a sterotypical man from the cowbay era of the mid-west to be standing with a glorious moustache and a bottle of whiskey being offered in both hands.
We reached the hostel chilled out for a little while, not that the day had been strenuous. We left again, collected out laundry and asked about the tours to the Chaco. 1000 Euros for 5 days each. In South America and to be fair, most places, that is an insane amount. It is my upper upper limit for a whole month. So no to the Chaco it was.
Home sweet hostel again, a long debate over the fact the elderly lady whose hostel it was, was in fact dead, as proved by the painting we saw earlier. We debated what would happen when we attempted to pay her for the accommodation. Would the money simply fall through her hand to the floor???
Eventually we decided to try to find somewhere to watch the Copa America. We went in the direction of where we were the night before, but a little further down the road than we had previously walked, we found an 'English' pub.
After sitting at the barstools on the roof bar for a while watching the game, a local girl asked us to join her and her friends. Ciaran had the fortune to sit next to the girl who invited us, I foolishly sat next to her more attractive friend, abeit one who didn't speak English. A night of drinking cut short, the girl who invited us ovcer turned out to be on Couch Surfers (a website where you can locate people who will allow you to stay in their house for free). She offered us accommodation for the week almost immediately and informed us that if we stayed until Saturday, she could show us a great night out.
The following sums up Paraguay.
It was a wednesday when we found ourselves in the alledged English pub. We asked her what we could do until Saturday if we stayed in Paraguay for the remainder of the week before a big night out. She looked up into one of her cerebral cortexes and thought. "You can watch ESPN". We left for Argentina the next morning.
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