Up close and personal in Paraguay

I feel a little like an intrepid explorer who lost her way down a Paraguayan river laid her pith hat to rest and headed straight back from whence she came.

Lets just say that Paraguay is poor but friendly and next time I will come back with a friend or two, my own car and maybe a tent. It’s a beautiful country. It has eleven national parks, a humungous river and jungle area. It has a desert. It has tribes that have no contact with any world but their own. It has a very tragic history. Back in the 1800s, this rather small, landlocked country suffered from what must have been an inferiority complex of epic proportions and declared war on Brazil… and then Argentina and then Uruguay by default. Jokes aside, they lost half their male population and when there were no more soldiers left, they sent kids out to the frontlines with farm implements to fight.

I started out in the country’s capital, Asuncion, with a French couple and a Japanese guy. We watched Paraguay leave the world cup dignified and wandered the streets of this tropical city discovering palaces and slums and many mosquitoes.

We spent a couple of days together and then I went a little way south, determined to find one of the parks. Trying to get tourist information here is like trying to find the proverbial needle. Mention the word “trekking” and you will get odd looks. I got myself on a bus to a town supposedly good for visiting the park from and met an old lady who took me under her wing and insisted I stay with her. I decided she wasn’t going to rob or mortally wound me so I took up her offer and had a grand tour of her little town. Hard as we tried though, all we could discover was that the bus dropped you 4km from the park (not a happy prospect when you have 20kgs balanced between your front and back). There were no cars for hire and a taxi was pretty expensive. So I got back on the bus and headed back to Asuncion the next day.

I then thought I would head further south to view the old Jesuit missions from Encarnacion, the border town with Argentina. Once again I was sat next to an overfriendly Paraguayan. Assuming that this was the nature of the people and trying to be less uptight, I chatted to him until he just would not stop. At this point I complained of needing some air and moved to the front of the bus. And he followed me. I then took out my music, hint, hint, and he asked me (yes, he really did!!) if he could listen too. Yes, you may as well lay me down as a carpet and walk all over me, but really, what else could I say? And then we played his music. At this point, honestly, listening to dance hits from 1994 (including the classics “Everybody dance now”, “Can’t touch this” and the completely unedited version of “Don’t want no short…”) was better than having to answer his too-nosey questions about where I was going, etc. Later, the bus conductor warned me he would try and rob me later (so my stranger danger radar isn’t too oversensitive after all) and then I got paranoid that the conductor was in on it too and so got away from the bus station as fast as I could and then left town the next day.

Out of Paraguay and into cheaper, more comfortable and definitely easier Argentina I gave the missions a skip altogether and have landed up in Puerto Iguazu, on the brink of the magical falls.