We awoke early Monday morning and set out in our little van to cross the border from Brazil into Paraguay. Traffic thickened and slowed to a crawl as we approached the border in Foz do Iguaçu but we had an experienced crew and I didn’t feel any urgency about passing through the two borders and boarding our public bus to Asunción on time.
As an American, I needed visas to enter three of the five countries (Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia) we would visit on this trip. The organizers, Journey Latin America, had advised me to get the Brazilian and Paraguayan visas in advance – the latter because they informed me that the crossing at Ciudad del Este in Paraguay didn’t have the facility to issue a visa (though perhaps they worried the process would take too long). I took their advice, had my visa on hand, and my entry proceeded with no delays.
Six not particularly interesting hours
This day, Monday 11 March, is a day of travel boredom. It’s not merely the time crossing the border but it’s six hours or so on a bus traversing a less than breathtaking landscape. On many trips, I have – and will later on this one – enjoyed simply watching a country pass by through the window of a bus or train. On a charter, there’s usually a chance to stop for photos but public transportation stops for its schedule not for the scenery. Even without those stops there’s pleasure to be had that a camera is unable to capture in the same way as the human eye.
Those of you who have been with me since the beginning might recall a more innocent time in my travel diaries. The early efforts were far less ambitious and confined more to my personal experience. When a trip like the Trans-Mongolian Express had days of boredom (two days on a train across Siberia, for instance) I didn’t delve into the history or geology of the region as I do now and were I writing within those same limits, this entry, if I had made one at all, would have been brief.
However, my approach has changed so as we pass through the countryside on our very comfortable bus, I will explore some of the troubled history of the small country of Paraguay. But first, I’ll start with some observations on crossing the border and zipping through Ciudad del Este.
A hint of the Wild West in the City of the East
Although Americans require a visa to travel to Paraguay, in this case I think it was needed more to exit the country at the airport in Asunción than it was to enter the country from Brazil at Ciudad del Este (literally City of the East).
Among the first things you notice crossing the Friendship Bridge spanning the Paraná River is not the dammed up pool of idling vehicles sitting bumper to bumper but rather the banana yellow moto taxis – some with passengers and some without – expediting their crossing by weaving between the buses and cars. There’s also a substantial number of pedestrians walking from one country to the other. Neither seemed to draw much attention from the Paraguayan border police.
Watching the relatively unencumbered moto taxis, it’s reasonably safe to assume that these scooting entrepreneurs move more than people. As they are with the pedestrians, it looks as though the authorities on both sides of the border are more interested in maintaining a smooth flow crossing the border than they are in checking for contraband. And apparently, there’s plenty of contraband. For at least the last 15 years the U.S. Trade Representative has placed the markets in Ciudad del Este on its Notorious Trade List calling it “a regional distribution hub for counterfeit and pirated products.”
Merely passing through this more or less open border town left me with more questions than answers. How “black” is this market? Is Ciudad del Este largely a bazaar of boutiques hawking contraband and counterfeit goods? Is this a smuggler’s paradise where outlaws are hiding in plain sight? Honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to know the answers.
A brief overview
South America is a continent of a dozen countries. All but two (Chile and Ecuador) share some length of border with Brazil and all but two have either an Atlantic or Pacific coastline. On this journey, we will visit both of the landlocked countries – Paraguay and Bolivia. It’s likely not a coincidence that these are two of the three poorest countries in South America. For reasons we’ll see later, my fellow Americans may be slightly more aware of Bolivia than Paraguay but I suspect neither is much more than a blip in the consciousness of most.
And why should they be? Let’s take a broad brush look at Paraguay. With a population of about seven million and a total area (406,750 square kilometers) just a bit larger than California Paraguay ranks in eighth in size and ninth in population among South America’s dozen countries. Only Guyana and Bolivia have a lower per capita GDP than Paraguay’s $9,800.
Geographically, the country has limited mineral or precious metal resources which is just one more factor contributing to general American disinterest even if this hasn’t always been the case. Paraguay has two main regions within its landlocked borders. The Paraneña in the east is mainly a plateau with some rolling mountains topping out at a far from dramatic 700 meters or roughly the same height as Rio de Janeiro’s Corcovado. One could visit the lovely little Salto del Monday (with its own set of charms as described by Atlas Obscura)
(From Wikimedia Commons)
about 10 kilometers south of Ciudad del Este but with Iguazú less than 50 kilometers distant, it doesn’t hold quite the same level of attraction.
On the western side of the Paraguay River is the Chaco. This area makes up 60 percent of Paraguay. It’s a piedmont plain with limited variation (between 125 and 300 meters) in elevation.
(The Chaco might be part of Argentina had it not been for a decision made in arbitration by U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes in settling one of the final disputes of the Great War – also called the War of the Triple Alliance about which I have more to say in the next post. The Paraguayans so appreciated his decision that the department {akin to an American State} just north of Asunción is named Presidente Hayes.)
Like the part of the Paraneña we’ll cross today, it too, isn’t a particularly interesting landscape. Our guide Berner seemed to think that Paraguay might have enough sites of the remains of indigenous people to generate some measure of archaeological tourism but he also believed that country suffers from such endemic corruption that it hinders such development. The country’s visa requirements (especially for Americans) and a lack of direct flights to Asunción from either the U.S. or Europe increase the effort needed for tourists to visit Paraguay and are also not helpful in developing any tourism.
Coming up, a peek into some of Paraguay’s history and some periods when the U.S. was a bit more involved in Paraguayan political affairs.