Paraguay – We didn’t see much but we felt it

Done with the Iguazu Falls and Brazil, we walked over the bridge and into Paraguay. Again we were surprised how easy it was to cross the boarder. If you wanted to, you could easily skip the whole immigration process and travel around South America without anyone noticing. Luckily for the boarder control, we are honest and happy people that smile to every moody migration officer while they are filling our passports with nice stamps from around the world!

Walking into Paraguay from Brazil was like walking back in time, in a surprisingly good way. The rubbish on the streets was back and so were the weak, yellow street lights, cracks in the roads and the stray dogs. The only thing that wasn’t there was the tourists but that is exactly what made the walk-back-in-time a more enjoyable experience for us.

We stayed in the city of Ciudad del Este just across the border from Brazil for two days before we travelled to Asuncion, the capital, where we stayed for another four nights. We knew before hand that there wouldn’t be too much to see so we took it slow and experienced smaller parts each day. Like our Lonely planet book says: “You don’t see it,you feel it”, we did exactly that. The people in Asuncion (and possibly the whole country) are very relaxed, friendly and happy. They don’t have much but it seems to be just enough to keep them happy and content. So while walking around in what felt like the most ‘un-capital-like’ capital we have ever visited we didn’t spot many attractive things to the eye, but we sure felt the relaxing “happy with less vibe”!

After Asuncion, we took an eight hour bus ride down to Encarnacion where we treated ourselves to some fast food before we again crossed a bridge, with some new stamps in our passports, in to a new country. We did plan to stay a few nights in Encarnacion but thanks to the ongoing Carnival everything was fully booked and forced us to move on, we entered Argentina instead!