Ciudad del Este
Crossing the Punte de Amistad bridge from Brazil to Uruguay (near Iguazu Falls) puts you right in the heart of Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este. It’s crazy here, with hordes of people, thousands of shops packed with cheap and possibly contraband goods, portable grills crammed with grilled meats, ankle deep trash, and insane traffic. The whole place reminded me a bit of a modern-day town like the pirate town in Pirates of the Caribbean (where Johnny Depp gets slapped by all the women).
The town is known throughout South America as the place to go to buy cheap electronics and imported goods, but they sell just about everything you could imagine. Paraguay isn’t visited by backpackers much and so there’s no hostels in the city. I ended up staying at a German owned hotel (Hotel Austria). I often saw the family working in the hotel, including their kids, and was kind of intrigued as to what originally would have led them to move to this town of all places (though I didn’t ask).
Only Argentina really controls their border, Paraguay and Brazil allow people to pass in and out without stopping them. My bus raced past the border to the bus terminal, so I had to find my way back to the immigrations office near the bridge to get stamped in (as a US Citizen I had to apply for a visa in advance in Buenos Aires). The receptionist in the hotel told me it was dangerous to walk there after dark, so I skipped it the first night. The second day I intended to go during daylight, but a mix-up with the bus routes returned me to town way later than I had planned and it was after dark again.
My strategy for potentially being mugged is to take enough money with me to satisfy a mugger, but nothing else. I figure you don’t want to end up with someone snarling “that’s all you’ve got?!” and you also don’t want to lose a camera or anything else valuable. I ended up having no trouble, but the main route back to the bridge was pretty creepy. During the day it’s crammed with vendors, but as soon as the sun sets the shops shut thick steel shutters over the windows and doors and the street stalls are packed up and hauled away. What’s left is incredible amounts of trash, homeless and crazy people burning it in makeshift campfires, and people lurking out of the bushes. The whole place smells like pee. Definitely somewhere I would not return, but I felt like I had to legally enter the country at some point…
The most intriguing part of the area to me for tourism was the Itapu Binacional, a massive hydroelectric dam that produces more power than any dam in the world. It’s considered one of the 7 modern wonders of the world and provides 90% of Paraguay’s power and 19% of Brazil’s power. On the Paraguayan side they offer free tours. Transit to the dam is a bit complicated, but I eventually found that I could just take a bus to Hernandarias and jump off when the bus turned off the main highway, walking the rest of the way. Unfortunately the technical tour which includes a tour inside the dam, power generation facility, turbines, and control room requires a week advance notice to request. Instead I did the “Panoramic Tour” which is a quick 30 minute drive around the dam in a bus and was a big disappointment.
During the rainy season, more water flow through the spillway than all of Iguazu Falls
The dam flooded a huge area and destroyed a lot of the native forest, including a set of falls as impressive as Iguazu in Brazil. I did lots of paperwork and got permission to visit one of the few remaining forest preserves, called Refugio Tati Yupi. After taking another bus to Hernandarias, I had to take a taxi the rest of the way to the park. I had two sets of papers signed by the park director, which the shotgun-toting guards at the gate near the road insisted on seeing. They initially said that taxis weren’t allowed inside, but the driver sweet-talked them and we were allowed through. A few kilometers down the road we came to a second set of shotgun-toting guards, who needed my second copy of papers. I was a bit confused by all the security, wondering if trees were under siege in Paraguay or something. I was surprised to find it almost like a summer camp near the lake, with picnic tables, a football pitch, and visitors center.
After spending the day hiking around the forest I was able to see capibaras, lots of tropical birds, armadillos, and anteaters. It’s a shame, but many species are threatened or endangered now. Near the end of the day, one of the guards had tracked down some monkeys and had me follow him out to them. We shucked and threw out some maize, and after a while one of the monkeys ventured down to grab an ear. They’re very nervous, apparently because people will hunt them.
Capibaras are fortunately not threatened, and they’re one of my favorite South American animals. They’re basically a rodent of unusual size and can weigh up to 250 pounds!
