Ottawa, March 5, 2016
As always, the contrasts created
by modern travel can be jarring. I
started writing this post sitting in Thunder Bay airport a few days ago, with
the outdoor temperature hovering around -20 degrees. I’m writing about travelling through Paraguay
a few weeks ago in temperatures above 40 degrees, and it seems hard to believe
that then we were seriously concerned about heatstroke, while now I’m trying to
avoid frostbite.
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| Cordoba cathedral |
Our bus ride from Santiago to
Asuncion was very, very long. We left
Santiago early on January 15
th and arrived more or less 48 hours
later. It was a three-leg journey,
through Mendoza and Cordoba, marked by constant squabbles and arguments with
greedy Argentinian luggage handlers about how large a bribe they would receive
for loading and unloading our bicycle boxes.
By the end of the trip, Terri had had quite enough of Argentinian
maleteros! We had a few hours off in Mendoza, which we
spent in the bus station, but when we arrived in Cordoba early in the morning
after a night bus, we left our bikes and baggage in a left luggage office and
walked into the historic centre of town which was surprisingly pretty, with
blocks of old colonial architecture, including the UNESCO-listed
Manzana Jesuitica, the Jesuit block,
with its striking architecture.
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| Monument to the disappeared, Cordoba |
There
were also reminders of the much more recent past, with memorial plaques to
various local people who disappeared in the days of the military government and
its Dirty War.
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| Jesuit church, Cordoba |
The second night on a bus went
reasonably smoothly but ended early with our border crossing at 5 am, just
outside Asuncion. Paraguay counted as my
120th country, and my first new country since Sweden (six months
previously). We got into the city at
about 6:30 am and sat in the almost-empty bus station for a while catching our
breath and using good free wi-fi (something almost entirely absent from the
country of Argentina!) to find a place to stay.
We threw the bike boxes into the back of an ancient Ford pickup truck
and drove to our chosen hospedaje, the very friendly Nande Po’a, which became
our base of choice in the capital. We
spent a couple of nights in our big, comfortable room, and escaping from the
blazing heat either in the air con in our room, or in the breezy, shaded
courtyard of the hotel.
We poked around Asuncion a bit,
less for historical interest and more for practical purposes. The town had a tropical, slightly derelict
feeling to it that reminded me most of Yangon.
The downtown historic core, as is so often the case in South American
cities, has been allowed to decay while the centre of economic activity shifts
to newer suburbs. We walked around,
buying groceries to cook up at the hotel, trying (successfully) to get a couple
of cavities filled in my teeth and also trying (unsuccessfully) to get my
malfunctioning watch fixed. We also
searched for a guidebook to the country, along with a decent map and a guide to
birds; we failed utterly in all three quests, as it turns out that Paraguay is
such a small tourism market for gringos that it’s not worth producing quality
English-language guides and maps. It was
certainly annoying not having a bird book, although we did manage to figure out
a few of the birds we saw.
We also had to decide what our
cycling route was going to be. My
original idea had been to take a bus to Montevideo and then cycle north from
there to Iguazu Falls and on to Asuncion.
Since our Carretera Austral trip had taken longer than anticipated, we
had decided to start and finish in Asuncion, but we hadn’t picked out a route
yet. My inclination was to cycle south
towards the Jesuit missions and then head upstream towards Ciudad del Este and
Iguazu Falls. Terri, however, wanted to
get to Iguazu Falls as soon as possible, so we ended up riding east towards
Ciudad del Este first, and then turning downstream towards the Jesuit missions
and Encarnacion. We were worried about
heat and traffic, and the trip was about to show that both were things worth
worrying about!
Tuesday, January 19th, 67 km: Asuncion to km 57, near Caacupe
On Tuesday, January 19th
we were up by 6 am, breakfasting by 7 and on the road by 8 am, hoping to beat
the intense heat. It was a long ride
through city traffic out towards the airport, and it was already 37 degrees by
the time we got to the small commuter town of Luque. We had chosen a route that avoided the main
highway, Route 7, for much of the day. We
rode from Luque along a less-trafficked road to the lakeside tourist town of
Aregua, although we barely caught a glimpse of the lake. We stopped for cold drinks near the lake and
sat in the shade, guzzling water, trying to rehydrate after the sweatbath we
had been riding through. As we
approached the town of Yparacai, on Route 7, more and more signs announced new
housing developments; the middle classes of Asuncion are either moving out of
the city, or buying weekend homes.
When we turned onto Route 7, we
emerged into a rushing torrent of trucks, buses and cars, some of the heaviest
traffic I had ridden in in years.
Luckily there was almost always a paved shoulder for us to use;
unluckily, the people who built the road put speedbumps on the shoulder to
dissuade cars from driving on it. This
made for a lot of bumps and evasive manoeuvres on our part. The terrain began to get hillier as we rode
along, and Terri began to melt in the heat as we climbed more steeply. We had one particular climb of 200 vertical
metres in the hottest temperatures of the day (42 degrees on my cycling
computer) that almost finished her off.
We looked for a hotel in the town of Caacupe and failed to find one, so
we cycled on.
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| End of the first day of baking in the heat |
Just as Terri thought we would
have to cycle another 25 km in the heat to find a place to stay, I spotted a
sign for a swimming pool beside the road and we turned in after 67 km to find a
lovely property run by a Paraguayan woman who was living and working in New
Jersey. We could camp at the back of the
yard, swim to our hearts’ content and escape the non-stop roar of grinding
truck engines. It turned out to be a
brilliant spot to stay, with lots of birds, a shady spot to cook, all the
mangoes we could eat from the mango trees, and the delicious feeling of water
on our skin to cool off. We ate
empanadas from the little stand next door, and went out at dusk to look for
birds down by the little stream at the back of the property. We tried out our new sleeping wraps; we had
left our heavy sleeping bags behind in our bike boxes in Asuncion, and bought a
few dollars’ worth of sheets and light terry cloth to keep ourselves warm at
night instead. It was actually a bit
chilly at night; once the sun was down, the temperatures dropped right down to
the low 20s.
Wednesday, January 20th, 73 km: km 57 to Coronel Oviedo
Our second day began even earlier
as we tried to get a jump on the heat.
We were cycling by 7:35, definitely a record for our trip, after some
cold tea and coffee and some morning mangoes.
The thermometer stood at only 26 degrees as we set off, although it
rapidly rose. We had lots of smaller
climbs as we made our way into Cordillera Province (the name is kind of a
giveaway!), along with heavy traffic and the annoying speed bumps of yesterday. After 18 km we stopped beside the road in a
traditional Paraguayan chiperia for
the national food obsession: chipas.
These are a bit like chewy bagels or buns, made with a mixture of wheat
and manioc flour and flavoured with cheese.
We ate, drank lots of cold drinks and then continued on our rolling
route across the hills. Eventually we
dropped down to a long flat stretch through the lowlands after San Jose, with
herds of cattle grazing beside the road and the heat assaulting the senses. Around noon, at the 48 km mark we passed a
fruit stand where we stopped and devoured an entire bag of oranges in one
sitting. We were beginning to appreciate
the low prices for food in Paraguay after the higher prices in Argentina and
Chile.
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| Life-saving fruit stand on a hot day |
At 2:30, just as the air was
reaching its blast furnace maximum temperature, after 73 km we arrived in the
bustling crossroads town of Coronel Oviedo, where we passed the second-grandest
building we had seen in the entire country so far. The most impressive had been the new Mormon
Temple in Asuncion, but the Teleton building in Coronel Oviedo was also
immaculate, a gleaming new building set in manicured grounds. It seems as though the Teleton organization
collects lots of overhead before passing on the funds it raises to its constituent
charities! We were keen to swim again,
so when we spotted a hotel set in spacious grounds and featuring a swimming
pool, we turned in.
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| Terri trying to cool off in a hot pool, Coronel Oviedo |
We paid 120,000
guaranies (about US$ 21) for a big double room with air conditioning and
breakfast, and again were grateful for the relatively low prices in
Paraguay. It was a great place to stay,
and we loafed in the pool for a couple of hours (it was so warm in the sun that
the pool itself was almost too hot, and Terri had to find a garden hose to cool
herself) before having a nap and a then a takeout meal of roast chicken. In town I met a Korean shopkeeper who had
emigrated to Paraguay back in 1980 when Korea was still relatively poor and
South America seemed to be the continent of opportunity. We went out for a dusk stroll and were
rewarded with dozens of types of birds, including hummingbirds, along with a
breathtaking display of fireflies that set the garden alight.
Thursday, January 21, 50 km: Coronel Oviedo to Caaguazu
 |
| Typical Paraguayan highway cycling |
Our third day on the road was a
relatively short one, at only 50 km, but between incandescent heat and lots of
hills, it was a tough slog. We were
saved by a series of fruit stands that served us iced fruit salads and fresh
fruit juice. We stopped for lunch (more
roast chicken and a pitcher of fresh fruit juice) and then knocked off early as
we seemed to have a long hotel-less stretch in front of us. In the big crossroads town of Caaguazu, we
found another good, inexpensive hotel with a swimming pool, and spent the
afternoon lounging in the pool and napping in the cool of the room. We got up, watched the birds that came to the
little oasis of the hotel garden, and then headed out for a great meal at a
street kebab stand, a spot that attracted quite a big crowd of locals on their
way home after work. Again I was
reminded of evenings in southeast Asia, with street food and crowds in the
streets.
Friday, January 22nd, 72 km: Caaguazu to Juan E. O'Leary
Our fourth day heading east
started slowly, with headwinds and hills slowing us down. I stopped on the way out of town to buy a
baseball cap to protect my scalp from the intense sunlight. We took some time off the bike and out of the
40-degree heat in JE Estigarribia, a town surrounded by extensive Mennonite
farmsteads. The landscape had changed
from the small subsistence farms of the first few days to much bigger
commercial operations, with huge fields of soybeans, corn and wheat festooned with
signs from Monstanto, Dow Chemical and the other giants of the agro-industrial
complex. The headwinds died out, the
landscape grew flatter and the population grew taller, blonder and more
Germanic-sounding, with farmers named Jakob Braun and towns called Colonia
Bergthal. We flew along, keeping pace
with each other, via stops for fruit salad and cold water, before arriving at
Juan E. O’Leary, a town lacking in quality hotels or restaurants. No swimming pool for us that evening, sadly,
and it was a challenge finding a restaurant that was both open and had anything
to serve. Luckily, there was an
exceptionally good ice cream parlour to drown our sorrows.
Saturday, January 23rd, 82 km: Juan E. O'Leary to Ciudad del Este
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| Japanese immigrants have completely integrated into Yguazu |
Our fifth day out of Asuncion, Saturday,
January 23
rd, saw us arrive in bustling Ciudad del Este at
last. It was our longest day of cycling
so far in Paraguay (81 km) but also had the best scenery at the end of the
day. Terri seemed a bit more
acclimatized to the fierce heat, and we made quite good time along the roaring
highway. Terri led the way on downhills
and on flat sections, and kept the gap close on uphills. The day’s culinary specialty was melon, eaten
at a roadside stall, and produced at a Japanese-settled area just down the road
in Yguazu. We stopped in for snacks in
Yguazu, noting lots of Japanese family names on signs (like the Churrasqueria Shirosawa), and then embarked on the
last busy stretch into Ciudad del Este, the second-largest city in Paraguay and
a relatively recent creation, springing up since the creation of the immense
Itaipu hydroelectric dam in the 1960s. We
stopped for lunch at a very friendly little restaurant and car wash, where the
friendly proprietress took an instant liking to us and decided to fatten us
up. Not far from the border crossing
into Brazil, we turned south towards the Monday waterfalls and found a pleasant
but quite expensive hotel, the Salzburgo, to stay.
 |
| Monday Falls, near Ciudad del Este |
We splashed around in the
swimming pool for a while before I dragged Terri out to go sightseeing. Monday Falls turned out to be very impressive
indeed, with chocolate-coloured water thundering over a precipice at a great
rate. The power in the water was
awe-inspiring.
 |
| Monday Falls |
We chatted with several
locals who were very welcoming; Paraguay is not overflowing with gringo
tourists, and so local people were genuinely curious about our impressions of
their country, and very welcoming. The
forests around the falls are some of the scattered remnants of what was once
the Atlantic rainforest, and have been maintained as a tiny park, full of
birds, flowers and butterflies. Terri
and I wandered around looking for birds, and then sat at a little restaurant
having a beer and an empanada while watching the waterfalls.
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| Monday Falls |
Sunday, January 24th, 31 km: Ciudad del Este to Foz do Iguacu (Brazil)
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| The view from the Brazilian side |
Early the next morning we rumbled
across the bridge into Brazil, my 121
st country. The usual frenetic cross-border shopping
trade was at a low point at 7:40 am, and we rolled into Brazil with minimal
delay. Foz do Iguacu, the Brazilian city
on the other side, was a modern, wealthy-looking city with well laid-out
streets and transport, a contrast to the chaos and grittiness in Ciudad del
Este. We cycled 28 kilometres from Hotel
Salzburgo, through the sprawling suburbs of Foz do Iguacu and out into the
countryside beyond. We had booked a
hotel on Booking.com that looked improbably upmarket, but it turned out to be
the right place. After a bit of messing
around and waiting for our room to be ready, we dumped our luggage and rode our
bikes the 2 km to the entrance to Iguazu Falls.
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| Coatis swarm a stolen bag of potato chips |
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| Butterfly at Iguazu Falls |
Iguazu Falls is one of the great
natural wonders of South America, and on this Sunday morning it seemed as
though half of the populations of Argentina and Brazil were there at the same
time. It took 20 minutes to get through
the huge ticket queue, and then a long bus ride to get to the falls themselves. Once we were off the bus, though, it was all
worth it. We spent a couple of hours
wandering around, taking photos and staring out across at the immense number of
individual falls that cut across the width of the river. Black vultures soared in huge numbers over
the falls, catching the updrafts, and bands of marauding
coatis, animals rather like raccoons, prowled around trying to
steal any plastic bags that tourists might be holding and rooting through snack
bars and trash cans in search of food.
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| Brazilian side of the Devil's Throat |
The Brazilian side of the falls is the place to get an overview of the
entire vast spread of the falls, and we certainly did just that. We were also blown away by the colourful
butterflies and birds in the jungle; Iguazu Falls is in a national park that
preserves a fair-sized chunk of Atlantic rainforest, and even has (somewhere in
the back corners of the park) jaguars.
We enjoyed the breathtaking, soaking experience of gazing out at Devil’s
Throat, the very centre of the falls, and then caught the bus back to the
entrance in order to visit the Bird Park.
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| Butterfly at Iguazu Falls |
We didn’t know what sort of
experience the Bird Park would provide, but we lined up in the heat, paid our
admission and went inside. We were late
in the day and concerned that they would close on us, but we needn’t have
worried, as they only close the admission at 5, allowing people already inside
to stay until 7 pm. We wandered around
for two and a half hours open-mouthed with amazement. The park is very professionally run and does
a lot of rehabilitation of birds captured from the illegal pet trade, as well
as captive breeding of rare species.
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| Butterfly at the Bird Park |
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| Toucan at the Bird Park |
They concentrate on Brazilian birds, although they have birds from all
over the world. Their parrots and
parakeets and macaws were captivating, as were their toucans. The park has a number of enclosures inside
which the birds roam and fly freely, and Terri and I spent a long time sitting
quietly while toucans and curassows crept right up to us to investigate
us. One huge highlight was the butterfly
and hummingbird enclosure, full of whirring hummingbirds and lazily flapping
colourful butterflies. We were the last
people out of the park, and our heads were whirring with sensory overload as we
cycled back to the hotel, had a swim and dined in the buffet dining room. My one day in Brazil left me eager to see much more of this huge and diverse country; it will have to be next time!
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| Terri meets a toucan |
Monday, January 25th, 18 km: Foz do Iguacu (Brazil) to Puerto Iguazu (Argentina)
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| Me wearing a butterfly on the Argentinian side |
Early the next morning we cycled
partway back towards downtown Foz before turning south across a bridge into
Argentina. It was possibly the easiest
crossing into or out of Argentina we had yet had, and we were quickly in Puerto
Iguazu, the scruffy little town on the Argentinian side. Compared to Foz do Iguacu, this side seemed
much poorer and less planned, and we had great difficulty in finding our cheap
accommodation, as there were no street signs to be found. Eventually, down a muddy anonymous track, we
found our little homestay, dropped off our gear and set off on foot for the bus
to the park.
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| Argentinian side of the Devil's Throat |
The Argentinian side of the falls
was a very different experience to the Brazilian side. There were far fewer tourists, and the
walking trails were more extensive and felt much wilder. We walked for a few hours, covering all the
major trails and getting very up close and personal with the individual
cataracts. We started off with a very
slow train trip to the furthest part of the park.
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| River turtle at Iguazu Falls |
We absorbed the overwhelming power of the
Argentinian view of the Devil’s Throat, then walked through the jungle track
(instead of taking the little train again) back to where the upper and lower
circuits cut through the jungle over and beside some of the hundreds of individual
falls. Again the jungle was full of
coatis, butterflies and birds, and we got in lots of walking and oodles of
wildlife. One of the most impressive
species were the great dusky swifts who nest on the cliffs behind the
thundering waterfalls.
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| Jay |
Partway through
the afternoon the sky turned orange with dust as winds kicked up dramatically
and looked almost as though a tornado was imminent. Fifteen minutes later the dust storm was
gone, having given us nothing more than dramatic light over the falls. (We heard later that the same storm hit the
city of Encarnacion and did quite a lot of damage; we were lucky to get off so
lightly.) We caught the bus back, having
decided that we didn’t want to pay an extra 550 pesos (US$ 37) for a full moon
experience over the falls. We bought
some juicy Argentinian steaks, some good veggies and some good red wine and
cooked up a small feast back at the hospedaje.
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| Terri having a rave moment at the falls |
The next day we had a
much-appreciated day off from sightseeing and from cycling. We had originally planned to go back to the
falls for another day of hiking, but we realized that we had covered almost
every bit of possible trail, and the weather forecast was far from
encouraging. In fact a torrential
downpour came down for much of the day, so we felt clever for not having gone
out hiking. It was good for the mind and
body to spend a day reading, juggling, doing laundry, eating and playing
guitar.
Wednesday, January 27th, 74 km: Puerto Iguazu (Argentina) to Tavapy
Wednesday, January 27th
saw us retracing our steps back to Ciudad del Este, as our original plan, to
cycle through Missiones province on the Argentinian side of the river,
foundered on the realization that much of the road had the same traffic as in
Paraguay but without the luxury of a paved shoulder. Some of the cycling blogs we read made it
sound quite nerve-wracking and perilous, so we decided to stick with the
Paraguayan devil we knew. It took
surprisingly little time to cross back into Brazil and then across into
Paraguay; I wish all South American border crossings were so quick and
easy! We rode out of Ciudad del Este. The traffic was insane; we were lucky to have
ridden the other way early on a Sunday.
Now every Brazilian and his car were heading across the bridge in search
of cross-border shopping opportunities.
We crawled out of town back to the friendly Minga restaurant in Minga
Guazu (on the south side of the road, between km 19 and 20 if you’re counting
from Ciudad del Este, or between km 307 and 308 if you’re counting from
Asuncion) where we had lunched a few days previously. Erica, the owner, was glad to see us and fed
us sumptuously again like long-lost family.
We eventually tore ourselves away and backtracked further to the highway
junction where Route 6 turns south towards Encarnacion.
The traffic lessened noticeably
as we moved onto Routh 6, although it was still a busy road. We ground out another 24 km, making 74 for
the day, before we found a place to stay.
We looked at a promising-looking swimming pool park beside the road for
camping, but it was, sadly, no longer in operation. In the tiny settlement of Tavapy, we found a
small hotel, the Emi, and downed a couple of ice-cold beers to cool off (in the
absence of a swimming pool). It was much
cooler than on previous days, thanks to the rains and overcast skies, but it
was still 36 degrees by 1 pm and pretty humid.
We set out that evening to see if the music we could here in the
distance was some sort of carnival celebrations, but nothing was going on, so
we retired to the hotel for an early night.
Thursday, January 28th, 87 km: Tavapy to Naranjito
 |
| Meeting Nestor and Ariel beside the road |
From this point on, our ride
passed through endless big commercial farms, through a changing quilt of ethnic
and religious affiliations: Mennonites,
Germans, Brazilians and Japanese all featured.
Our second day, at 87 km the longest ride we did in Paraguay, saw us
leaving fashionably late at 8:15. Not
long after rolling out of town, we were passed by a couple of local mountain
bikers in spandex heading back from a training ride. We ended up having a long conversation with
them beside the road, and Ariel and Nestor recorded a short interview with me beside
the road (in Spanish) that they posted on Facebook. Ariel is a serious competitive rider, off to
the world championships in Canada in August.
As was so often the case in Paraguay, they were curious about what we
thought about Paraguay and Paraguayans.
I mentioned the heat and the crazy traffic, but also the hospitality and
friendliness of the people we had met.
After we got rolling again, we seemed to ride forever through the
sprawling town of Santa Rita. We had the
one and only attempted tourist ripoff of the Paraguayan trip, as a juice stand
wanted to charge us four times the usual price for fruit juice. We declined and cycled further to find cold
drinks at a gas station. We continued to
roll past big soybean fields and signs for Syngenta, Cargill and Monsanto. After 45 km we found an isolated restaurant
which served an expensive but huge all-you-can-eat feast over which we
lingered, using internet and escaping the heat.
(Of course “expensive” is all relative; if I were paying US$ 7 for an all-you-can-eat
lunch in most other countries, I’d be overjoyed!)
After lunch we undulated over
increasing hills, as we got up to an eventual altitude of 450 metres above sea
level. We had to ride further than we
had anticipated looking for a hotel, and when we got to the town of Naranjito
it wasn’t at first obvious that there would be a place to stay. Eventually we spotted a hotel tucked behind a
big churrasco restaurant and settled in for a well-earned cold beer. The couple running the restaurant and hotel
were both Brazilians, and everyone in town seemed to be Brazilian, to the point
that all the TV channels were in Portuguese and all the shops in town sported
posters of Brazilian soccer teams. We
chowed down on some delicious meat in the restaurant that evening, discussing what
to do when our cycling was over.
Friday, January 29th, 77 km: Naranjito to km 66
 |
| Arno Sommerfeld, quality leader in a Mennonite district |
We set off the next morning
breakfastless, stopping in at a small shop after 7 km to have some coffee, tea,
bread, jam and in a small grocery shop.
We had a long discussion with the owner and her daughter. It was another day of lots of hard work
cycling without much to look at. I found
myself longing for the wonderful natural setting of the Carretera Austral; this
was too much cycling to survive rather than cycling for the joy of it. The temperature soared up to 41 degrees
again, and we ended up staying the night in a small, isolated hospedaje in the
middle of nowhere after a series of steep hills. There was no restaurant around, but the lady
who ran the hospedaje offered us some of the leftovers from her lunch and
between that and a supper of macaroni and cheese, we staved off
starvation. The surroundings were full
of interesting birds, including hummingbirds and a crowd of noisy parakeets,
and it was pleasant to sit out in the back yard playing tennis and juggling and
watching nature, including an immense toad and a big, alarming looking tarantula.
Saturday, January 30th, 64 km: km 66 to the Country Hotel (km 27), via sidetrip to Jesus de Tavarangue
 |
| I'm a little mate gourd, short and stout |
We were now only 66 km from
Encarnacion, but the main attraction of this leg of the trip, visiting the old Jesuit
missions of the area, was coming up, so we planned on taking two days to get to
Encarnacion. We started the day with
some tea, coffee and oatmeal cooked out in the garden, and were underway by 8
am. We rolled easily to Bella Vista, the
first of three towns known collectively as Las Colonias Unidas, the wealthiest
communities in the country. We had mid-morning
snacks at a bakery next to the giant mate gourd that marked the fact that Bella
Vista produces much of the country’s yerba mate. The town was full of German last names and
blond hair and blue eyes. We continued
cycling through Obligado and Hohenau and by 11:30 we had reached the crossroads
leading towards Jesus de Tavarangue. It
was a tremendous relief to turn onto the road and suddenly be almost alone on
the pavement, with only a handful of cars heading out towards the ruins. We rode side by side, admiring the views and
chatting, something we had barely done since arriving in Paraguay. Fields of yerba mate lined the road and we
climbed steadily up to the village of Jesus.
 |
| Ruins of Jesus |
 |
| Jesus ruins |
It had been our plan to spend the
night in Jesus, but there were no places to stay that we could find, so we
decided to visit the ruins and then return to the highway. I loved the ruins, set atmospherically on the
edge of town. The Jesuits had
established a series of “reductions”, or villages set around a church, in the
area in the late 1600s and early 1700s.
By the standards of the time, the Jesuits were enlightened rulers,
helping teach the Guarani villagers skills and how to survive in the colonial
economy. They were eventually evicted by
the Spanish crown in the 1760s, either because they had become too powerful and
rich, or because the Spanish (and the Portuguese across the border in Brazil)
were not interested in having educated, skilled villagers who were harder to
exploit and force into near slavery.
 |
| The Jesuits looking military in their coat of arms |
The
ruins show the epic scale of the Jesuit ambition, with a huge church (that,
like medieval cathedrals, didn’t ever get completed), a big school, workshops
and the foundations of the houses built for the villagers. The views over the neigbouring hills were
pretty, and we sat behind the church reflecting on the changing fortunes of
history.
 |
| Terri contemplating Jesus |
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| Pretty woodpecker at Jesus |
On the ride back to the main
road, we realized how much we had climbed going the other way, as we coasted
downhill almost the entire way. In
Trinidad we looked at places to stay and found them severely wanting, so we
again decided not to sleep there. The
ruins were amazing, even bigger in scale than Jesus and more complete. The tropical heat and red brick ruins made me
think of Southeast Asian ruins like Ayutthaya and Bagan. Parakeets flittered around from palm tree to
palm tree, and we were pleased to see a few burrowing owls sitting on walls and
in the grass. There was 18th
century graffiti in the ruins of the church, along with gravestones of
long-dead missionaries. I found it a
moving place to wander around.
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| Trinidad Jesuit ruins |
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| Burrowing owl at Trinidad |
We rode away from Trinidad around
5 pm, stopped for a fruit break to try to rehydrate and then pushed onwards,
aiming for a hotel we had heard about, the Tyrolia. We heard from a passing local guy on a racing
bike that the Tyrolia sat atop a steep hill, news which did not please
Terri. Luckily we soon passed a sign for
the Country Hotel and turned in to have a look.
They wanted a lot of money for a room, but we could camp in the garden
for a very reasonable 50,000 guaranies (about US$ 8). The place is owned by a German guy, Wolfgang,
who has lived in Paraguay for 30 years.
We ate lots of yummy food, drank home-made beer, bought honey and
German-style bread and generally spent much of the money we had saved on
accommodation.
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| Camping under shelter at the Country Hotel |
It was interesting to
talk to Wolfgang and hear how the area has changed over the past 15 years, with
paved roads, big agro-industrial farms and clearcutting replacing dirt tracks,
tiny subsistence farms and big tracts of Atlantic rainforest. We swam in the pool, put up our tent under a
thatched roof and slept well, despite the torrential downpour that lasted much
of the night.
Sunday, January 31st, 25 km: Country Hotel to Encarnacion
Our last day of cycling in
Paraguay, January 31st, was a short one, as we only had 25 km
separating the Country Hotel from downtown Encarnacion. We rolled along through relatively light
traffic into the city, then combed the streets looking for a hotel. Our map was hopelessly inaccurate, but we
eventually found a decent hotel with an indoor pool and quiet rooms. We went out for a celebratory lunch at a
churrasco restaurant, bought our bus tickets for the next day to Asuncion, had
a long swim, then went out in search of sushi.
It took forever to find the Hiroshima, but it was worth it. We got takeout sushi and brought it back to
the hotel along with a bottle of Argentinian bubbly to mark the end of two and
a half months of riding in South America.
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| Running the bikes through the car wash, Encarnacion |
The next day saw us bring our
bicycles, which were covered in the fine red dust of Paraguay, to a car wash to
be properly washed before loading them on the bus. The bus ride to Asuncion was long but fairly
comfortable, and we spent part of it talking to Colleen, an American Peace Corps
volunteer on her way to welcome a new group of volunteers. We rode from the Asuncion bus station back to
Nande Po’a to find that our room seemed to have been given away despite having
made a reservation. Luckily by the time
we started to put up our tent in the courtyard, the manager realized that he
did have a room for us and we slept indoors.
A day of administration in
Asuncion saw me get the finishing touches put on my dental work (two cavities
filled for US$80, a lot cheaper than in Canada, by a very professional outfit)
and get my watch fixed properly, while Terri visited the beautician to repair
some of the ravages of life on the road.
And then, on February 3rd, we took a pickup truck through a
spectacular rainstorm and the rapidly flooding streets of the capital back to
the bus station to catch a bus to Buenos Aires, where we had decided to spend
the last 10 days of our trip.
Paraguay was an interesting
country to visit, not least because I knew so little about it before visiting. It’s definitely poorer than either Chile or
Argentina, but it seems to be riding the agricultural commodity boom to greater
prosperity, and it is one of the friendliest countries I’ve been to outside of
Central Asia. There was never any undercurrent of desperate poverty or social unrest, and I really enjoyed meeting
the people along the road who were genuinely curious about us and what we were
doing. Unlike, say, Chile, we met no
other bike tourists, although local people said they did see cyclists on a regular
basis. The cycling was pretty grim, to
be honest: the incessant heavy traffic
wears on the senses and makes cycling not much fun, while the heat is pretty
fierce. I wish we had had the time to
ride up into the wilder parts of the country like the Gran Chaco. We decided not to rent a car and visit
national parks, as we weren’t sure how much real wilderness and jungle remains
to be found in the country, and how accessible it is. What we did really enjoy was the good,
inexpensive food and accommodation to be found, with great quality fruit and
meat and quality hotels for less than US$20.
I’m glad we visited, although perhaps cycling is not the ideal way to
experience the country.
