Asunción
PARAGUAY
An Overlooked Country
By LYNDI
Monday, October 4, 2010
Not many people I know have been to Paraguay – and there’s probably a good reason for that. I always tell people on my tour that want to know why they paid US$45 for a Paraguay visa when we’re only there for 2 days that Asuncion isn’t necessarily a “destination”, but it’s a great “stop-over”, and they seem pleased enough by this answer. See how easily manipulated people are?? Anyways, it’s true. I would never tell someone they can’t miss Paraguay – but I enjoy the place every single time I visit.
To begin with, there are no beautiful colonial buildings in Asunción that you wouldn’t find in a lot of places in South America. Basically when the Spanish Conquistadors came through what is now Paraguay, the land didn’t offer gold, silver, necessary waterways or anything else to attract them, so they never constructed the ornate and timeless houses and churches that you find in other countries. Second, Paraguay has been ruled by dictators since anybody can remember, and dictators typically don’t invest a lot of money in aesthetic endeavors. So what you have in Asunción is a lot of parks, banks, a few museums and gardens… and cheap shopping!!! Paraguay has been granted duty-free status, so all their electronics and designer goods come super cheap (as evidenced on weekends when Brazilians flock into the country by the hundreds).
We arrived in Asunción after a quick stopover in Ponta Pora, Brazil where the city is literally split down the street by the country borderlines. On one side of one street, everything will be written in Portugese, prices are high, and everyone follows traffic signs and wears seatbelts and helmets. On the other side of the median it’s Spanish, cheap imported goods and general traffic chaos.
The drive from the north of Paraguay down to Asunción is beautiful – limitless green countryside – and ladies constantly get on the bus to sell you chipas, or donut shaped cheese bread. And to put some frosting on the cake – our bus also put on one of the worst movies on God’s blessed earth – a movie called Crocodile where (you guessed it) a giant crocodile slowly picks off the stupidest bunch of teenagers that have ever breathed. (Spoiler alert: the main character that gets eaten alive will be okay – the crocodile regurgitates him at the end and he’s fine.)
Our first stop in Asunción was a restaurant called Rodizio where you bring your plates up to a buffet line, load it up with whatever you want – pasta, steaks, salads, etc – and pay them however much your plate weighs. Brilliant! Afterwards we passed by a karaoke bar and thought – hey! I can’t think of anything better than singing in front of a bunch of strangers all night! So Steff, Kim, Aaron and I entered the bar, and 2 beer towers and 20 songs later, stumbled out. Unfortunately, because several songs were filmed, I’m going to have to give up any future political aspirations.
The next day I took all the passengers on an orientation walk of the city showing them the cheap electronic stores, the shantytowns where the indigenous people live directly across from the Palace of Justice (ironic?) and a few historic buildings. I also got to drop some knowledge on them about the Triple Alliance War in 1865 where Paraguay went to war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and basically got slaughtered. Their dictator at the time, Mariscal Carlos Solano Lopez, started the war with a population of approximately 3 million people. By the end of the war, only 10% survived. Of that 10%, only 2,500 adult males were left. In the last days of the war in 1870, the army painted beards and moustaches on children to make them look like a more formidable, adult army from a distance.
Naturally, after the war, Paraguay’s leadership fell under puppet governments run by England and Brazil and their former number 1 national economy is now the second poorest on the continent. Amazing that a war 150 years ago still has a direct effect on the lives of so many people.
While I caught up on some work, Aaron took a bus to the expensive and ritzy parts of the city where mansions sell for about US$1 million (the country is cheap!) and are owned by the farm owners who can turnover 4 crops a year because the soil is so rich in the northern Chaco part of the country.
Around 5pm we all met up in the lobby of our hotel to go for another round of poker. I was, naturally, the first one out – but Aaron and Steff held out to the end and Aaron finally won it all – a huge pot of about 100,000 guaranies!!! Which is actually about US$20, so we’re sure to always quote the winnings in guaranies.
We took Aaron’s huge bounty back to the Rodizio restaurant and had an early night to compensate for the extra sleep needed from the previous night. The next day we had enough time to go shopping for some speakers for our iPod and catch our noon bus to Foz do Iguazu in Brazil.
And so I said goodbye to Paraguay and cheap food, cheap electronics, and incredibly friendly and open people. We were off to one of South America’s biggest tourist attractions, Iguazu Falls.
