It’s been a crazy couple of weeks… we’ve covered seemingly impossible distances, traversed four countries, three capital cities – and far too many buses, on which we’ve lost countless hours of our lives.
From Montevideo, we headed up-country to Salto (no relation to Salta), because it’s on the border to Argentina.
Salto is an unremarkable town with a couple of rather pretty plazas, but little else to keep us interested (though our hotel was very cool; the oldest in Uruguay and filled with antique furniture, unruly plants and cats), so we soon bade farewell to Uruguay and crossed back to Argentina.
We stayed in the city of Concordia, also pleasant but forgettable, though filled with excessively friendly locals, and being in Argentina again was lovely in itself. But we had a mere day to spend there while waiting for our night bus to Posadas in northern Argentina.
Posadas was tropical in climate and quiet on a Sunday. We visited the sprawling ruin of a Jesuit mission at San Ignacio de Miní, a maze of stone walls almost entirely encroached upon by the surrounding forest, apart from the big open space of the ex-plaza, and the big walled-in space of the roomy ex-church.
We returned to Posadas to discover where its life exists: at twilight along the riverfront boulevard – for we turned a corner out of the sleepy city centre and suddenly it was heaving, with young couples, attention-seeking teenagers, and entire extended families, watching the river, each other, and the world go by.
Knowing we wanted to end up in Brazil, we sat down with a guidebook and planned a route over a few beers. And on the other side of those beers, we realised there was no reason not to go to Paraguay. Because when else will we get the chance to pop over to Paraguay for the day?
So from Posadas we hopped a bus to Asuncion, Paraguay, and we learned that most of Paraguay is deeply green, thick with plants and humidity. Asuncion was far removed from the European-style comfort we’d been living in for so long – it was closer to the South America we first knew in Peru and Ecuador.
Asuncion was grittier, grubbier, and oppressively, achingly hot. So hot that our taxi driver scurried eagerly into our hotel to find out if they had any rooms, before we had a chance to stop him, then brought our luggage in for us, then loitered around pretending to count his change for ages, just for the chance to soak in the gloriously air-conditioned lobby before once more braving the surely life-threatening temperatures outside.
We spent a day trudging through the heat of Asuncion, appreciating the sprinkling of colonial buildings and the bustling street life – it’s hectic and the plaza people-watching is great – but to be honest, were not too disappointed at leaving the next day.
We headed for Ciudad del Este, on the border between Paraguay and Brazil, and just north of Argentina. Weirdly Ciudad del Este is a mad tax-free shopping-obsessed town, of huge malls and in-your-face billboards.
We stayed just long enough to give up on border-crossing buses and shoved ten dollars at a taxi driver to take us across to Brazil the easy way.
