Bus travel: expect the unexpected

El Jardin Hostal, Asunción, Paraguay

It is eleven in the morning. Hunting for a tank top in our backpack I come across a pair of socks. Given the fact that the door was almost too hot to the touch from the outside three hours ago already it is hard to imagine that I'll ever need them again. May I live with this illusion for a little while longer ...

Illusion, too, is that even the shade of this tree-lined little courtyard will provide coolness for much longer: the temperature, right now, is 30º C. El Jardin is at the perimeter of the city centre, which, according to Thomas, the Swedish owner of the hostel, is small enough to explore on foot, and that's what we plan to do later.

But what a journey it has been to get here! Little did we know that what was supposed to be an easy travelling day would turn out to be anything but when we shouldered our packs and walked down to the bus terminal in Puerto Iguazú yesterday morning. We held the tickets to Ciudad del Este, the Paraguayan city right across the Rio Uruguay, in our hands, an hour's bus trip at the most including the border crossing, according to our information.

Having misread the handwriting of the employee of the 'Rio Uruguay' bus company we were a bit early, and for the longest time it looked as if hardly anybody would join us on this trip across the border. Modern two-story busses came and went, loading and unloading people and luggage, and finally a relatively small, older bus arrived, displaying a 'Paraguay' sign in its front window. There were fewer seats than on the other busses we'd been on, but more space to put luggage, and suddenly there were all kinds of people, too, only a handful of them obvious foreign tourists, and only one other girl with a big backpack like us, indicating that she planned to cross the border for more than just a day's exploring or shopping.

It soon became clear that most of the passengers were going to Ciudad del Este to do just that; it seems to be a popular place to shop for bigger items like electronics, and Christmas is coming closer. We thought the bus was quite full when we left the terminal already, but the bus driver stopped at several bus stops along the way on his way out of town. By the time we left Puerto Iguazú behind us there was hardly a place left to put one's feet: seats and standing room alike were filled to capacity. We had had to leave our big pack at the front end of the bus and ended up at the very rear ourselves. No worries, though: we didn't need it until we got off, after all ...

A tall blond woman in her sixties had addressed us in excellent German at the bus stop: a third-generation Argentinian of German descent. A teacher at the Goethe-Institute (a German college) in Villa Gesell on the Argentinian coast she was in Iguazú for a holiday, had heard us speak German and enjoyed the opportunity to practice. Happy to be distracted from the crowded circumstances on the bus we didn't pay much attention to the landscape we drove through. It took only about twenty minutes until we reached the Argentinian border station where everyone had to get off the bus, the five or six foreigners to get their exit stamp, the locals only to show their identity card. Just like the day before, when a bus took us to the Brazilian side of the falls, these formalities went very smoothly, and in no time at all we were back on the bus. We were much too late to find a seat close to the front (or anywhere else, for that matter), but we made sure to get a standing place close to the back door to be able to exit quickly at the Paraguayan border station.

Not long, and we crossed the Rio Uruguay. 'Now we're in Paraguay', Johann said. My impression that the view from the bridge to the left was the same as the day before when we crossed into Brazil couldn't be right, of course. Not able to get a good view out of the window from our squeezed-in position we wondered just a little how quickly the bus passed some buildings that could have been a border station, but didn't think much of it, just wondered a little why it took so long to get to the official entry to Paraguay. Road construction made for a bumpy ride, and to the left and right shopping centres and commercial buildings lined the road, some of them not finished yet. Road signs seemed a bit strange to me: this didn't look like Spanish, was only reminiscent of it. Maybe this was what Guaraní looked like, the official Paraguayan language? Still, letter combinations like '...eixe' and 'ão' made me think of the signs we had seen the day before – but we weren't in Brazil, were we? By now, the French couple close to us was wondering aloud about this strange occurrence, too. And then we crossed the river – or a different one? - a second time. There was a lot of traffic here, a long line of trucks waiting in the lane beside us, masses of people crossing the bridge on foot.

Suddenly a call from the front: 'Pasaporte? Pasaporte?' This, then, had to be the real border to Paraguay, and we had indeed travelled through Brazil for the past twenty or thirty minutes. Trying frantically to get to the front of the bus from where the call had issued we made very slow progress. The local passengers not only didn't need to have their passports stamped, but also were not in the least concerned about us. By the time we got close to the front the bus was on the move again. The French couple and the girl with the big backpack, just like us, were left without an entry stamp; only the Japanese man had been close enough to the front to get his.

The girl, a young traveller from Holland, as it turned out, spoke Spanish quite well, and from her conversation with a Paraguayan woman I gathered that while we could travel all we wanted in Paraguay we would face a heavy fine when we tried to leave again without the stamp. She explained to us that she had even asked the bus driver if we needed to stop and get our stamp when she boarded the bus, and he had just waved off her concerns. Hot and not at all happy with the situation we decided we better take a taxi back to the border station from the terminal before going on to Asunción.

At the terminal we found that we could take the same bus back to the border station, about teón or fifteen minutes away, so that we could save at least the taxi fare for one way. The three of us – the French had got off the bus a few stations before the terminal already – boarded the bus again, now almost empty, and made sure the driver knew that we wanted to get off to get our stamps. This time we encountered no problems, were quickly processed at the border and found a taxi to take us back to the terminal. Altogether this little excursion took no longer than maybe half an hour extra – and 100 pesos ($10 Can) in taxi fare, of course. How strange that a country is not interested to check the people crossing its borders.

As soon as we entered the terminal building again and looked around for a bus that would take us to Asunción shouts of 'Asunción, Asunción' greeted us from different booths. The nearest one, of the NSA bus company, had a bus leaving in 'five minutes'. Sure. Eager to be on our way again we paid the $15US/person (no need for Paraguayan Guaranís yet) and soon stepped on a bus most definitely a class or two below the long-distance busses we had travelled on in the last while. The bus driver walked along the isle and asked me to open the window: 'for air', he smiled. Well, here was our air condition, then. How long would it take to get to Asunción, Lisa, the Dutch girl, inquired of the driver. Oh, we'd arrive 'a la seize, mas o menos' – around six, approximately. Five hours, then. The end was in sight.

The five minutes turned out to be more like twenty before the driver had decided that he now had enough passengers. This time Lisa and us were truly the only foreigners. With the open windows the temperature was very pleasant in spite of the heat outside, and we soon enjoyed the beautiful landscape we passed through. We had brought bread, cheese, water and peanuts – our standard travel fare – but would not have had to go hungry and thirsty if we hadn't. Unlike in the fancier busses we were finally back to South American bus travel we have come to not only appreciate but love. Women with huge cloth-covered baskets came on board to sell warm 'chipas', a local cheese-flavoured kind of roll made with cassava or corn flour; also men carrying coolers of 'agua' and 'gaséosas' (pop) or sweets.

Green and lush, Paraguay proved to be a balm for the eyes. Fields with white, long horned Brahma cattle and big herds of beautiful horses passed by, interspersed with long stretched out villages with shady groves of blooming trees where people sat in the shade and children were playing. Finally, finally there was something we had most sorely missed in Argentina with its meat based diet: fruit stands, with watermelons and honey melons at first, later with bananas, citrus fruits, tomatoes and much, much more. How good it would be to just be able to stop at a stand for some great quality fruit instead of turning away in disgust from the poor display of Argentinian fruit in the supermarkets.

Often, the bus didn't make quick progress, stuck behind a line of traffic which, however, the driver had no qualms passing quite aggressively, but whenever there was an empty stretch of road we made up for the delay. We stopped at bus stops in smaller towns, a couple of times at a bus terminal in a bigger town along the way, and, the window open beside me, I tried to take a few pictures. 

 

We had just passed this '24-hour tire shop' with the tethered cow in the background at about 5:45 when the bus stopped. This was not a bus stop, however, and after ten minutes we still had no idea what was going on. The engine rumbled quietly, the driver and co-driver got off, after a while followed by a few of the other passengers who stood around

 looking just as clueless as we were. It took a whole hour

until we were finally on the move again, and not much after the sun started to set. Soon it was too dark to see, and, tired of spending all these long hours on the bus, we were anxious to arrive at our destination and finally stretch our limbs again.

By the time we entered the huge bus terminal in Asunción it was nine o'clock – the trip had taken three hours more than anticipated, only one of those hours with explainable reason. It didn't matter: we were where we wanted to be, and our hostel was only a twenty minute taxi ride away. What relief to finally be able to call it a day!

Wall of the courtyard with Jasmine spilling down

Fragrant Jasmine flowers

It is now 3:30 in the afternoon, time to go for a walk and see what this city has to offer. According to Thomas, it is a safe and pleasant place to be, and I look forward to finding out more.