I can only disappoint you

After nearly six months on the road, it's fair to say that even the most excitable of travellers can catch a slight dose of the "seen it all before" malaise that usually afflicts the packs of consummately shootable, British, middle-class, gap-year white kids with dreads and hareem pants that prowl this part of the world. While Lou and I weren't quite at that stage, while we waited for the bus from Posadas to Paraguay, it's fair to say that I was pretty damned excited at the prospect of visiting a country that general consensus puts down as utterly bonkers. I could go into great detail about the strange allure that Paraguay held for me, but readers would do far better clicking here and reading our good friend Matt Greenough wax lyrical on the subject. In a nutshell, the fact that Rough Guides don't even have a guidebook for the place was enough to get my juices flowing. Any inflatable pigs or hidden Nazis would be a bonus.

The bus ride into Paraguay starts off in a suitably bonkers fashion. No organised tours or high-end coaches here; you just stand on the street corner and pay 20p to catch a local bus to the border, rush through customs, and jump back on. And you're in, having caught a bus in much the same way you get from Splott into the centre of Cardiff.

Sadly, and continuing with the admittedly tenuous parallel, arriving in the border town of Enacrnacion gave me  a buzz roughly comparable with the centre of Cardiff on a weekday afternoon. No crazy street touts, noise, sound, fury or South American madness here. Certainly no pigs - inflated or otherwise - or Nazis. In fact, there was nothing exciting at all. Moreover, there wasn't really much of anything else, either.  No bars, no restaurants, no... fun. At all. Walking through the town, we found a good supermarket and about thirty ice cream parlours - no bad thing, but hardly a selling point. The steam train that chuffs out at you from local tourist flyers and postcards has stopped running, the 'free' Wi Fi in the central plaza costs a small fortune, and the most interesting part of town has just been flooded by the Government in one of the dam building projects so beloved of the authorities in this part of the world. All in all, as they rarely say on the streets of Encarnacion, it was a bit shite.

 So what did we do with our two days in town? Well, our digs at the Hotel Germano were slap bang opposite the bus station, dirt cheap and spotlessly clean. The staff were also massively kind, helpful and efficient. Anyone in town for a spot of ice cream shopping / expensive open air Wi Fi use should book a room here. We ate, two nights on the trot, at the cheap and cheerful Karumbe on the high street. The steak and eggs was top notch, as was the service. Like our hotel, it was also cheap as chips. And, town centre wise, that was about it.

In the interests of fairness and accuracy, day two saw us take a local bus out to the Jesuit remains at Trinidad - and they were absolutely spectacular. Having survived attempts by both man and the elements to do their worst since the Jesuits expulsion from Paraguay in the mid 17th Century, the remains are wonderfully preserved, beautiful and eery in equal measure. A few hours drinking beer and playing cards in the charming little hotel nearby made the day pretty damned perfect.

And so it was that, having come to Paraguay in search of the earthy, edgy, South America we'd left behind in the weirder parts of Bolivia, we left rested, well-fed and with some lovely pictures of religious ruins. All in all, not a disaster, but a slight disappointment nonetheless.

Off to Iguazu next, where we may or may not inflate a pig ourselves.

Luke and Louise

(Posted by Luke)