Encarnación Paraguay

Layne organized our visit to Encarnación and we started by driving the Costanera, the waterfront which has been beautified to attract tourists to the city that wants to be the summer capital of landlocked Paraguay.

My heart is red and white, Coca Cola. 

Behind Asuncion the capital and Ciudad Del Este the shopping capital of the country Encarnación is the tenth largest city and the vacation capital of Paraguay. But red mud still stains the traffic in this urban center. Can’t escape it, it seems like. 

Imagine this in summer vacation in January and February. 

Argentina across the water. 

Layne had her eyes on a neighborhood with mosaics. 

I’m not fond of cobblestone streets which I call Roman roads but when they are blocked by holes it gets awkward in a big van. My language was rather colorful, I’m sorry to say, as I turned and blundered the wrong way up a one way street. Oh well. 

The Staircase of St Peter the Apostle was a tribute to the 400th birthday of the city designed by one Rubén Sikora. It was a damp Saturday afternoon when we got there and the neighbors stared at us like we were a troupe of lunatics who were invading. The local dogs were not happy to see Rusty and the yards of the houses echoed with a barrage of barking.

We ended the with a short drive across town to a Japanese restaurant with enough parking to accommodate GANNET2, a miracle.

Hiroshima got rave reviews from fellow travelers and strangers. We didn’t cross in time for lunch so we planned to drive after dark after dinner to a place to park.  

US$60 seemed very reasonable for an excellent dinner and it was worth having to drive after dark for twenty minutes out of town. Out iOverlander spot for Saturday night was a gas station with excellent WiFi and a quiet parking spot. 

Up next ruins and Laotian food I hope.

Goodbye Argentina

We got on the road from our truck stop around 10am with less than three hours to drive to get to the border. 

It wasn’t a bad spot to spend the night in the back, surprisingly quiet. The road started out crappy of course but the roadside showed a level of poverty we haven’t seen since Brazil. 

The road continued horribly patched.

The part that got freaky was the style of driving. Argentines have cornered the market on unskillful aggressive decision making on full display when we got stuck behind some very slow logging trucks and a line of trucks cars and buses behind them.

I was certain we were going to witness a pile up and hung back to give others a chance to pass if they felt like it, I wasn’t getting involved in the shoving to get ahead.

It all worked out and I got to sit back and in between avoiding pavement patches got to look around at impoverished northern Argentina.

I am a little tired of red mud in my life but here it was just like we’d seen across Brazil and it makes for a messy shoulder on the road.

Skies were gray but we had no rain and temperatures are near 70 so we are enjoying not being cold at last.

We had a chance to buy some tapioca cheese rings from a street vendor so we did. Pretty good too, and we had them for lunch with marmite and cheese.

And that road boy howdy.

The weird thing was the toll booths were fine despite rumors to the contrary they accepted our credit card no problem  and the corrupt cops also rumored on iOverlander were nowhere to be seen going north. They were checking cars going south but it all looked above board and normal. We have yet to meet corrupt cops reputedly found across Latin America. 

The final thirty miles were being replaced and happily there were no stripes so traffic could make it a free for all after the active paving zone. 

When we last left Paraguay we chose Friday night to fight traffic to the border with Brazil and this time we chose Saturday afternoon to get in line to leave Argentina. It took longer in line than to deal with the paperwork.

We were under observation. 

Weirdly enough immigration for both countries was carried out by the cheerful Argentine official who apparently got us out of his country and into  Paraguay in one seamless, stamp free operation. 

At the checkpoint the customs guy took our Temporary Import Permit for GANNET2 and we got on the bridge to Paraguay which was an epic traffic jam almost the entire length of the structure. Including vendors to keep the bored families fed. And don’t forget the windshield wiper salesmen! 

It’s a mighty structure across the great Paraná River which is second in volume only to the even mightier South American river already visited by GANNET2 and crew: the Amazon. 

Reminiscent of the Sunshine Skyway in Tampa Bay and there was no toll here which surprised me. It was dreamed up in 1973 and construction began in 1983 and the bridge opened in 1990. 

Of course I got a picture as we passed the midpoint.

On the Paraguayan side we had to stop to do a fresh Temporary Import Permit for GANNET2, a piece of artwork not required by locals in the Mercosur (Southern Market) countries. It took twenty minutes and basically required us to sit while he typed.

And then we were back in Paraguay a pleasant cool gray day compared to the burning heat of summer a few months ago.

 Founded in 1615 Encarnación is a city of a hundred and fifty thousand and is supposedly the tenth largest in the country. It’s undergone a process of renovation as a tourist center in this landlocked country. Posadas Argentina across the Paraná River: 

It’s famous for its beaches and its new waterfront promenade. 

The city is a bustling tourist center for Paraguayans but there are foreign communities here reportedly Poles and Ukrainians mostly, surprisingly enough. 

We got the distinct impression no one expects to see gringos here especially in winter. We smile and wave and say hi! And they reply cautiously with a suspicious glance. It feels like being back in Suriname where people wondered why we were there…

You can imagine the crowds here in summer baking on the river beaches. 

In winter on a Saturday afternoon there is plenty of room to park but we were on a mission. 

We had other plans to be revealed tomorrow, mosaics and sushi. 

Paraguay: we’re back.

Highway 14

Argentina Highway 14 up the Brazilian border 

 I didn’t really need reminding but Argentina’s infrastructure is crumbling. The president promised to fix spectacular rates of inflation and he did by laying off thousands of bureaucrats and canceling infrastructure projects. Consequently roads, the stuff we drive on, are in a woeful state of disrepair.

They patch the roads but it ends up an awful potato patch lumpy ride, and there is a ton of truck traffic that apparently melts the road in summer into ridges and valleys of asphalt.

It’s a hard drive especially as the traffic up the border was heavy with trucks and impatient cats dodging between them to get ahead. Layne for some reason was hell bent on getting to Paraguay but I was tiring of fixating on asphalt and avoiding getting run off the road.

We spent Thursday night at a truck stop which offered free RV services to anyone that stops by, electricity, potable water, a toilet dump station and was it surprising the spots were all taken?

The photo I took the next morning shows a spot where our Brazilian friends finishing their vacation had survive night and were hurrying home. We parked Argentina style in a non parking spot to the side while a late arrival had parked in front of another RV…a popular spot for the night.

We left late and got on the road after ten, still shared how Argentina offers free stops for RVs. Back on that infernal road we got.

There were a ton of dead dogs on the shoulders probably pets abandoned and killed lacking street sense. Poverty in Argentina is rampant. We also saw many rusting hulks of abandoned automobiles.

A nice stretch of road there too, all too short unfortunately. Then we ran into a smokescreen reminiscent of the wildfires causing havoc all over the world.

It came, it went and there was no explanation. By now temperatures were in the mid 60s and we even got some sunshine, it felt completely different from the cold damp days in Uruguay. It feels like Spring even though it isn’t.

The countryside changed too, less orderly farms and fields and more marshy wilderness. 

I got fed up with the road after six hours not least because we had agreed to keep our days shorter for Rusty’s sake though he was keeping up just fine. We stopped to eat a sausage sandwich, a classic Argentine choripan photographed by Layne: 

While Rusty snoozed in the shade. By 4:30 we found a gas station with hot showers and overnight parking  so we stopped two hours shy of Paraguay. 

I walked Rusty and we came across a motorcycle and tent on the edge of the parking lot. It reminded me of my youth.

Aridtides the rider came by Timor’s tice his English and told me his story, a former truck driver who quit in a dispute with his boss. He wanted to stay on the road so he rides and looks for work as he goes. Argentina is a mess he said, we don’t plan for the future we only live for today because with a shrug.

President Milei is an attempt at change head after forty years of hopeless corruption. Hope springs eternal. I fed the gas station dogs much to Rusty’s irritation and I saw a guy collecting cans working at it. I gave him a five dollar bill as our supply of pesos is low. He looked at it like I’d offered him the holy grail and doffed his cap like a medieval serf. He couldn’t believe his eyes and backed away bowing and thanking me. It takes so little in a ruined economy. Oh Argentina.