Encarnación

Buses in Paraguay are not like other buses we’ve experienced to date. For one, no one cares about your passport when you buy a bus ticket. They expect you are going on the next bus and they are happy to take your money. For two, the buses are quite old and there are no fancy features: no AC, no WiFi, at least not that we’ve seen. You might get a seat that doesn’t recline or you might get a seat that doesn’t stay up. In fact, you might not even get a seat.

Our first long-distance bus trip was from Ciudad del Este to Encarnación. It’s a journey of approximately 170 miles that takes 5-6 hours and costs between 50,000 and 70,000 guaranis ($8.33 – $11.67). The bus was pretty empty when we got on, and we boarded with all our bags since there didn’t appear to be an option to put them under, so we sat in different rows. The bus had massive windows that the bus attendant encouraged us to open to create natural air conditioning. It worked surprisingly well when the bus was moving and it was nice to get some fresh air.

The bus had five rules: 1) Avoid eating in excess; 2) Don’t throw trash on the floor; 3) Don’t bother the driver; 4) Don’t write on the vehicle; and 5) The bathroom is suitable only for urinating. It’s possible the first rule is intended to prevent people breaking the fifth one, otherwise it seems like sort of an odd rule. And why is the most relevant rule – not bothering the driver – so far down the list? Eric thinks at the point where you’ve listed not writing on the bus and not eating too much, there are all sorts of other rules that would be worth writing down. We are both curious how these ones made the cut.

The bus stopped at a bunch of little stops in the city on the way out of town and then at other stops along the route, so people were getting on and off the whole way. At some stops people got on selling soda, water, and snacks. At one stop about half way into our journey, a Paraguayan woman got on the bus and sat next to Jess. She was carrying a large bag of coquitos which we had not yet encountered. They look like small rolls but have a hard crusty texture like a cracker. She shared some with Jess. She seemed a bit surprised to see a foreigner on the bus and asked a lot of questions about what we were doing and where we were going.

At one point, she asked Jess if she knew how to write and then explained that it was her niece Elma’s birthday and she wanted Jess to write Elma a message on WhatsApp. Definitely in Spanish, Elma doesn’t know English. Jess wrote a nice birthday wish and handed the phone back without pressing send. We think this was an “it’s cool to get birthday wishes from strange tourists” sort of situation, but we’re not totally sure.

At the next stop a person selling chipá got on the bus. The Paraguayan woman bought one and shared it with Jess. Chipá is shaped like a bagel but made with cornstarch, cassava and cheese. It’s a traditional Paraguayan food with Guarani-Spanish Jesuit origins, and it’s pretty delicious especially when you’ve been on a bus for four hours and are hungry. Jess passed half of all of her treats over the seat to Eric behind so he could try them too. The Paraguayan woman got off near Trinidad which we plan to come back to in a few days and we arrived in Encarnación an hour later.

Our Airbnb in Encarnación was just across the river from the main city, so we got off the bus at one of the stops before the bus terminal and walked a mile. Jess has taken to affectionately calling the bridge to our hostel the Prince of Persia bridge. The walkway is made with these 2ft by 4ft concrete panels that are sometimes attached solidly and sometimes wobble a bit just like in Prince of Persia. They also make the exact same noise when they wobble as the sound effect in the game. You wonder if this wobbly panel will be one of the fragile ones that drops you to the ground (in this case the river) below, depleting your health in the best scenario or delivering you to sharp spikes in the worst. In some cases, the panels on the bridge have broken and fallen in and they mostly reveal pipes or trash so nothing too treacherous so far. While Jess pictures a computer game every time we walk on this bridge, Eric thinks it’s a clever engineering design. It’s easy to pull those panels up if you ever need to do some maintenance on the pipes.

After some lost searching back and forth on the other side of the bridge, we find our Airbnb. There is no number outside, so the fact that we have the address doesn’t help at all except that Google Maps keeps telling us we’ve passed it. Finally a call to the host and his description of a second floor with lots of glass and three trees outside clues us in: there are hardly any houses with a second floor. Three trees could be anything until we are outside the front door and there are three very deliberate trees right in front.

The Airbnb has an amazing open dining room with an incredible view and a delightful breeze which quickly makes us a bit less hot and sticky. We’re going to enjoy being here for the next few days.

There’s not a lot to do or see in Encarnación, so the first evening we walked down to the beach to see the sunset and then went to the grocery store to get some food for dinner. The Super Seis is the biggest, shiniest grocery store we have seen since Buenos Aires. It’s almost an attraction itself. There are these massive bins filled with varieties of coquitos, biscuits, rolls, and chipá, and people stuffing bread into extra large produce bags like bread will never be made again. We can’t imagine how they can possibly eat all that bread before it goes bad, but everyone is doing it. The produce section is beautifully displayed, and the two people working in the weighing station are like a machine: so efficient! We spent way too long in the grocery store.

The next day we explored Encarnación. We walked up the Paseo de los Enamorados (passage of lovers) which has beautiful mosaics and then down the Escalinata de San Pedro. Just after crossing the Prince of Persia bridge, we saw an owl! We walked to the Plaza de Armas and played cribbage while drinking maté. We wandered through the Japanese gardens in the Plaza de Armas and admired the 234-year-old tree that has a plaque from 1980 honoring it as a natural monument for the shade it had provided in its 195 years. We visited the cathedral and then found a hole-in-the wall restaurant that was not closed for siesta and ate pasta with a beef sauce. Afterwards, we saw the San Jose flour mill and silo and went to the Museo de Memorias Vivas. It’s not clear what ties the items in this museum together. On one side there are newspaper reports of a massive tornado in 1926 that destroyed a large part of Encarnación and killed hundreds of people. On the other, there are lots of seemingly random old objects: old calculators, typewriters, phones, teacups, photographs with little in the way of explanation. However, it was interesting to poke around.