City of the East

Finally back in the States (hooray!), so I'm posting the rest of my entries with pictures.

My guidebook describes Ciudad del Este as having a "justifiable reputation as one of South America's most corrupt cities." As a tax-free zone at the junction of the most laid-back of three countries (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay), it's no wonder why. At 10 am on a sunny Saturday morning, I walked across the bridge to Brazil with several hundred other people, most of whom were carrying large parcels with contents of dubious legality. And looking down at the water 50 yards below, I could see rowboats full of more goods crossing the river and people climbing the well-worn paths on either bank. I was grateful for the strong grip my hostess kept on my elbow as we (also illegally, I might add) crossed the bridge. But since I was without a Brazilian visa, we didn't try to get through immigration on the other side, but turned around instead and had a mate with the Paraguayan Marines manning the other side of the border.

It had been an interesting weekend. At 3:30 on Friday afternoon, Vivi (the 16 year-old grand-neice of my host mom) and I left Tobati on a bus. Riding buses in Paraguay is always an adventure because you never know what people are going to come down the aisle trying to sell. The chipa sellers in their short skirts are a given. (Chipas are the ubiquitous snack here--sort of a fried bagel that is hard and salty.) But the other day, I was passed by a man hawking sets of kitchen knives with sharpeners. And on the way to Itagua was someone with moth balls for sale. I can’t imagine sitting on the bus and thinking, “Mothballs—that’s exactly what I need.” (This trend is not limited to buses. When you're stopped at stoplights in cars, inevitably someone will run between the lines of traffic with sodas or band aids or toilet bowl cleaner. Or sometimes it will just be someone juggling flaming sticks for spare change. I guess whatever you can do to make a buck. . .)

An hour later, Vivi and I got to her grandparents' house near Itagua, where we met her mom, Juanita, and aunt Ethyl. All of us sat on the front porch overlooking the highway to watch the cars and relax. Three hours later, we were still relaxing there. (My ability to sit and do nothing has increased exponentially since I got to South America, but this was still rather taxing on the attention span, especially since I never understood exactly what we were waiting for.)

But at 7:30, Reinaldo the cousin pulled up in his green SUV with tinted windows. (Tinted windows are everywhere in Paraguay--it definitely added to the mobster-like flavor of Cidudad del Este.) Five hours later and more BeeGees songs in Spanish than I care to remember, we arrived in Ciudad del Este. Even though it was a Friday night, the streets were almost empty, although there were a few people out at the bar where we stopped to have a snack. (Vivi got her own glass of beer and no one seemed to mind. I guess the big sign saying that the bar didn’t serve people under 20 was just for looks.)

We stayed in a mother-in-law apartment at Reinaldo's house. (Houses in Paraguay are more like little compounds--high barbed-wire-topped walls enclose a courtyard and breezeways connecting different portions of the house. Reinaldo’s happens to have an extra self-contained apartment in his.) The next morning, we were all supposed to go to Brazil. (Reinaldo is a Marine, which was supposed to negate my need for a visa.) But he woke up with severe back pain, so the rest of us went into the city to entertain ourselves.

After walking across the Amistad Bridge and back as I described above, we did a little shopping, which is the main attraction in the city. The tax-free nature of area and limitless flow of illegal goods create unbeatable prices both in the legitimate shops and the countless street sellers. You could buy it all--Nike, Puma, Dolce and Gabbana--although frequent misspellings called into question the authenticity of the articles. We went into a store called Mi Bambi, which was a little girl's dream--filled with millions of cheap plastic pink accessories and clothes with sparkles, sequins and glitter (frequently all three). I thought we would never get Vivi out again. Walking through the streets was exhausting--there were throngs of people, all of whom have a different concept of personal space than I do. It was more like wading than walking. So I was not sad to return to Reinaldo's in the early afternoon.

With Reinaldo out of commission and other opportunities for entertainment pretty limited, we started watching movies. Vivi was the official movie selector, and her taste fell squarely in the "young teen" category. So of the six movies we watched in the following 24 hours, I thought the best was a flick called The Pacifier. In a few years, it will be on a card in Balderdash that reads, "Hilarity ensues when action hero Vin Disel becomes a nanny for five troubled kids in this heartwarming Disney movie."

Fortunately, Reinaldo was feeling better on Sunday, so we all went to the lake formed by the Itaipu Dam. Built in the mid-1990s for the staggering cost of US$25 billion (not surprisingly, there were some problems with over-invoicing), Itaipu Dam has made Paraguay the world's largest exporter of hydropower. (It supplies 80% of Paraguay's power needs and 25% of Brazil's.) Unfortunately, the project destroyed a set of waterfalls more impressive than Iguazu, and the 1350 square kilometer reservoir has become a habitat for malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitos, but a massive publicity campaign minimizes these downsides. We visited the reservoir where we had a horse-drawn carriage ride through the forest and along the lake side, and then the cultural/natural history museum and zoo--all for free, courtesy of the electric company. While I was looking at the skeletons of trees still marring the surface of the lake, my family explained to me how much good the dam had done for the environment. The PR firm deserves some sort of prize; it was pretty unbelievable.

When we returned to Reinaldo's from Itaipu's massive complex, I asked if we were headed to Iguazu Falls in the afternoon. Apparently, going to the Falls (one of the biggest tourist sites in South America) had not even occurred to Reinaldo--he had never been before, but he was agreeable to driving us there. So we went across the bridge to Brazil (empty now because stores are closed on Sundays), and no one batted an eye with our Paraguayan license plates as we drove through Brazilian immigration without stopping.

Reinaldo and Ethyl decided the entrance fee was too steep, so Juanita, Vivi and I headed into the park alone. A tour bus drove us to the "scenic footpath," where we had our first view of the waterfalls. I'm at a loss to describe exactly how massive the Falls are. I thought that the first view we saw--of a waterfall that looked like Niagra Falls--was incredible. But Juanitia (who had been there several times) pushed us on. We rounded a corner and there was another enormous waterfall to the side of the first, and then another one farther along, and another one with tons of smaller falls squeezed in between. There was so much water cascading off the side that we could feel the spray from 600 yards away. My guidebook says that there are actually 275 separate waterfalls that make up Iguazu, and the water falls 80 meters. It was just mind-boggling. After seeing the amount of water pouring off Iguazu, I understand how the ancients could have thought that the world was flat and water poured off the edges--and we were there in the dry season.

Unfortunately, I can't say much else about Brazil. The traffic lights were strange--two rows with five bulbs each that flashed in a complicated pattern. But we didn't make any stops, and our reentry to Paraguay was, immigration-wise, as anticlimactic as our departure. We went back to Reinaldo's house and watched Scary Movie 4--another gem--and then packed up the car and drove back to Tobati.