Paraguay - Brazil - Argentina (phew! three countries in one day!)

I was maybe a bit mean to Paraguay the other day - it's just we'd become so used to travelling in 'civilised' Argentina and Chile that it came as a bit of a shock to the system. I'm sure it's a perfectly nice country really!

We caught the bus from Asunción directly east to Ciudad del Este ("City of the East", aptly enough). After a five hour journey in a clapped out old Volvo bus - with air conditioning, barely, and they had to turn it off to drive uphill! - we arrived, were bundled off and collapsed into a local bus before we knew what was going on. After my internal GPS failed we went a little too far, so swapped buses and finally arrived downtown. We got another luxury hotel (a/c, minibar, cable TV, the works) - Hotel Munich, run by Germans (hmm, what could Germans be doing in Paraguay...?). After basking by the air conditioning for a couple of minutes we headed back into town to find an ATM, a supermarket and a way of getting back to Argentina the next day.

Ciudad del Este is famous for being one of the most corrupt cities in South America, and it apparently turns pretty nasty after dark, so we hid in our hotel room for the rest of the night.

The next day we had another great breakfast in our hotel, and then walked through the city centre to the international bridge that connects Paraguay with Brazil - there's no way through directly to Argentina. Since we were only going to be in Brazil for a few hours we weren't sure if we needed a passport stamp, but to be safe we got one anyway - and that gave me a chance to practise my Portuguese (I don't speak Portuguese ;). As we walked over the bridge youths with suspicious looking cardboard boxes ran back and forth past us - before they got to the other side, they chucked the boxes over the side of the bridge to their waiting partners in crime below and headed back.

We'd thoughtfully torn out and thrown away the Brazil section of our Lonely Planet, thinking we wouldn't need it, so we got a taxi straight to the bus station (paying in Argentinian pesos), and then got a bus straight out from Brazil to Argentina.

Inevitably, we forgot to get a Brazilian exit stamp before we left the country - Argentinians don't need to bother, so our bus just sailed through customs, and we had to trek back 2.5km to sort that out. We got on the next bus (transferable tickets, you see) and got our new Argentina stamps. We arrived in Puerto Iguazú at about lunch time, checked into a hotel (our second choice, the first being full), and had a rest!