Actually we sometimes did get out of bed for longer than it takes to shop and cook. Almost every weekend we went on some kind of trip with our host, Victor. If if wasn't for him (and the fact that he owned a car), then we mostly would only have seen Asunción in Paraguay. So we went camping a few times and visited a few of his friends as well. The nature in Paraguay is lovely - colorful birds and butterflies, plants that are quite different from what I have seen, large flatlands and wetlands often dotted with palm trees, a few hilly parts aswell, small waterfalls and lakes etc. There are no big, grand must-see natural sights that would evoke a wow-effect but it is 'muy lindo' (very nice, lovely).
Their capital is like a very big town, and does not really feel like a big capital city (2,000,000 people in 'Gran Asunción', meaning with the sorrounding urban areas). There is a lot of potential to be have a beautiful city centre - many houses from the colonial times with elaborate decorations and so on. The problem is that after the houses were built, no effort of trying to preserve them has been done. The beautiful architecture is just falling apart in most of the places. The city does not even care enough to tow away some burnt car wrecks from the streets (in their 'main square' for example or near the government buildings)
With all that said (the town looked a bit creepy with all the dilapidated and empty buildings) it was still interesting and relatively safe. As there are not enough tourists, there are not many criminals, who make their living off tourists (pickpockets and hustlers). And as the crackheads of the centre (can't get around them. They were part of our everyday life) had enough people to ask money from (and were very often given money by the locals) so they did not really have to rob anyone or take part in crimes that would hurt anyone either(surely not 100% true but mostly, yes).
It turned out that Ernst (the crackhead living close to our house in an abandoned car) had stolen our host's car's tires a couple of times so they new each other as well :D
In the capital we also visited a few sights, like the train station (the first in all South America) and the zoo+museum and saw even further how much they care about their things. In the train museum, all the old paperwork, photos and equipment was just rotting there, where somone had put them when the museum was opened - under a coat of dust, unhidden from any influence of the weather or the traffic pollution. Old photographs curled up because of the humidity, pages of documents turning brown-black. In the zoological museum, the exaples of different animals that were put in jars and in a liquid to preserve them, were often half-out of the liquid, half of the animal remains decaying; most of the name tags or explanations gone. They also had the worst examples of taxidermy that I have seen. Not that I approve it in other situations but what I disapprove even more is stuffing a skin of animal randomly so that it locks like a bad mockery of a living animal.
Despite their inability or unwillingless to really care enough about many things, they really were lovely people (actually most people are very friendly, nice and helpful in any country we have visited). Paraguayans were sometimes a bit shy and afraid to start taking to us. But they were all actually extremely curious (because of the previously mentioned extremely small number of tourists) and interested in knowing more about us everywhere we went. At first it was quite difficult as our Spanish was quite basic. But by now we have improved a lot. So generally if the other person takes the effort to talk slowly and rephrase, we can manage (I recently had a successful 40minute conversation with a man who only spoke Brazilian Portuguese and I spoke Spanish. But I 'll get to that.)
If anyone has an interest in moving to a warm country and making an investment, Paraguay is your place. There are so many things this country does not have (in tourism sector or many others) that it is the right time to come and start them. Plus the relative simplicity to get residence and even citizenship.
Anyways, we left Asunción in a bus with a plan to spend 4-5 days going back to Ciudad del Este (a big shopping town on the border if Argentina and Brazil, where you can find anything pirated and cheap) through some southern Paraguayan towns. Method of transport: bus.
Our first destination was Villarica, which is 120km from Asunción. We reached Villarica 6 hours after the scheduled departure time. One of the reasons being that the traffic in Paraguay is as ill-organised as anything else. Everyone stopping at random places (in the middle of the road) and not really caring that there are other vehicles on the roads as well. The same width streets with the same number of cars in Northern Europe would definitely allow several times more cars through.
The other reason for taking that much time is that the buses stand and wait in every stop for a long time and pick up absolutely every person who waves their hand at the bus at random places as well (people wait 30m away from the station until the bus comes to them, instead of using the time that the bus is standing in the stop to walk to the stop). So there is not even room to stand and you are very lucky to get a seat even if you buy the ticket hours before departure.
That all brings me to the fact that travelling is not all fun. The pictures in Facebook show mainly the good and fun part of travelling. But there are also a lot of 'bad days'. The days when you are sick and tired of everything: nothing works properly, you can't buy the food that you would like, the stomach is constantly upset because of the local variety of bacteria, in every country/town there are new problems to solve, new systems of doing everything, different prices and/or currency. Not every day are you ready to deal with these problems. Sometimes you just wish that life was simple and straightforward.
The percentage of our 'bad days' had already gotten much higher before Asunción and we hoped that resting would solve that. But after we had spent most of our time of 'exploring Southern Paraguay' stuck in overcrowded and extremely slow buses, we discovered that we are still fed up with everything.
Our travelling had lost its purpose. It was time to stop and think about what we really wanted from this trip. It was immediately clear that we are not really that interested in the cities. But travelling with buses, this is what you get: going from the centre of one big city to the centre of the next one or you can also go to the small towns but then you really don't know where you end up in because there is no English information about them.
After considering different things, we decided that what we needed to improve our experience is to be able to see the nature and be able to stop anywhere we wished to. Depending on the public transportation set so big limits to us that everything had lost its value.
So our solution was to buy a cheap motorbike. That would also eliminate the husstle of walking around with our heavy backpacks trying to find a hotel (we have camping stuff so we can sleep anywhere we please) and give us a better opportunity to cook our own food more often (we could have used the gas cooker in cities as well... but we did not).
So we made as much reaserch as we could and decided to buy the bike in Brazil. We decided to base our search in Tres Fronteras- the place where three countries and three cities meet: the shopping town Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, Puerto Iguazú in Argentina (where we stayed the last time with our local friends and also this time) and Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil (short name: Foz). We spent the first day getting ourselves a CPF, which is like a Tax File Number that you need for buying anything from a phone sim card to festival tickets and cars-houses. You were supposed to be able to do it in a post office but when we got there we were sent (we had our bags at that day and it was abou 36 degrees) from the post office to the Federal Police, back to Post office, to Tax Office (and almost back to the Federal Police) but we finally got it.
We found a few Brazilians through couchsurfing who helped us with some advice so we finally found a used bike shop through the Internet who seemed to be offering what we wanted. So not really knowing how long it was going to take (days? weeks?), we headed to Foz one morning. Getting to the shop took us four hours. We discovered that the moto shop was owned and run by a very talkative guy, who only spoke Brazilian Portuguese but nevertheless he managed to explain to us that it is 4x more expensive to buy a Brazilian bike than a Paraguayan one (our first experience in how our communication with the locals in Brazil will be like).
So we chose a Paraguayan bike (400 Australian dollars - we still calculate mostly in AUDs), borrowed two helmets and rode to Ciudad del Este to buy our own helmets (helmets are compulsory in Brazil and we needed them immediately if we wanted to ride away from the shop with our bike). We did hold our breaths entering Paraguay again with a bike that was not really on our name. But none of the border guards or police even stopped us to check anything so that was a success. We found our helmets and immediately headed back to the bike shop because firstly we did not have a bike lock yet (didn't want to leave our new friend on the street while we search for other necessary things) and secondly we still needed some work done on our bike - it had a frame on it for towing things, that we did not need and a broken indicator light.
We held our breaths even more when we were on the Argentinian-Brazilian border. Argentina is the only country at Tres Fronteras that actually has an efficient (read:existing) border control. The guy checking our documents did not care the least that the bike was Paraguayan and not on our name (we had the documents of the bike) so that was a success. Time from bike shop to home: just under an hour (compared to four hours in buses in the morning).
So now we are really looking forward to continuing our trip because we expect it to be much more like we wish to travel: being able to see some amazing nature and stop wherever we want plus not depending on the local transport. Even if we can not take the bike over the Brazilian-Bolivian border (which we think we can) in 1,5 months, it is still worth it budget-wise because we are saving on bus tickets, food and accommodation.
We will have another shopping trip to Ciudad del Este (things are considerably cheaper there) to buy necessary stuff for the bike and ourselves but we will do it by bus as we do not want to take our chances with the extremely corrupt Paraguayan police again (if they had stopped us with a bike in Paraguay, it would almost definitely have meant paying bribes). And on Tuesday we will head North to the Samsara music festival and to visit our Capoeira teacher near Ûberlandia.
