Blog

THE JOURNEY
For Easter I went to Ciudad del Este. After the bus ride and a few days with friends, it was time to visit the falls and the city. The falls of course are the mighty Iguazu falls, among the biggest in the world. The city was in Paraguay.

The famous Ciudad de Este of Paraguay. The man with the cart of boxes is carrying something like CD players, stereos, or computers to Brazil by foot. The people on the right are searching out clean paper and cardboard to sell so they can survive. Hundreds of thousands of dollars change hands here every day.

Now to get to Paraguay from Puerto Iguazu the easiest and cheapest way is by bus. This local bus goes through Foz Igua? part of Brazil, to arrive outside the bridge leading to Paraguay. Unfortunately, all Australians need a visa to enter Brazil and Paraguay. However, since the buses only stop for the Argentine border in the entire journey, there is no real problems in slipping through. It is seen by some as a “tourist area” where visas are optional and not mandatory.

There is another way to Paraguay too, but it is slower and more costly and less convenient. That is to directly cross over the river by boat to Paraguay. This misses out the Brazil part of the equation. In my case, since I had a Paraguayan visa, it would have been the better choice. But I was not thinking about this at the time.

Traffic lining up to cross the bridge from Paraguay to Brazil

It was my second crossing through Brazil now, and all had gone smoothly as I entered Paraguay and went about the business I needed to complete while there. On my return over the bridge, I hire a motorcycle taxi as usual. These daredevil style riders provide a rather unsafe ride as they cut through the gaps between the busy bridge traffic, but their full face helmets help in the process of entering the countries without being stopped. It was fortunate that I asked this rider to drop me off on the other side of the bridge.

THE RETURN
Normally I would have asked for a ride back to the bus station or something else, further in town, but today I knew there was a bus that I could catch to take me all the way back to Argentina from the other side of the bridge. So I asked to stop there, and when we arrived there I was very glad that I had. There seemed to be a huge congestion of bikes ahead.
Continue reading “Almost a Refugee”

Keeping track of friends is a hard thing to do at the best of times. Keeping in contact with them all is harder at times. The important thing however is to be sure that the contact details you have are current… actually, it is even more important to actually have their contact details.

That is why it was very difficult to acknowledge that I had lost everything on this fateful day. Every single contact that I had, every single friend of mine, every single new friend that I had made as I travelled around the globe… all lost.

There was no backup at the time. No other place that they were all stored. No paper copy nor some other way I could recover what was lost. It was gone, and in some cases, irretrievably.

What happened? My phone was stolen, and all of the information it contained disappeared with it. I had caught the local bus into town as part of my work activities. It was my first day back from Paraguay and I was not just tired, but exhausted.

Waiting for my phone to send an email, I collapsed into a deep sleep due to my exhaustion. With a start I awoke and discovered the bus was already stopped at my get-off point. I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus, not knowing that the phone had fallen from my hand while I slept.

It was over an hour later that I realised the loss. The bus had made several rounds by then, with more than one hundred people boarding and getting off during that time. When I finally found the bus and the driver, there was nothing to be found. It was lost.

A phone call to my number was answered by a man that gave no details to identify himself and who made a false promise to return it. After that there has never been an answer. Now the phone was not just lost, but it had been stolen.

There was nothing more I could do. My phone was gone, and all of my contact details with it. I had just recently purchased this phone while in Chile (see New Phone entry) and spent hours transferring all of my contacts to it from my old phone. The contacts in the old phone were kept for a while, but eventually erased (just before this incident) to prepare the phone for sale. So I was left with nothing.

The lesson from this experience is, of course, to have a backup. The irony was that it was that very night that I had planned to back everything up. I missed it by only a few hours. Doh!

BUTT OF THE JOKE
On the bus to the bus terminal in Corrientes, I drilled my friend Chris to make sure he had the tickets, and then laughed about how I would probably have left them on the shelf at home still. My face then suddenly turned pale as I remembered my passport. I had left it behind. On the shelf.

It was still at home, so I left Chris and quickly jumped off the bus and found the nearest taxi back home for my passport, glad that this time I had enough time to retrieve it. I did this another time when I was in New Zealand, over one hour from home, and had to call a friend at 5am in the morning to bring it down to me – I made the plane with only a few minutes to spare. It was not like that this time however.

SHODDY BROTHERS BUS COMPANY
Back at the bus station in time to meet up with Chris, we had a few minutes for our bus to arrive. But it didn’t arrive. Over an hour later, we finally climb aboard our bus and head off north. The problem was that my seat was double allocated, so I ended up finding a seat for the journey right near the front.
Continue reading “An Extended Bus Ride”

Well, I am now in Paraguay. Officially this time, after my last visit here that was made in crossing through Brazil and entering Paraguay as an “illegal”.

Now I am here with others from my team in Corrientes and we are working here in an orphanage.

I will be here until next week sometime, as I also need to make a number of purchases in this very cheap electronic haven.

So until I get back to where the internet is fast and the computers new…

Today I view the world through 37 year old eyes. It doesn’t look much different to yesterday actually, but there is one more year of memories, and one big year of lots of amazing adventures.

Since my last birthday, in Scotland, I have travelled through…
Continue reading “Happy Birthday To Me”