We hadn't previously planned to visit the Republica del Paraguay, but found ourselves near its border and thought, well, it would be rude not to. So, having typed our previous installment home from Posadas, Argentina, we caught a combination of buses, traipsed over through 2 lots of Customs who were completely indifferent as to what may have Been in our bags, and made it into one of Paraguay's 3 'big' towns - Encarnacion.

Our first impression was the obvious drop in wealth. Paraguay is a pretty cheap country (cheap for us, so it MUST be cheap!), and as Kate put it succintly, it has that "poor country smell" (too difficult to describe!). Unlike in Argentina, everyone had something for sale, whether we were on the bus, in the street or sitting down for dinner. On the dinner front ,if you order, say, pork chop, you get exactly that, no more, no less. No garnish, veggies or sauce. We didn't realise it was the norm when we first saw a family tuck into a very lone whole roast chicken...

Encarnacion was a bit of a hit or miss town - lots of rows of stalls selling cheap/imitation stereos,clothes and perfumes, and not much else. With little entertainment we tried 2 of the local tipples: Maté - an infusion type tea drunk through a metal straw - the Paraguayans live on it, but to us it tasted somewhere between dried leaves, mud & fag-ash; Caña - local firewater, which was actually pretty good.

Paraguay is definitely the land of the bus - unlike London, if you miss one, another 20 will pass in the next 2 minutes. We took one of the misleadingly named 'Directo' ones out to see some more Jesuit mission ruins in Trinidad,a tiny village out of town. Great ruins, but for the bus journey it was a case of stopping absolutely anywhere for anyone, anytime. At least flagging one down for the ride back to town was easy...

From there we moved on to the 2nd big town, Ascuncion, the capital. Foolishly taking an 'Expresso', we arrived a mere 7 hours later, after a great rural journey past lots of oxen, horse & carts, and small huts. As capital cities go its hardly a biggie, with a really small centre but sprawling suburbs of broken down housing. However it scores highly on the heat and humidity front. Its definitely the most surreal capital we've been to yet, with some amazing grand classical/colonial Spanish architecture living literally next-door to complete poverty. The Royal Palace with its immaculate lawns and helipad backs onto a shantytown - seeing is believing!

We decided against enjoying the delights of the 3rd big city, Cuidad del Este. Quoting from the 'Lonely Planet', this town: "..has a reputation as one of South America's most corrupt cities, frequented by smugglers, money launderers, and according to intelligence reports from many countries, Islamic terrorists...". We were worried we wouldn't fit in.

So instead we opted to take a 22hr bus direct to Sao Paolo. It wasn't a luxury one, the air-con was feeble, the Brazilians talked non-stop and a religious woman kept trying to convert us all, but it only cost $35 each and we made it to Brazil in time to catch the end of Carnaval. What is it about bus drivers that they only speed up if it is dark, wet or a single lane anyway?

So, to conclude, Paraguay - friendly, cheap, buses-a-plenty, and we didn't seem to attract as much attention as foreigners as we'd expected, which can only be good news. In fact, we were both mistaken for Brazilians at the bus terminal, which was great until we opened our mouths.

Next installment - the nightmare of getting accurate information about anything in Brazil, especially Carnaval. And of course the latest score from the second leg of our tie with 'Brazilian Bag Snatchers'.