Tríplice Fronteira

Triple Frontier.

I crossed the border to Brazil to see Iguaçu Falls from that side. There are some spectacular vantage points, as pictured. The rainbow was the cereja (cherry) on the bolo (cake). Overall I preferred spending the day on the Argentinian side as there are more forest trails and ways to get lost in between waterfall views, even if the Brazilian side trumps it with the jaw-dropping vistas.

I’d taken a day trip from Argentina and decided to visit Paraguay whilst in Brazil. Therefore today was a muddle of currencies and passport stamps, to be expected when you visit another country and pop to a third whilst there. If you cross the Brazil-Argentina border with a public bus and don’t holler at the driver that you need to officially pass through migration (as opposed to being Argentinian or Brazilian and the laxer rules concerning movement between countries) you will find yourself accidentally in a country illegally. I’m sure quite a few have been left with tricky explanations when passing back through. The bus driver won’t wait even though the passport process is very fast, leaving you on the roadside for the next bus to chug by.

In Foz de Iguaçu city in Brazil it’s a walk across the Ponte da Amizade (Friendship Bridge) to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. As I strolled to the border, I overheard a British woman talking about studying Portuguese on Duolingo, and thought she was the type of chica I should chat to. Charlie and her Belgian pal Alec were good companions to bumble around in Paraguay for a few hours. Ciudad del Este is a strange place that exists principally as a comercial trading centre, as there are no taxes on electronic products and therefore Brazilian traders and tourists visit to buy them more cheaply in bulk. We didn’t believe the officials at the border that the city shuts down mid-afternoon around the time we were arriving, but obviously they were correct. From the clamour of the markets and vendors trying to flog us trainer socks every twenty metres, the city then transformed into a ghost town with piles of trash bagged up (see extra), which was quite eerie to wander. Late afternoon I was conscious I needed to get back to Brazil and then to Argentina, so we walked back over the bridge in the drowsy heat. It was a random fun excursion and worth unnecessarily filling up pages in the passport.

Someone asked me my nationality today and when I said British they asked me if I had coronavirus. If we weren’t working ourselves up into a major state about it, perhaps this strange association wouldn’t be someone’s natural conclusion.