From Argentina we travelled to Paraguay. We had to cross the river Rio Paraguay. The country is thus named after the Paraguay River, whose name is explained in several ways: in most cases a combination of terms from the indigenous Guaraní language is proposed that connects “river” and “sea”, thus ” the river that flows to the sea”.
Well, the Spanish sailed all the way up the river to here and founded Asunción, the capital. We could see the high rise buildings from the Argentinian side some time in advance. The land we travelled through is almost flat, and a low palm species generally grows on the wet grassy plains.
The border crossing was again really easy, it just took a lot of time because we crossed the border on a Saturday. Of course it is a bit busier then. But no fuss, the van wasn’t even looked at seriously.
After crossing the Paraguay river we arrived almost immediately in Asunción. The atmosphere here is quite more “South American” again compared to Argentina, Chile or even Uruguay. The traffic is more chaotic, no (or much less) regulations about the lights on a vehicle, more food stalls along the road, advertising, more noise, etc. But at the same time there are high-rise buildings and a lot of shopping centres. The streets are in a very bad shape though.
Outside the city we noticed that the vegetation rapidly changes to more tropical plants and trees. Also there are some more hills again. We noticed more colonial buildings. It is wintertime right now, and a very cold winter according to locals. But we can imagine it is normally quite hot around here: most houses are build between and under a thick cover of foliage, which gives a bit of a eerie atmosphere right now because the sun almost doesn’t shine. From here we will go north to reach the Pantanal and we will probably skip the east part of Paraguay.
Fuel and Currency
There are much more fuel stations here, compared to Argentina. Usually they have two types of gasoline and two types of diesel. Besides that they have Alcohol. I guess this is the Ethanol, made from, for example, sugar cane waste. LPG is available too. I did not know it beforehand, but noticed some fuel stations do indeed sell LPG. The currency here takes again some getting used to. a 100.000 Guarani’s is about 12 euro’s. The country is cheaper than Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.
Car Parts
Japanese cars are much more popular here again. That is fortunate because it means a much better availability of car parts too. I quickly noticed that they have the Mitsubishi L200 (older generations) the Montero/Pajero, Isuzu’s, Hyundai’s and even the old Mazda vans which share the same platform. And we needed some parts… I will write about it soon.
I learn a bit more topography ?. Wat is the weather like, how do you keep the inside of the van as dry as possible? I’m curious to your vehicle maintenance blog. Greetings Ilona
Always happy to educate! :). In Paraguay it’s also winter and the weather varies greatly, almost like a Dutch summer 😉 We have had days with gray clouds, rain and 12C and right now it’s sunny and 25-30C during the day, but colder at night. We keep the van as dry as possible with ventilation and drying the windows. It’s not always easy, during winter in Europe we had mold growing in the van despite our best efforts. Here it’s easier as winter is shorter and not so cold in most places (and we avoid those that are very cold). We also have a heating although it’s not working great anymore and it’s not possible to fix it completely because there are no parts available. Kilian has just finished a biking article and will start on the maintenance article soon. Greetings!