Ciudad del Este, Paraguay - Itaipu Dam, Wonder of the Modern World

The Hotel Munich's friendly owner called our room at 8:45 to remind me that breakfast ended at 9:00. Luckily I wasn't sleeping, just getting ready at a slower pace than Michael, who was already in the dining room eating. The buffet, even at that late hour, was impressive - juice, coffee, tea, hot and cold cereal, cheese and cold cuts, bread, rolls, cakes, and pastries.

Michael was sitting at a little table squished by the door when I came in. "Why are you sitting here?" I asked him. "Didn't you want to sit by the window?"

"You missed it," he said. "Ten minutes ago, this entire room was packed with Japanese tourists. This was the only table available."

Oh. I filled a plate and we discussed our plan for the day: taking the free tour of Itaipu Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project and one of the seven wonders of the modern world. We found out we wouldn't be able to make any of the pre-lunch tours. The post lunch tours were hours away, but we decided to immediately head over to the site anyway because one never knows what's going to happen. And we especially never know.

We were in (mostly) efficient mode, so after breakfast we checked out of our room and left our bags at the desk. The plan was to see the dam, come back to the hotel and collect our bags, and then head across the border to Argentina. We didn't feel there was any reason to spend another night in Ciudad del Este.

After a small amount of trouble, we boarded the correct bus to Itaipu Dam. The ride seemed to be taking forever, and when we finally spoke up, it turned out we'd passed the dam a while back. The driver took us further down the road and let us off, telling us to walk straight ahead. A minute later, as we were doing so, he caught up with us and had us get back on the bus. He took us further ahead and pointed to a bus stop across the street. There we could get a bus back to the dam. Great.

We waited and waited. A woman with a couple of kids approached us and started chattering away in Portugese, needing some kind of directions. Why she thought we, obvious tourists in a Spanish-speaking country, would speak Portugese, I really don't know. Maybe she thought I was Brazilian. Luckily a large man with a sign around his neck was able to help her out. I kept trying to get a peek at the sign. It was small, with a lot of small-print text, and I couldn't even get a hint. So now that's one more mystery that's going to bother me for the rest of my life.

The bus that finally arrived was not for us, so we gave up and found ourselves a taxi. (That's another way in which our money ideas have changed over the course of the trip, this philosophy of "spend a couple extra dollars and suddenly the problem is gone.") The taxi took us right in through the gates of the visitors' center. Theoretically it was closed for lunch (as we expected) but the guard told us we could go on in and wait for the next tour, which would be at 2:00.

Nothing was closed to us, and we wandered around talking to some of the staff, getting promotional brochures, watching TV, swatting at mosquitos, having lunch and peering through the windows of the closed gift shop. We played a few games of hangman - I spelled out "sciatica" and Michael spelled out "hypochondriac" - and examined a couple of three-foot high red-dirt anthills up close. We met some Spanish teenagers who spoke better English than we spoke Spanish and chatted with them for a while.

Finally tour time rolled around. Part one was a video. When we presented our passports to sign up, we were asked if we needed an English version of the video so we said sure, and they opened up a seperate viewing room upstairs for just Michael, me, and one Japanese backpacker to watch the video in English.

The video was pretty interesting, even if you're not into hydroelectrica. It sketched the history of dam and piled on a bunch of facts and figures, like: Paraguay is the world's largest exporter of hydroelectric power. Itaipu Dam is on the 100,000 guarani bill. Itaipu's generators supply nearly 80% of Paraguay's electricty and 20% of Brazil's. The environmental concerns and budget issues were skimmed over if addressed at all.

After that we all went outside and loaded into a deluxe tour bus. The place had been deserted when Michael and I arrived, but now we tourists managed to fill an entire large bus. Impressive. Our first stop was the big spillway. Which, except for the faintest trickle of moisture down the middle, was dry. No water was spilling out at all.

One one hand it was kind of disappointing. One doesn't visit the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world to not see millions of gallons of water spilling out. But on the other hand - how many tourists get to see the concrete chutes just sitting there idle? And all the gradations of color seeped into the concrete from different levels of water pressure? I chose to be consoled by that.

The next stop was a photo gallery where I was transfixed by the extreme number of daddy-long-legs clustered around the displays while our guide in his yellow polo shirt chattered on about the history of the dam in Spanish. Then we filed downstairs to see the inner workings of the 50-story dam through huge plate-glass windows. (If you are waiting for me to correctly identify the things we saw or explain how a dam works - sorry! This isn't that kind of blog. But I can report that we haven't had fried chicken for a while. Oh, and did I mention I think I have sciatica?)

It was a pretty good free tour, really. Definitely worthwhile if you're in the area. At the end we were taken back to the visitors' center. The gift shop was now open and a bunch of us crowded in. After the other tourists had fondled everything in the place and crowded back out, and Michael and I had the undivided attention of the sales girls, we asked them about the terreré set we'd been admiring.

It was an extremely fancy set, tooled leather specially made to cover the plastic thermos and wooden cup, and snaps that attach the cupholder to the thermos. While every Paraguayan seems to have at least a plain old thermos and cup rattling around with them, we've only seen the fancy ones in use at the bank and such. Presumably those who have the nicer ones keep them at homes and offices where they won't be ruined.

We asked a few questions about the care and use of the set, but the young girls seemed confused by our presence and didn't provide very detailed answers in between glancing at each other and tittering. We did find out that the tall, thin one I liked is for terreré, while the shorter, fatter ones are for mate. So to really be authentic, I would need two separate thermoses, one for hot water and one for cold. (Hey, isn't a thermos supposed to - oh, never mind.) I bought the cold terreré set. I've been looking hard, and this was the nicest one I've seen and worth the slight gift-shop markup. And hopefully it will be worth the extra weight and bulk in my pack for the next couple of weeks.

Getting back to Ciudad del Este went very smoothly. We ended up on the same bus we'd gotten on the way out. It was very amusing to watch our bus driver risk all our lives racing with another bus to get to the bus stops (and fare-paying passengers) first. We got off at the correct place and collected our packs. And now we're going to have to say goodbye to Paraguay and cross another border.

Paraguay has been amazing for real.