Ponte Porã, Brazil - Parque Nacional Cerro Corá (Paraguay)

This morning we sneaked back out of Brazil and into Paraguay with our lunch supplies. Parque Nacional Cerro Corá is about an hour away from Pedro Juan Caballero on the way to Concepción, so we found the bus station and got ourselves on a Concepción-bound bus. Crazy as it sounds coming from such limited Spanish-speakers, it was a huge relief to speak Spanish and express ourselves so freely.

We told the driver that we wanted to go to the Parque and he said he'd stop. So an hour later when Michael noticed the entrance whizzing by, he panicked slightly and yelled out, "Yo! Yo! El Parque!" Of course he meant "yo" in the American way, meaning "hey" but I'm sure it didn't sound that way to the driver. And I teased him about it the whole rest of the day, spontaneously yelling out, "I! I! The Park!" (Amusingly enough, if he actually had yelled out "I" it would have sounded to the driver like "ay" which might have come across like "hey.")

But really it was a good thing he yelled, because otherwise we might have ended up back in Concepción. The driver slowed down immediately but then speeded back up and took us to a different entrance. This worked out nicely, because it turned out to be the entrance point discussed in the guidebook, and we were eager to meet the "curious monkey" who hangs out at the ranger station.

We walked up a long red-dust trail under the pounding sun until we reached the ranger station. We gratefully stepped into the cool dimness and chatted with the guy there who helped us sign in. He turned on the lights so that we could see the displays of historic artifacts and modern conservation information. (Did you  know it takes five hundred years for a disposable diaper to decompose??)

We asked the ranger about the monkey.

"Él murió," he said. ("He died.")

I gasped and a few seconds later Michael gasped too. I don't know why this news hit us so hard; we didn't even know the monkey. But we were pretty sad about it. And then the ranger went on to tell us that the monkey had climbed a transformer and been electrocuted. Could have spared us the grisly details at least. Poor monkey.

But the ranger did find us a spot to have lunch, the cool, shady front porch of one of the many little houses grouped around the ranger station. There was a small table and a couple of chairs there and we pulled out our ingredients and began assembling our meal. Sometimes I think we just come to these parks so we can picnic, because it's always the main focus of the day.

Everything was great, especially the salami. I really fiend for salami sometimes and the supply in South America has been woefully inadequate. Don't even get me started on the spongy pink stuff they were trying to pass off as salami in Colombia. I mean, we loved Colombia, but that stuff wasn't even baloney. Brazil, however, is on point with the cured, salted meats.

The hot-dog flavored Cheetos that Michael was so drawn to were just icky. They tasted exactly like hot dogs. Even Michael didn't like them. (And he had the nerve to be surprised that HOT DOG FLAVORED CHEETOS were icky.) But it was very cute how they were made to look just like little hot dogs and buns.

After finishing our flan we looked at the map in the ranger station, talked to the guy again and set off down the trail. It was extremely hot and the sun was directly overhead as we walked down the unshaded red-dirt road. We did not meet a single other person all day, but the road was studded with giant anthills to which we gave a wide berth, and the very pronounced footprints of various animals, including humans and human-made tires. We were happy to note from the tracks that some sneaker-wearing person who had gone down the road before us had made it back out.

Cerro Corá's huge, knobby rock formations were all way off in the distance unfortunately, but much closer was an assortment of giant busts of figures from Paraguayan history. Eventually we reached the river, where massive swarms of butterflies rose up in alarm at our approach. Michael stripped to his boxers and sat in the water up to his neck. I waded in up to my ankles and tried to stay still enough so that the tiny fish would come back and swim around my toes.

We didn't want to leave the park, but we couldn't delay too much because there are a limited number of busses passing the park toward Pedro Juan Caballero and we didn't want to be stranded. Luckily our footprints were still clear in the red dust - they kept us from making at least one wrong turn on the long walk back to the ranger station.

We were gasping for water by then, having finished our bottle while walking in the sun. A woman - we don't know who she was other than an angel of mercy - traded our empty bottle for a full one from a refrigerator. The new bottle had already been opened and the water taken from a sink or other not unsuspect source, but we didn't care.

We were eaten alive waiting for the bus at the side of the road. There was no one else around and the air was thick with bugs. There were hundreds of them clouding around us and all we could do was swear and slap ineffectually at them. It was unbelievable. It was just too much. I mean, it was really ridiculous how many bugs there were. It was like bug Grand Central Station. Really, I can't say enough times that there was a notably large amount of bugs.

Michael chose to pace up and down briskly, trying to be a more difficult target. I stood still and attacked with merciless precision every bug that landed on me, and because there were so many bugs, there was a lot of slapping. We both must have really looked like freaks to anyone driving by.

Thank goodness for the bus. It almost blew right by us as we stood there waving, and then we had to run for it, but after that the bug nightmare was over. Well, phase One was over. Phase Two, the Weeks of Itching, is yet to come.

The bus company was doing a raffle promotion and our ticket purchase entitled us to two chances to win one of several prizes (an iron, a blender, a computer, or a TV). For several obvious reasons, these tickets were not of use to us, so Michael gave them to the ladies in the seats behind us. They were thrilled. A little too thrilled. Ok, ladies, that's enough back there.

Back in Brazil we ate more picnic food for dinner (mmm, salami) and spent nine of our last ten reis on three beers.