Crossing the Paraná

As I described in the previous post, my wife and I were recently in Paraguay, and we also crossed the border into Brazil and then from Brazil into Argentina. This is a well-trod trail for tourists who start in Paraguay and want to see Iguaçu/Iguazú/Yguasu Falls, but the information available online and in guidebooks can be misleading, so I thought I’d write about our experiences to help future travellers. And also just for fun.

The border between Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) and Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil) is fairly safe crime-wise, but you have to be careful with the bureaucratic side of things. Most of South America isn’t in the European Union (though some of it *is) and you can’t just waltz through borders there. At the Paraguay-Brazil border you have to make sure to get your passport stamped at both* border control points, Paraguayan and Brazilian, either side of the river. It would be quite easy to cross the border and miss the border controls; at the Ciudad del Este-Foz do Iguaçu border there can be large crowds of locals for whom the crossing requires few if any checks, and if you’re not careful you could end up swept away in just such a crowd. The penalties for re-entering Paraguay without exit stamps didn’t seem too steep — a fine of €100 or so, I think — but it isn’t a good idea to get on a border agency’s bad side.

To get to Foz from Ciudad del Este, you have to cross the Friendship Bridge (Ponte da Amizade or Puente de la Amistad) over the Paraná River. The Paraná is South America’s second-longest river, after the Amazon, and at 4880 kilometres in length it’s sizeable by any standard — over a thousand kilometres longer than the Volga or the Mississippi. Hydroelectric projects along the Paraná provide close to 100% of Paraguay’s electricity demands and a significant chunk of Brazil’s as well. It is a beast of a river. The Paraná flows into the Atlantic at the River Plate/Río de la Plata, and before the dams were built it was navigable by large ships over much of its length. At this point in its journey to the Ocean it takes about ten minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour, to cross on foot. My photos here make it look smaller than it is.

A view from the Friendship Bridge looking south down the Paraná, taken while crossing from Paraguay into Brazil. Paraguay is on the right and Brazil on the left.

My wife and I crossed twice, once going into Brazil and again on the return trip, and there were no queues at either checkpoint on either journey. We were able to walk up to the windows and get our documents checked and stamped within a couple of minutes. The office on the Brazilian side was closed — I can’t remember why — but there was a small kiosk nearby, and the lady there checked and stamped everything. I don’t think she was able to understand the layout of the Irish passport very well, and she definitely entered my info incorrectly into the system, but that wasn’t a problem in the end. Perhaps it will be when we go back to Brazil.

(This happened several times on our trip. Once, in Paraguay, I bought a ticket for a long-distance bus, and the sales assistant needed to take down my passport details. My name appeared on the ticket as ‘Éireannach West’. Éireannach is the Irish word for ‘Irish person’.)

Another view of the Paraná River as seen from the Friendship Bridge, this time looking north on the crossing from Brazil into Paraguay. Paraguay is on the left and Brazil on the right. It was fairly early in the morning when we crossed the second time.

The crossing itself is best done on foot. You can hire a taxi to take you across the bridge but traffic can be heavy and some drivers are reportedly reluctant to stop at the border when they can otherwise just saunter through. Reportedly. I have no idea if that is actually the case. You can also take a bus, but this is said to have the same problem. If you don’t have a huge amount of luggage with you, you should walk. The views are lovely, and why wouldn’t you want to take a close look at South America’s second-longest river? There are observation points along the Friendship Bridge so you won’t be getting in anyone’s way if you stop to take pictures. Foot traffic is heavy, too, but the pavements are wide enough for people to walk two abreast, and the traffic is all going in one direction. There are corrugated metal awnings over the pavements on both sides to protect you from the sun. (These seem to have been added fairly recently, going by older photographs of the bridge.)

We did the entire Paraguay > Brazil crossing on foot, even walking through Ciudad del Este with our luggage to get to the crossing — which is rather poorly signposted, and you may have to ask for directions. To get there from the centre of town you pass a long row of low market stalls and people corraling chickens, shucking corn, and chopping manioc tubers with large knives by the roadside. Before we got to Ciudad del Este a Paraguayan acquaintance described it as rather like Hong Kong — chaotic and mercantile. I don’t know if he’d been to Hong Kong before. I spent a month there in 2008. Ciudad del Este is not like Hong Kong.

I should mention that the Brazilian side of the pedestrian crossing ends at a narrow turnstile gate and you won’t get through with any particularly large items. This is an anti-smuggling measure; Ciudad del Este is a smuggling hub. If you try to walk across the border anywhere else, the muscular Brazilian border guards will gently guide you to where you need to go. They were very nice but they also had shotguns.

The Brazilian side is another world. Ciudad del Este is a half-wild border town in a middle-income country with a fairly low human development ranking. Foz do Iguaçu is a touristy town in Paraná, one of Brazil’s richest states. You can really feel the difference. Paraguay is a lovely and very friendly country, and it is genuinely safe to visit, but — outside certain parts of the south — it doesn’t feel rich. Foz feels quite prosperous indeed, at least beyond the border crossing.

By chance we found an excellent taxi driver in Foz. He took us all the way to the small hotel at which we were staying in Puerto Iguazú, Argentina, for $35 (US) and handled all the (less-complex) Brazil-Argentine border stuff for us. We stayed in Argentina for a bit, visited the Argentine side of Iguazú Falls, ate some disappointing gluten-free Mexican food, and went to Brazil to see the Brazilian side of the falls. A storm hit when we were coming back from Argentina —probably the northern edge of the storms that hit Rio Grande do Sul, a little to the south, causing massive flooding — and the national park was closed the entire time we were there. Still, we had some lovely meals in Foz, so it wasn’t all bad.

The weather in Foz do Iguaçu when we were there. It was like this on-and-off the entire time.

The return trip to Paraguay was much the same. We took a taxi to the border and walked across from there. We’d prepared yellow fever vaccine certificates in advance of the trip — a legal requirement for travelling into Paraguay from Brazil — but the Paraguayan border agents didn’t ask to see those. Still, better safe than sorry. And now we’re protected for life against yellow fever, I suppose.

Once in Paraguay, we started to see signs in Guarani again. There’s actually quite a lot of cool Guarani stuff on the walls around the crossing, but we didn’t want to stop and take too many pictures lest we get in the way. I only took one.

The first language at the border is Guarani: “Tapeg̃uahẽ porãite Paraguaipe” ‘Welcome to Paraguay’. This is the form for groups of people; the singular form is “tereg̃uahẽ”, using the desiderative/hortative/subjunctive prefix “ta-”. (This prefix is sometimes analysed as having the underlying form “te-”, but I don’t think that’s correct; the “e” in “tere-” is a vestigial form from proto-Tupi-Guarani. The “ta-” in “tape-” is the underlying form. Anyway…)

I have to say that this ended up being one of the most interesting parts of the trip for me. We don’t have a lot of borders like this in Europe, and it’s pretty easy to zoom across a national border here without even noticing them. (Not the EU’s border with non-EU countries, of course. The EU’s external borders are literally murderous. But that’s a slightly different matter.) There’s a bit of romance to an old-fashioned border crossing, and the fact that in this case the border is on one of the world’s biggest rivers made it all the more interesting.

It’s entirely possible that you’ll have a different experience if you make the same crossing. You can never cross the same river twice. I make no guarantees that you’ll be able to sail through the checkpoints without queues or that the Paraguayan guards won’t ask to see your yellow fever vaccine certificate. But these were our experiences.

A. J. West — Lisbon, 2024.