Paraguay

We are still in Foz do Iguacu today and had a couple of optional tours to take, in which I elected to do both. Our first excursion was to the super massive Itaicu Dam just outside of town and on the Brazil/Parguay border. The dam project was started in 1975 and the final generator wasn't in place until 2007. It is the largest dam in the world in power generation and second only to the Three Gorges Dam in China in overall capacity.
The Itaicu dam is so massive that it supposed 25% of Brazil's power needs and 90% of Paraguay's. Think about that for a second...that is massive!

I'll post a couple pics. I don't have a wide screen camera close to large enough to show the entire dam's width. Just know the top of it stretched well over a mile.

Our second excursion was a little shopping tour just across the border into Paraguay. Many, many Brazilians and Argentinians line up daily to cross the border by car, motorcycle and on foot to illegally buy up electronic goods, alcohol and cigarettes
duty-free in Paraguay. The border is mayhem. It felt a whole lot what I envision some madness I envision in some SE Asia city. I'm not sure that's a fair comparison based upon what some of my tripmates tell me.



My main purpose for this tour was just to mark Paraguay off my map. I admit it. There's really no other good reason to go there. The country is one of the poorest in the world. It has an ongoing Yellow Fever epidemic. The interior of void of much of anything. At one point, I saw a couple of individuals sprinting across the bridge and the border and heave a taped up box over the side onto the first spotting of land on the Brazilian side. Who knows what was in that box (drugs?). We were only there for about two hours, but
I had had my share in probably one.



It's off to the coast now as we go into the final week of the tour. It's a 24-hour bus riding cycle overnight and most of the next day from the border region to the coast, via Sao Paulo. The coastal region should have some spectacular pictures and beachlife.

Brazilian Food