“Are we stopping anywhere?” I asked the driver when I boarded the bus to Asunción.

“Stopping?”

“Yes, like for… for lunch.”

I don’t care about lunch, but I very much care about clean bathrooms, cold drinks, and possibly a smoke break, plus I’m used to the Brazilian mandatory 45-minute lunch break, even if you leave at 11:55 a.m., because Brazilians self-destruct if they don’t have rice, beans, chicken, and more for lunch.

“Ah. Don’t worry, the chipa girls will come to us.”

“The chipa girls?”

Okay, welcome to Paraguay, I guess.

I wanted a culture shock, I got it—and it started a couple of hours earlier on the bus to Ciudad del Este.

Thanks to my Brazil-Paraguay border hack the day before, my passport was already stamped, so I only had to take one bus, the Foz do Iguaçu to Ciudad del Este. I didn’t have to get off at the bridge to exit Brazil and enter Paraguay at the other end, and I was all set. My Airbnb host loved the hack.

I still had to walk to the damn bus stop. It was a painful 15-minute hike uphill with my backpack.

And the bus had to arrive. Oh wait, it was already here, across the road! I ran to it.

The bus was already very full. I managed to put my backpack down in a corner and I stood by the door. The day before, at noon, it had taken 30 minutes to reach the bus terminal in Ciudad del Este. It was 9:30 a.m., so rush hour. I knew it was going to take much longer, but I wasn’t prepared for the 90-minute ride, with passengers boarding the bus every five minutes and carrying the most unlikely things—tons of flowers, for instance.

Still, my hack worked, I didn’t have to get off the bus, and I was at the bus terminal, officially in Paraguay, at 11 a.m.

“Go to the air-con VIP lounge,” the bus company employee offered, recognizing me from the day before.

I did (yay, clean bathrooms!), then I went to buy a coffee in the very much non-air-conditioned terminal, and back to the VIP lounge where we were boarding the bus and I learned about the chipa girls, whoever they were.

The NSA bus was one of these South America super fancy and super comfortable buses, with fully reclinable seats, USB plugs, footrests, and, sadly, very cold air con.

The bus left, and we all fell asleep, including the nun behind me. Paraguayans are smart, they had brought thick blankets. I only had my beach canga. It was chilly. Still, I slept for a while, then I tried my new Paraguay SIM—very cheap prepaid plan and very easy to use, looking at you CPF-obsessed Brazil. I watched the landscape go by. We were crossing the entire country to get to Asunción. It would take five hours… at least.

Then around 4 p.m., the bus suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere.

“Chipa!”

Suddenly, everybody was awake.

I looked out of the window. Three women came on board with giant baskets full of—you guessed it—chipas, the Paraguayan baked, chewy cheese-flavored snack. It’s a bit like pão de queijo in Brazil.

“Five chipas!”
“Ten here!”
“Two!”

The entire bus was smelling of cheese—not a bad way to wake up from a bus nap.

I sneaked out for a smoke with a few other passengers who needed a bathroom, a cigarette, and maybe a bit more than just chipas before arriving in Asunción.

“Falta poco,” assured an Italian traveller sitting behind me.

Yeah, “falto mucho,” I checked Google Maps. Still another two hours.

We were supposed to arrive at 4:28 p.m. (??) at least, that’s what the ticket said.

We arrived at 5:30 p.m., not bad, but a long ride. It was the 11:40 a.m. bus…

I booked an Uber to my Airbnb. The Italian found me waiting outside—his phone wasn’t working, so I told him to take my Uber and find a deal with the driver to get to his Airbnb after.

“How much was your Uber?”

“16,000, I think,” I said.

“No way. It’s gotta be 160,000.”

I shrugged. “Nope, 16,000. CAD 3.25.”

I guess Paraguay is cheap.

The driver was a lovely guy who made sure it was the right building, and that I was able to get in.

I put my backpack down, quickly washed my face, and headed out to find water and food.

Except it’s not that easy when you don’t know the country, the city, the currency, or anything else.

I found the supermarket, a bakery, coffee, hauled everything back to my apartment, and cursed my life choices for a minute.

“I’m finally eating!” the Italian texted at midnight.

“I’m cooking too,” I texted back.

“I went to a restaurant… what are you cooking?”

“Whatever I found. Broccoli. Pasta. Frying two eggs.”

“Broccoli, eggs, and pasta?”

Damn, I had forgotten I was talking to an Italian, albeit in Portuguese, because he was living in Lisbon. He was not impressed with my late-night pasta improv.

Maybe I should have bought a few chipas, after all.