Asuncion

I´m not a great fan of cities and Asuncion didn´t change that.

Once I had established myself in pleasant accommodation I went walkabout to orient myself. It seemed that, despite the guide book´s assurances, Pension de Silva was still in a poor part of town and there are homeless families camped under black plastic in the nearby Plaza Uruguaya. I did not feel totally comfortable walking around after dark.

In the daytime, though, there was a walking tour of the city that allowed me to photgraph the big, historical buildings and visit the museum in the city´s oldest building. I ended up in the Plaza de los Heroes, which features some statuary and the Panteon, where the nation´s heroes are honoured.

To my amazement, this building is the final resting place of Francisco Solano Lopez, the dictator who initiated the war of the Triple Alliance by declaring war simultaneously on Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Lopez´delusions cost Paraguay a huge percentage of its menfolk (one estimate is that after the war there were 10 women to every man), yet he is still held in high regard (locally) and his fat face appears on the 1,000 Gs note.

More agreeably, the Lido Bar is located just across the road. This is a landmark eatery, where I sampled the local dishes, sopa paraguaya and chipa guasu. These are both very tasty, but neither of them is a soup so the reason for the former name is a mystery. During the lunchtime rush you have to wait and grab a stool at the bar as it is vacated, the establishment is so popular. No school-age fast-food servers here. Having hips wider than the counter is no bar to employment as a waitress at the Lido.

Both Lonely Planet and my special adviser on Paraguay, Jenny, recommend Bolsi Bar. It has the same stools at a counter system as Lido Bar, but much fancier prices. However, I enjoyed my splurge, and if I had my notes with me I could spell the type of fish I ate. Surubi? Anyway, it was excellent.

My lodging was just round the corner from the Museo Etnografico (ethnography = "tribes and such"). There I was taken aback to be greeted by a locked metal grille. A sign invited me to ring the bell, an action that produced a smiling attendant who eagerly de-padlocked the grille and let me in. In the hour-and-a-half I was there I was the sole visitor, which explains why it is impractical to leave the front door open.

There is much good material in the museum, but the presentation is unusual. Exhibits are sorted by who collected them, rather than what they are or which tribe produced them. However, there was no restriction on photography, so I have many souvenir snaps. These are mostly taken using flash because the light was quite low.

The museum itself has many black and white photos from the 1950s featuring scenes from a ritual that involved many costumes and masks. Unfortunately the Spanish explanations were well beyond me. Other photos featured a very butch German archaeologist with various indigenous groups.

A friend of a friend in NZ has a Paraguayan wife from Paraguay´s small ethnic Korean community. An email was sent to the wife´s sister, Lizza Eum, to say I was in the country and a copy gave me Lizza´s phone number. I replied to the email and, several hours later in the evening, phoned the number. Unfortunately Lizza had not checked her email for a little while and so was very surprised to get a call from a NZer.

Luckily her English is excellent and she grasped the situation as though a call in English from a complete stranger was something that happens every week.

First of all she rounded up an English-speaking friend, Rodolfo, to be my chauffer and guide for an afternoon. Rodolfo´s English wasn´t as fluent, but with some help from my Spanish, we managed to communicate. With the aid of a phone call, Rodolfo overcame the incomplete directions in the guide book and drove me to the Museo Boggiani in San Lorenzo.

This is another ethnographical museum. The exhibits were of much better quality and they were beautifully presented. The feature was a large collection of feather artifacts. The colours have been preserved much more successfully than in the central museum. They were spectacular. And once again there was no restriction on photography.

Rodolfo didn´t appear to share my interest in natural history, but he good humouredly took me to a park near the airport as the light faded. A quick walk identified no birds, but the winged creatures darting across the lake were bats. I don´t think Rodolfo believed that there are small mammals with wings except in Dracula movies.

For my last evening in Asuncion Lizza organised a dinner. I spent a good part of the day riding buses, because Lonely Planet was out of date on the opening hours of Museo del Barro. It now only opens its doors at 3:30pm on Thursday to Saturday. I can see that it is well organised and presented and justifies its status as Asuncion´s most recommended museum. However, it proved once again that Bill and modern art exist in different realities. But I did enjoy the indigenous art section.

Before returning to the pension I remembered to buy a bottle of wine. A shower, a shave, some clean clothes and then call Lizza, as arranged. Unfortunately something had come up and the dinner was cancelled. A shame, but these things happen.

What to do with a bottle of wine? It´s too heavy to carry with me. Better drink it. So I had a couple of good slurps before going out to a local restaurant. I tried a new dish - horse. Those familiar with Round the Horne will recall risible refences to the "horse meat shop in the Balls Pond Road". Well, I can tell you that horse steak is good food and not terribly different from beef.

Back in my room I was assisting digestion with more sips of wine when a message was delivered. Javier, Lizza´s brother-in-law, was sorry that the dinner had been called off and could we meet for a drink. This rendezvous was successfully completed and we had a very pleasant chat in Asuncion´s Britannia Pub. Luckily this was all in English. Javier had studied in Pennsylvania for four years. I had imbibed so much wine that my Spanish would not have been reliable.

Javier told me about a tourist train and an information office, neither of which I had come across in the guide book. So I postponed my departure to check these out. The train runs twice monthly and the information office provided some literature, including a very useful map.

And then I donned my pack and set off for the delights of Ruta Uno.