Asuncion, capital of Paraguay. A city, and a country, that few travellers I have met have been to.
That was part of the reason I wanted to go there. After spending most of my time on the well-worn 'gringo trail' of South America, I fancied going somewhere that wasn't so geared up for the visit of a pasty-faced Englishman.
And yes, my face has gone back to its usual pale colour - and destined to stay that way now that I've found myself in the South American winter.
I booked myself on a cama bus from Salta to Clorinda with a company called Tigre Iguazu, and it was destined to be the last comfy cama of my trip. The cheery driver/conductor looked at my ticket as I boarded and winked at me. 'Aahh, Cloriiiinda'.
To help you picture the driver, he looked and acted in a similar way to Brendan from Coach Trip. If you've never seen Coach Trip, not being from the UK or with better things to do with your time, I'm sure you can look it up on YouTube - but I'd suggest you don't.
Here's Brendan/my driver:
I wasn't sure what he meant by 'Aaah, Cloriiiinda', but I was later to find out. Clorinda, on the Argentina/Paraguay border is not a place that many people go to.
Of the 40 or so people to board the bus that sunny afternoon in Salta, only two of us made it to Clorinda.
The others weren't bumped off, like in an Agatha Christie novel (had Agatha Christie written whodunnits set on the Argentinian bus network. Which she didn't). They just left the bus at various points along the way, to places with more obvious appeal than Clorinda, and Asuncion.
The selection of films we were shown en route included one that particularly stood out in my memory. It was called The Mechanic, starring possibly the most typecast actor in Hollywood: Jason Statham.
The plot, if there was one, seemed to involve Jase looking moody in every shot, Jase wearing tight T-shirts to show off his worked-on body, Jase mumbling the odd menacing line, and Jase kicking the living crap out of every body and every thing that got in his way.
Some of the violence was pretty extreme, and I'm not sure what the elderly couple sitting next to me made of it. They were positioned directly under the TV, in full view of every blood-splattered scene.
But that's South American bus films for you. One day it can be a happy-ever-after Disney schmalzathon, the next it can be Jason Statham grinning as he sticks a blunted knife into someone's oesophagus. Keeps us on our toes I suppose.
At about hour 13 of our 18 hour journey - which came at approximately 3am - we pulled into a deserted bus station which I later found out to be a place called Corrientes. I woke from my doze and saw that everyone was getting off.
The man who sold me the ticket in Salta had smiled when I had asked him if the bus was direct to Clorinda. 'Si, señor', he'd said - as if I'd asked him a stupid question.
Well, his answer was the stupid one, as the bus wasn't direct to Clorinda.
We piled out of bus #1, bleary-eyed and disorientated, got our bags from the luggage storage area at the back of the bus and stood there waiting for instruction.
Suddenly lots of people came out of the bus station and started boarding our bus. I asked Brendan what was going on. He asked where I was going. 'Aaah, Cloriiiinda', he replied - pointing to bus #2 on the far side of the forecourt.
The old couple who had sat next to me, probably still in a Statham-inspired shock, looked bewildered. Eventually they put their bags back on bus #1 after I helped get to the bottom of what was happening. Bus #1 was going to the Iguazu Falls, their destination, and bus #2 was going to Clorinda.
With that minor drama negotiated, we went our seperate ways. On my new bus was driver Brendan, one passenger from bus #1 and lots of tired-looking men in their 30s and 40s silently drinking mate.
If you are unaware of what mate is, this picture will help:
Yes, mate is Argentina's favourite drink, and - it seems - Paraguay's and Uruguay's too. Everywhere I have been during the last month I have seen men and women, boys and girls, even dogs* cradling thermos flasks of hot water and their little mate pots.
You put the herbs into the pot, pour in some water, give it a stir and drink. It is a way of life out here, and forms the basis of many social meetings.
So where was I?
After leaving Corrientes, we trundled on slowly northwards. At a place called Formosa we stopped and most of the passengers got off.
I think at this point there were only about four of us left, but my memory is hazy. I didn't really trust the look of some of the guys on the bus so had metaphorically stuck matches between my eyelids to make sure I kept awake, and in sight of my stuff.
We stopped again an hour or so later and a couple more people got off. Shortly after that, with the sun up and the barren landscape forming a picture of nothingness outside my window, we pulled into Clorinda.
It wasn't even a bus station. The driver seemed to pick a random spot on a random street to stop. Me and a big guy who looked either Argentinian or Paraguayan (perceptive to the last, Harry) were the final two who had come all the way from Salta.
Outside the bus, I asked Brendan (still smiling) where la frontera was. Over his shoulder, a squat man with a weathered face leaned in and intimated that he was a taxi driver. Well, he probably said it too, but I couldn't understand him. He was just pointing to a red thing that once resembled a car.
The big guy and I climbed into taxi man's poor excuse for a vehicle - something that made a mid-'80s Fiat Panda look like a Porsche - and gingerly pulled away from the curb.
I always tell myself never to use unlicensed taxis, never to travel with another passenger in a taxi, and be particularly vigilant when in places with a high-risk factor.
Like border towns.
But at that point, sleep-deprived and wondering why I had chosen to follow this particular path, I had little choice.
With blackened windows that wouldn't wind down (as the handles were missing), a juddering engine, and two blokes in the front who seemed to keep gesticulating at each other in a not-particularly-friendly way, I was willing the border to come into view.
And it did. We paid the squat man what was a relatively large amount of money and got out.
At the border crossing were the usual array of men with five o'clock shadow trying to fleece you of your money, plus various trucks and cars piled high with bags and sacks. Some of which might not contain drugs.
It felt a bit sketchy, and there was not a single other traveller/backpacker in sight. I changed some of my Argentinian pesos with one of the money fleecers, him probably ripping me off, me oblivious to it.
I got my exit and entry stamps in my passport and got on a banged-out old bus, the like of which I hadn't seen since Bolivia.
And 15 minutes later, after all the women selling maize snacks and chiclets (chewing gum) had traipsed up and down the bus selling their wares, we left Clorinda.
I have no pictures from that morning, for obvious reasons. As if they didn't have enough reasons to mug me.
The journey to Asuncion took about an hour and a half. We passed small villages where the houses were made of mud and corrugated iron, as well as several chemical/mineral plants.
When we got to the outskirts of Asuncion, and mud huts gave way to megastores, I tried to find our location on the map I have in my Footprint guide. Unfortunately the Footprint map only covers downtown Asuncion, and the city is a sprawling mass.
More and more people were getting off the bus, until there were only two of us left. Deja vu.
I thought my Spanish was making reasonable sense as I kept asking where we were in relation to the map, and how I would get to downtown. The driver just looked at me blankly and spouted something in Spanish at a million miles an hour.
It's a familiar story for me in South America. I can say a bit of basic Spanish, and can understand about the same. But when someone talks at you quickly, and the sentence(s) contain lots of unfamiliar words, you are stuck. Up a creek, without a paddle.
Luckily the other person left on the bus saved me.
He was a kid of 15 or 16 with a laptop bag under his arm. I guessed a student. His English was non-existent, but he seemed to have a bit more patience with my Spanish than the driver, and my finger-jabbing at my map (at the location of my hostel) seemed to register with him.
He motioned for me to get off the bus with him, which I did. We were in a market area packed with stalls and people and he soon led us down a couple of side streets before we ended up on a crossroads.
A bus came down the hill, he spoke to the driver, and we got on. As I tried to squeeze myself and my backpack past the staring passengers I held out some money to my companion (the exchange rate of which was still baffling me).
He paid the driver, squeezed on with me, and then insisted that he didn't want any of my money. It felt a bit pathetic, a 34 year-old accepting a free lunch off a 16 year-old, but he wouldn't have any of it.
We eventually reached downtown and got off the bus. I have no idea where his real destination was, but he insisted on walking with me all the way to the end of the street where my hostel was before saying goodbye.
What a great bloke.
It wasn't difficult to choose my hostel, because it is the only one in Asuncion. There are a few other places that use the term 'hostel', but a quick internet search revealed that they are more like hotels.
So I was relieved that a) the Black Cat Hostel existed and b) that it had a bed for me.
I needn't have worried though. They had lots of beds.
I soon discovered what I had presumed, that not many travellers come through Paraguay. This hostel was the only backpacker place in the capital of the country and it was almost empty.
How empty? I stayed five nights at the Black Cat in an 8-bed dorm. I didn't have to share with a single other person my whole stay.
There was a 14-bed dorm, for about 3 pounds less a night, and that's where any visitors seemed to end up. I was happy to spend the extra 15 quid (over the week) and have a dorm all to myself.
It was a great hostel run by friendly staff. It housed the World's Biggest Television, and sported a neat little patio area out the back:
On my arrival day, a Tuesday, I took a quick walk through the downtown area and bought some essentials: pants and socks.
Paraguay is currently celebrating its bicentenary and the red-white-and-blue colours of the flag are everywhere. I first noticed them as we were entering Asuncion, but then when I got to downtown the effect was fantastic.
Every other building had flags drapped over balconies, round columns, along rooftops:
Buying my pants and socks in the department store was an experience. As soon as I got to the men's floor, I was accosted by two or three women looking to help. Nothing new there then.
But they were insisting I took a ticket from them. I tried to explain that I was just looking, and surely didn't need a ticket to look at clothes in a shop.
They eventually let me be and I chose some clothes. I then went back to them and they took my clothes and gave me a ticket, instructing me to go to a small booth in the corner and pay for my items.
I did as told, and the coughing woman behind the perspex glass took the ticket, and my money, and gave me a slip of paper. She pointed to another booth further along the corridor. I went there, gave another woman my slip of paper and she produced my clothes.
I'd like to see them try that in Primark on a Saturday afternoon.
Clothes bought, and I had a small mission to complete. There was another reason I had come to the backpacker outpost of Asuncion: for a football match.
Asuncion has several football teams, and one of them - Cerro Porteño - had defied the odds and managed to reach the Copa Libertadores semi final. The Copa Libertadores is the South American equivalent of the Champions League, and is big news in these parts.
Cerro had been drawn against Santos from Brazil in the semi, and had lost the first leg in Sao Paolo 1-0 the week before. The day after my arrival was the second leg and I was determined to get a ticket.
I followed my map the 15 blocks south and found the ground. The match was still over 24 hours away, but already the merchandisers had set up strings of flags and shirts to sell to the excited public:
As I got closer I soon encountered the touts. The first one I spoke to wanted 70,000 Guaranis for a 30,000 Guarani ticket. This meant a ticket that should have been four pounds fifty would cost me almost eleven pounds.
For a Copa Libertadores semi final this seemed like a bargain to me, so I feigned a haggle but gave in on the first non. I had a ticket for one of the year's biggest games, and it had cost me about the same as three or four pints back home.
With ticket in hand I headed back to the hostel where I met a rare beast - a lone female traveller in Paraguay.
Her name was Hanna, a Swede, and we decided to go and get something to eat. We found a place nearby selling the usual stuff: lomitos, hamberguesas, etc.
After a quick feed - Hanna politely eating her burger with a knife and fork, me scoffing my lomito like a pig - we headed to a place called Gales Bar where we had a few drinks before heading home.
On the Wednesday I did a bit of pottering around town as I waited for the evening's match. I visited the oldest part of the city: a cluster of small colonial-era buildings that now housed art galleries, cafes and offices.
At 6pm it was time to get to the match. I took a walk up to the stadium and as I got close I thought it was a bit strange that few fans were in the streets. This was a huge game for the locals, kick-off was less than 3 hours away - so where was everyone?
I feared I'd got the kick-off time wrong, but then saw a few fans scattered about in outdoor bars near the ground. I joined them and had a quick drink.
With about an hour to go until the start, the owner of our bar put the TV on and I suddenly saw why the streets were so empty. On the TV an excited commentator was babbling into his microphone as his cameraman panned around the ground of Cerro Porteño.
The stadium was absolutely packed with people. People who had obviously turned up hours before to get their spot on the terraces, whereas I was obviously using my English mentality of turning up with a few minutes to spare. More fool me.
I had a mild panic that the police might even stop letting people in, as it was so full, so I downed my drink and hurried to the ground. When I got there I had to pass three or four police cordons, then walk all the way around the outside of the stadium until I found the norte entrance.
Luckily my ticket passed when put through the electronic barriers. I had worried about it being a fake, but I was in.
The huge terrace behind the goal was completely stuffed, as were the walls towering over the back of the stand, as were the roofs to the toilets, the food kiosks, everywhere.
I would therefore be spending the next two hours standing at the back of the terrace, craning my neck to get a view of the pitch. But fair enough - I'm a tourist and the game meant far more to the guys below me.
The atmosphere was fantastic and you could feel the tension in the air as kick-off approached. This match was arguably the biggest in Cerro's 99 year history.
The groundsman, as you can see from the picture below, was clearly consuming a lot of LSD. I loved the crop circle effect he had done on the pitch; I hear it looked great on TV too.
Almost every person I saw that night had some sort of Cerro Porteño shirt on. Now I'm going to get grief from my Everton-supporting mates for this, but I had to fit in:
The first and last time I will wear a red football shirt, promise.
With five minutes to go, the teams ran out onto the pitch and I was about to witness something special.
Please, if you only watch one football-related video this year, make it this one:
That is the best welcome for a team I have ever seen from a football crowd. Absolutely brilliant. At that point I was so glad I'd come to Asuncion.
As I mentioned before, Santos were 1-0 ahead from the first leg so Cerro had their work cut out. And then, within two minutes of kick-off, their workload was doubled.
The Brazilians had a free kick on the left-hand side which was expertly delivered into the goalmouth. Without a defender in sight, one of their strikers stole ahead of the keeper and nodded the ball home. Damn.
The Santos players tore over towards their fans in the far corner of the ground, and all around me the Cerro fans just stared vacantly into space. Such a massive week-long build up to the game, such an amazing welcome for the players, and such an anti-climactic start.
But there was still time for the home team to turn things around. The players had battled through lots of matches to reach this point, and it wasn't time to throw in the towel. There were 88 minutes left after all.
Santos had clearly not read the script though, and were passing the ball around as if they knew they were going to make the final. On 28 minutes the unthinkable happened: a Santos player chipped the ball forward into the box and it was nodded past his own keeper by a hapless Cerro defender.
The crop circled ground didn't open up and swallow him, but I bet he wanted it to.
3-0 to Santos on aggregate. One hour to go.
Two minutes after that catastrophe, and with people now sitting at my feet at the back of the crowd and refusing to watch, Cerro got a lifeline.
Attacking our end, they managed to pull a goal back. The striker scooped up the ball from the back of the net, sprinted back to the centre spot and urged play to restart. Game on.
Cerro then had the better of the play for the next fifteen minutes and, as half-time approached, it looked like an equaliser was coming.
But then Neymar - a 45m Euro target for the likes of Chelsea and Real Madrid - finished off a simple move for Santos with a cool finish. It was bang on half-time and must have felt like a punch in the guts to the amazing Cerro fans.
I enjoyed watching Neymar - an incredibly skilful player with an incredibly shit haircut:
The Cerro fans saved their worst venom for him, obviously not enamoured by his playboy looks and propensity to fall on the ground at the slightest touch.
At one point in the second half he came over to our side of the pitch to take a corner. He was soon getting showered with drinks chucked from the Cerro fans, and having to duck out the way of firework sticks and coins.
Eventually, with no let-up in the abuse and missiles, another player came over to take the corner.
So after Neymar's late goal, half-time was a sombre affair. I spent most of it trying to get some change for my 1,000,000,000 (or something) Guarani note in order to buy a drink. The Guarani must be one of the most ridiculous currencies in the world: loved by Paraguayan banks and geeky mathematicians; hated by everyone else.
The other 'highlight' of half-time was watching the most violent football-related scenes I've so far witnessed in South America.
I remember my first game, in Colombia, where the Nacional and America de Cali fans spent most of the match hurling lighters and coins at each other, but this was on a different scale.
It was bizarre. As soon as the half-time whistle went, and no doubt fuelled by Neymar's goal, the Cerro fans on both sides of the Santos section almost en masse started chucking anything and everything at their Brazilian visitors.
I was far away, but it looked like coins and lighters were soon followed by frisbeed seats and other paraphenalia. And the Santos fans weren't just standing there and taking it either. They were soon launching stuff back the other way.
At one point the Santos fans fired some sort of rocket into the Cerro fans. I saw the flare shoot over the partition, and the Cerro fans fled - resulting in a big expanse of empty seats where the flare landed. Two or three seconds after landing, the flare exploded - and you could have probably heard it in downtown Asuncion.
Not the best pic but you can see both sets of fans running for cover under the stands as the missiles flew:
And the police response? The usual South American police response: do absolutely nothing.
With that 15 minutes of drama over, it was back to the drama on the pitch and Cerro Porteño had 45 minutes to reverse a 4-1 deficit and reach the Copa Libertadores final.
In the 60th minute they pulled one back. The fans around me had renewed belief, and veins were bulging from necks as they roared their team on.
Twenty minutes later they got an equaliser on the night. 3-3, but still 4-3 to Santos on aggregate.
The last 10 minutes was fraught. Santos kept breaking away with the ball - sometimes having four men to Cerro's two - but couldn't score. And at the other end Cerro twice came close to levelling the tie but couldn't quite find their finishing.
Towards the end of the game, a Cerro fan in the stand to my right threw something at the Santos bench and hit one of the training staff on the head. It was probably a coin as the press photographers and TV crew were soon surrounding him in the dugout, shoving each other out the way to get a pic of his bloodied face.
And so, after almost two hours of full-throttle football, fights, fireworks and facial injuries, Cerro were out and the jubilant Santos contigent were through to the final - where they would face Uruguay's Peñarol.
I left the ground, passing some dejected fans and a huge shirt paying homage to them (the 12th Man):
Back at the hostel I met some new arrivals - a Canadian girl and an English couple - and we shared some drinks and some stories.
In an ideal world I would have left Asuncion the following day. I'd seen what the city had to offer, which wasn't a huge deal, and was looking forward to continuining my travels through unchartered Paraguay and Uruguay.
But reading through my book, there didn't seem to be much happening in the rest of Paraguay (particularly as a solo traveller in a country with no hostel scene) and the same could be said for northern Uruguay.
So I decided to tackle one final monster of a coach journey and go all the way from Asuncion in western Paraguay to Montevideo in Southern Uruguay.
The only problem was that the coach only left on Wednesdays and Saturdays. It was now Thursday, so I found myself with two days to kill before I could get the bus south.
More of which in Asuncion, part 2...
*that's obviously a lie, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone, somewhere shares his mate with his dog.
That was part of the reason I wanted to go there. After spending most of my time on the well-worn 'gringo trail' of South America, I fancied going somewhere that wasn't so geared up for the visit of a pasty-faced Englishman.
And yes, my face has gone back to its usual pale colour - and destined to stay that way now that I've found myself in the South American winter.
I booked myself on a cama bus from Salta to Clorinda with a company called Tigre Iguazu, and it was destined to be the last comfy cama of my trip. The cheery driver/conductor looked at my ticket as I boarded and winked at me. 'Aahh, Cloriiiinda'.
To help you picture the driver, he looked and acted in a similar way to Brendan from Coach Trip. If you've never seen Coach Trip, not being from the UK or with better things to do with your time, I'm sure you can look it up on YouTube - but I'd suggest you don't.
Here's Brendan/my driver:
I wasn't sure what he meant by 'Aaah, Cloriiiinda', but I was later to find out. Clorinda, on the Argentina/Paraguay border is not a place that many people go to.
Of the 40 or so people to board the bus that sunny afternoon in Salta, only two of us made it to Clorinda.
The others weren't bumped off, like in an Agatha Christie novel (had Agatha Christie written whodunnits set on the Argentinian bus network. Which she didn't). They just left the bus at various points along the way, to places with more obvious appeal than Clorinda, and Asuncion.
The selection of films we were shown en route included one that particularly stood out in my memory. It was called The Mechanic, starring possibly the most typecast actor in Hollywood: Jason Statham.
The plot, if there was one, seemed to involve Jase looking moody in every shot, Jase wearing tight T-shirts to show off his worked-on body, Jase mumbling the odd menacing line, and Jase kicking the living crap out of every body and every thing that got in his way.
Some of the violence was pretty extreme, and I'm not sure what the elderly couple sitting next to me made of it. They were positioned directly under the TV, in full view of every blood-splattered scene.
But that's South American bus films for you. One day it can be a happy-ever-after Disney schmalzathon, the next it can be Jason Statham grinning as he sticks a blunted knife into someone's oesophagus. Keeps us on our toes I suppose.
At about hour 13 of our 18 hour journey - which came at approximately 3am - we pulled into a deserted bus station which I later found out to be a place called Corrientes. I woke from my doze and saw that everyone was getting off.
The man who sold me the ticket in Salta had smiled when I had asked him if the bus was direct to Clorinda. 'Si, señor', he'd said - as if I'd asked him a stupid question.
Well, his answer was the stupid one, as the bus wasn't direct to Clorinda.
We piled out of bus #1, bleary-eyed and disorientated, got our bags from the luggage storage area at the back of the bus and stood there waiting for instruction.
Suddenly lots of people came out of the bus station and started boarding our bus. I asked Brendan what was going on. He asked where I was going. 'Aaah, Cloriiiinda', he replied - pointing to bus #2 on the far side of the forecourt.
The old couple who had sat next to me, probably still in a Statham-inspired shock, looked bewildered. Eventually they put their bags back on bus #1 after I helped get to the bottom of what was happening. Bus #1 was going to the Iguazu Falls, their destination, and bus #2 was going to Clorinda.
With that minor drama negotiated, we went our seperate ways. On my new bus was driver Brendan, one passenger from bus #1 and lots of tired-looking men in their 30s and 40s silently drinking mate.
If you are unaware of what mate is, this picture will help:
Yes, mate is Argentina's favourite drink, and - it seems - Paraguay's and Uruguay's too. Everywhere I have been during the last month I have seen men and women, boys and girls, even dogs* cradling thermos flasks of hot water and their little mate pots.
You put the herbs into the pot, pour in some water, give it a stir and drink. It is a way of life out here, and forms the basis of many social meetings.
So where was I?
After leaving Corrientes, we trundled on slowly northwards. At a place called Formosa we stopped and most of the passengers got off.
I think at this point there were only about four of us left, but my memory is hazy. I didn't really trust the look of some of the guys on the bus so had metaphorically stuck matches between my eyelids to make sure I kept awake, and in sight of my stuff.
We stopped again an hour or so later and a couple more people got off. Shortly after that, with the sun up and the barren landscape forming a picture of nothingness outside my window, we pulled into Clorinda.
It wasn't even a bus station. The driver seemed to pick a random spot on a random street to stop. Me and a big guy who looked either Argentinian or Paraguayan (perceptive to the last, Harry) were the final two who had come all the way from Salta.
Outside the bus, I asked Brendan (still smiling) where la frontera was. Over his shoulder, a squat man with a weathered face leaned in and intimated that he was a taxi driver. Well, he probably said it too, but I couldn't understand him. He was just pointing to a red thing that once resembled a car.
The big guy and I climbed into taxi man's poor excuse for a vehicle - something that made a mid-'80s Fiat Panda look like a Porsche - and gingerly pulled away from the curb.
I always tell myself never to use unlicensed taxis, never to travel with another passenger in a taxi, and be particularly vigilant when in places with a high-risk factor.
Like border towns.
But at that point, sleep-deprived and wondering why I had chosen to follow this particular path, I had little choice.
With blackened windows that wouldn't wind down (as the handles were missing), a juddering engine, and two blokes in the front who seemed to keep gesticulating at each other in a not-particularly-friendly way, I was willing the border to come into view.
And it did. We paid the squat man what was a relatively large amount of money and got out.
At the border crossing were the usual array of men with five o'clock shadow trying to fleece you of your money, plus various trucks and cars piled high with bags and sacks. Some of which might not contain drugs.
It felt a bit sketchy, and there was not a single other traveller/backpacker in sight. I changed some of my Argentinian pesos with one of the money fleecers, him probably ripping me off, me oblivious to it.
I got my exit and entry stamps in my passport and got on a banged-out old bus, the like of which I hadn't seen since Bolivia.
And 15 minutes later, after all the women selling maize snacks and chiclets (chewing gum) had traipsed up and down the bus selling their wares, we left Clorinda.
I have no pictures from that morning, for obvious reasons. As if they didn't have enough reasons to mug me.
The journey to Asuncion took about an hour and a half. We passed small villages where the houses were made of mud and corrugated iron, as well as several chemical/mineral plants.
When we got to the outskirts of Asuncion, and mud huts gave way to megastores, I tried to find our location on the map I have in my Footprint guide. Unfortunately the Footprint map only covers downtown Asuncion, and the city is a sprawling mass.
More and more people were getting off the bus, until there were only two of us left. Deja vu.
I thought my Spanish was making reasonable sense as I kept asking where we were in relation to the map, and how I would get to downtown. The driver just looked at me blankly and spouted something in Spanish at a million miles an hour.
It's a familiar story for me in South America. I can say a bit of basic Spanish, and can understand about the same. But when someone talks at you quickly, and the sentence(s) contain lots of unfamiliar words, you are stuck. Up a creek, without a paddle.
Luckily the other person left on the bus saved me.
He was a kid of 15 or 16 with a laptop bag under his arm. I guessed a student. His English was non-existent, but he seemed to have a bit more patience with my Spanish than the driver, and my finger-jabbing at my map (at the location of my hostel) seemed to register with him.
He motioned for me to get off the bus with him, which I did. We were in a market area packed with stalls and people and he soon led us down a couple of side streets before we ended up on a crossroads.
A bus came down the hill, he spoke to the driver, and we got on. As I tried to squeeze myself and my backpack past the staring passengers I held out some money to my companion (the exchange rate of which was still baffling me).
He paid the driver, squeezed on with me, and then insisted that he didn't want any of my money. It felt a bit pathetic, a 34 year-old accepting a free lunch off a 16 year-old, but he wouldn't have any of it.
We eventually reached downtown and got off the bus. I have no idea where his real destination was, but he insisted on walking with me all the way to the end of the street where my hostel was before saying goodbye.
What a great bloke.
It wasn't difficult to choose my hostel, because it is the only one in Asuncion. There are a few other places that use the term 'hostel', but a quick internet search revealed that they are more like hotels.
So I was relieved that a) the Black Cat Hostel existed and b) that it had a bed for me.
I needn't have worried though. They had lots of beds.
I soon discovered what I had presumed, that not many travellers come through Paraguay. This hostel was the only backpacker place in the capital of the country and it was almost empty.
How empty? I stayed five nights at the Black Cat in an 8-bed dorm. I didn't have to share with a single other person my whole stay.
There was a 14-bed dorm, for about 3 pounds less a night, and that's where any visitors seemed to end up. I was happy to spend the extra 15 quid (over the week) and have a dorm all to myself.
It was a great hostel run by friendly staff. It housed the World's Biggest Television, and sported a neat little patio area out the back:
On my arrival day, a Tuesday, I took a quick walk through the downtown area and bought some essentials: pants and socks.
Paraguay is currently celebrating its bicentenary and the red-white-and-blue colours of the flag are everywhere. I first noticed them as we were entering Asuncion, but then when I got to downtown the effect was fantastic.
Every other building had flags drapped over balconies, round columns, along rooftops:
Buying my pants and socks in the department store was an experience. As soon as I got to the men's floor, I was accosted by two or three women looking to help. Nothing new there then.
But they were insisting I took a ticket from them. I tried to explain that I was just looking, and surely didn't need a ticket to look at clothes in a shop.
They eventually let me be and I chose some clothes. I then went back to them and they took my clothes and gave me a ticket, instructing me to go to a small booth in the corner and pay for my items.
I did as told, and the coughing woman behind the perspex glass took the ticket, and my money, and gave me a slip of paper. She pointed to another booth further along the corridor. I went there, gave another woman my slip of paper and she produced my clothes.
I'd like to see them try that in Primark on a Saturday afternoon.
Clothes bought, and I had a small mission to complete. There was another reason I had come to the backpacker outpost of Asuncion: for a football match.
Asuncion has several football teams, and one of them - Cerro Porteño - had defied the odds and managed to reach the Copa Libertadores semi final. The Copa Libertadores is the South American equivalent of the Champions League, and is big news in these parts.
Cerro had been drawn against Santos from Brazil in the semi, and had lost the first leg in Sao Paolo 1-0 the week before. The day after my arrival was the second leg and I was determined to get a ticket.
I followed my map the 15 blocks south and found the ground. The match was still over 24 hours away, but already the merchandisers had set up strings of flags and shirts to sell to the excited public:
As I got closer I soon encountered the touts. The first one I spoke to wanted 70,000 Guaranis for a 30,000 Guarani ticket. This meant a ticket that should have been four pounds fifty would cost me almost eleven pounds.
For a Copa Libertadores semi final this seemed like a bargain to me, so I feigned a haggle but gave in on the first non. I had a ticket for one of the year's biggest games, and it had cost me about the same as three or four pints back home.
With ticket in hand I headed back to the hostel where I met a rare beast - a lone female traveller in Paraguay.
Her name was Hanna, a Swede, and we decided to go and get something to eat. We found a place nearby selling the usual stuff: lomitos, hamberguesas, etc.
After a quick feed - Hanna politely eating her burger with a knife and fork, me scoffing my lomito like a pig - we headed to a place called Gales Bar where we had a few drinks before heading home.
On the Wednesday I did a bit of pottering around town as I waited for the evening's match. I visited the oldest part of the city: a cluster of small colonial-era buildings that now housed art galleries, cafes and offices.
At 6pm it was time to get to the match. I took a walk up to the stadium and as I got close I thought it was a bit strange that few fans were in the streets. This was a huge game for the locals, kick-off was less than 3 hours away - so where was everyone?
I feared I'd got the kick-off time wrong, but then saw a few fans scattered about in outdoor bars near the ground. I joined them and had a quick drink.
With about an hour to go until the start, the owner of our bar put the TV on and I suddenly saw why the streets were so empty. On the TV an excited commentator was babbling into his microphone as his cameraman panned around the ground of Cerro Porteño.
The stadium was absolutely packed with people. People who had obviously turned up hours before to get their spot on the terraces, whereas I was obviously using my English mentality of turning up with a few minutes to spare. More fool me.
I had a mild panic that the police might even stop letting people in, as it was so full, so I downed my drink and hurried to the ground. When I got there I had to pass three or four police cordons, then walk all the way around the outside of the stadium until I found the norte entrance.
Luckily my ticket passed when put through the electronic barriers. I had worried about it being a fake, but I was in.
The huge terrace behind the goal was completely stuffed, as were the walls towering over the back of the stand, as were the roofs to the toilets, the food kiosks, everywhere.
I would therefore be spending the next two hours standing at the back of the terrace, craning my neck to get a view of the pitch. But fair enough - I'm a tourist and the game meant far more to the guys below me.
The atmosphere was fantastic and you could feel the tension in the air as kick-off approached. This match was arguably the biggest in Cerro's 99 year history.
The groundsman, as you can see from the picture below, was clearly consuming a lot of LSD. I loved the crop circle effect he had done on the pitch; I hear it looked great on TV too.
Almost every person I saw that night had some sort of Cerro Porteño shirt on. Now I'm going to get grief from my Everton-supporting mates for this, but I had to fit in:
The first and last time I will wear a red football shirt, promise.
With five minutes to go, the teams ran out onto the pitch and I was about to witness something special.
Please, if you only watch one football-related video this year, make it this one:
That is the best welcome for a team I have ever seen from a football crowd. Absolutely brilliant. At that point I was so glad I'd come to Asuncion.
As I mentioned before, Santos were 1-0 ahead from the first leg so Cerro had their work cut out. And then, within two minutes of kick-off, their workload was doubled.
The Brazilians had a free kick on the left-hand side which was expertly delivered into the goalmouth. Without a defender in sight, one of their strikers stole ahead of the keeper and nodded the ball home. Damn.
The Santos players tore over towards their fans in the far corner of the ground, and all around me the Cerro fans just stared vacantly into space. Such a massive week-long build up to the game, such an amazing welcome for the players, and such an anti-climactic start.
But there was still time for the home team to turn things around. The players had battled through lots of matches to reach this point, and it wasn't time to throw in the towel. There were 88 minutes left after all.
Santos had clearly not read the script though, and were passing the ball around as if they knew they were going to make the final. On 28 minutes the unthinkable happened: a Santos player chipped the ball forward into the box and it was nodded past his own keeper by a hapless Cerro defender.
The crop circled ground didn't open up and swallow him, but I bet he wanted it to.
3-0 to Santos on aggregate. One hour to go.
Two minutes after that catastrophe, and with people now sitting at my feet at the back of the crowd and refusing to watch, Cerro got a lifeline.
Attacking our end, they managed to pull a goal back. The striker scooped up the ball from the back of the net, sprinted back to the centre spot and urged play to restart. Game on.
Cerro then had the better of the play for the next fifteen minutes and, as half-time approached, it looked like an equaliser was coming.
But then Neymar - a 45m Euro target for the likes of Chelsea and Real Madrid - finished off a simple move for Santos with a cool finish. It was bang on half-time and must have felt like a punch in the guts to the amazing Cerro fans.
I enjoyed watching Neymar - an incredibly skilful player with an incredibly shit haircut:
The Cerro fans saved their worst venom for him, obviously not enamoured by his playboy looks and propensity to fall on the ground at the slightest touch.
At one point in the second half he came over to our side of the pitch to take a corner. He was soon getting showered with drinks chucked from the Cerro fans, and having to duck out the way of firework sticks and coins.
Eventually, with no let-up in the abuse and missiles, another player came over to take the corner.
So after Neymar's late goal, half-time was a sombre affair. I spent most of it trying to get some change for my 1,000,000,000 (or something) Guarani note in order to buy a drink. The Guarani must be one of the most ridiculous currencies in the world: loved by Paraguayan banks and geeky mathematicians; hated by everyone else.
The other 'highlight' of half-time was watching the most violent football-related scenes I've so far witnessed in South America.
I remember my first game, in Colombia, where the Nacional and America de Cali fans spent most of the match hurling lighters and coins at each other, but this was on a different scale.
It was bizarre. As soon as the half-time whistle went, and no doubt fuelled by Neymar's goal, the Cerro fans on both sides of the Santos section almost en masse started chucking anything and everything at their Brazilian visitors.
I was far away, but it looked like coins and lighters were soon followed by frisbeed seats and other paraphenalia. And the Santos fans weren't just standing there and taking it either. They were soon launching stuff back the other way.
At one point the Santos fans fired some sort of rocket into the Cerro fans. I saw the flare shoot over the partition, and the Cerro fans fled - resulting in a big expanse of empty seats where the flare landed. Two or three seconds after landing, the flare exploded - and you could have probably heard it in downtown Asuncion.
Not the best pic but you can see both sets of fans running for cover under the stands as the missiles flew:
And the police response? The usual South American police response: do absolutely nothing.
With that 15 minutes of drama over, it was back to the drama on the pitch and Cerro Porteño had 45 minutes to reverse a 4-1 deficit and reach the Copa Libertadores final.
In the 60th minute they pulled one back. The fans around me had renewed belief, and veins were bulging from necks as they roared their team on.
Twenty minutes later they got an equaliser on the night. 3-3, but still 4-3 to Santos on aggregate.
The last 10 minutes was fraught. Santos kept breaking away with the ball - sometimes having four men to Cerro's two - but couldn't score. And at the other end Cerro twice came close to levelling the tie but couldn't quite find their finishing.
Towards the end of the game, a Cerro fan in the stand to my right threw something at the Santos bench and hit one of the training staff on the head. It was probably a coin as the press photographers and TV crew were soon surrounding him in the dugout, shoving each other out the way to get a pic of his bloodied face.
And so, after almost two hours of full-throttle football, fights, fireworks and facial injuries, Cerro were out and the jubilant Santos contigent were through to the final - where they would face Uruguay's Peñarol.
I left the ground, passing some dejected fans and a huge shirt paying homage to them (the 12th Man):
Back at the hostel I met some new arrivals - a Canadian girl and an English couple - and we shared some drinks and some stories.
In an ideal world I would have left Asuncion the following day. I'd seen what the city had to offer, which wasn't a huge deal, and was looking forward to continuining my travels through unchartered Paraguay and Uruguay.
But reading through my book, there didn't seem to be much happening in the rest of Paraguay (particularly as a solo traveller in a country with no hostel scene) and the same could be said for northern Uruguay.
So I decided to tackle one final monster of a coach journey and go all the way from Asuncion in western Paraguay to Montevideo in Southern Uruguay.
The only problem was that the coach only left on Wednesdays and Saturdays. It was now Thursday, so I found myself with two days to kill before I could get the bus south.
More of which in Asuncion, part 2...
*that's obviously a lie, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone, somewhere shares his mate with his dog.