Yacyreta Dam is a massive World Bank-funded hydroelectric dam (the World Bank loves those) on the Rio Paraná. It is attended by all the usual controversy that these projects attract; my uncle figures the overspend on it was the tipping point in Argentina's financial meltdown in 2001. Not surprisingly, most of the people displaced by the dam were on the Paraguayan side, even though the two countries are supposed to have equal interests in it.
They have a good PR department though, and you can take tours. First we had to get there - it's an hour or so outside Posadas by car, but the better part of a day by public transport. Posadas, however, is full of nice air conditioned vans for hire and my uncle arranged for one through the tourist information office. Unfortunately, the price got higher and our ride later throughout the morning until finally we told them to forget it. We were resigned to spending the day wandering around the city, but the guy on the desk at the hotel said he knew somebody, who only wanted half as much money as the first place.
The trip out was great - we were finally far enough north for the landscape to really feel like South America and not rural North America with the occasional palm tree. That was when I saw the
rhea running around the field.
Our driver was (like all Argentines) very friendly, and being so far from Buenos Aires he spoke more standard Spanish than the Argentine dialect, so I was able to understand quite a lot of what he said. His grandfather came out from England to build the railways, and we all chatted about life, the universe and everything. It was really interesting. The residents of Misiones province are very proud of its multi-cultural makeup and he told us about how there's no less than 35 different religions practised there. At the time we were in neighbouring Corrientes province, dismissed as "todos Catholicos". Well, I thought it was amusing.
A sort of company town has sprung up at the dam site, and it's actually quite a nice little place. They even remembered that a community needs shops, schools and recreation facilities. We got there just before the afternoon tour started, long enough to run across the street to the shop for an ice cream break (we took a lot of those). Then there was some problem at the visitors centre - apparently you're supposed to book ahead or something. Our driver sorted it out (he knew somebody) but they had to take all our passport details because the tour goes onto the Paraguayan side.
That's the point at which I got excited - going to Paraguay, yay!
I didn't get much out of the tour itself - there's an introductory
propaganda video with English subtitles, and then we all got loaded into vans and taken to different parts of the site to get out and take photos. Not only was the tour in Spanish, the guide spoke quite incomprehensible Argentine dialect. The fluent Spanish speaker in our group struggled to understand much. The views were quite spectacular and the scale of the project impressive and scary.
Sadly, the tour only went halfway across the river and not all the way to the Paraguayan side. Technically the place where the bus turned around to go back was in Paraguay, but we didn't get to get out. I was sadly disappointed :-( So technically, I've kind of been to Paraguay.
When we got back to Posadas our guide didn't have to be home right away so he threw in a drive along the river front, which has been developed as a park and is very lovely indeed. The Paraguayan city of Encarnacion is across the river.
Paraguay's reputation of the last bastion of corrupt banana republic-ness is not helped by the fact that every Paraguayan-registered car I saw, in both Posadas and later in Puerto Iguazu, was a massive European-built behemoth with blacked-out windows.
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