The Diary of a Gold-Digger

I flew to Santa Cruz from Asunción. There is no land route (well, paved land route) from Paraguay to Bolivia, although they have a border in...

I took the bus to San Ignacio Guazú, a cute, tranquil town without a single other tourist. The bus ride was atypical in that the driver blar...

From Ciudad del Este, I took the bus to Encarnación in the south. For the first fifteen minutes of the trip, a pitchman tried to sell his wo...

At 3:00 p.m., the street vendors were already packing up their wares. I hadn’t had any lunch except the leftover vegetarian sushi rolls I’d ...

The bus to the falls was filled with tourists. Two German couples hopped on board. One girl was wearing short shorts and a bikini top. Her s...

The glamour of Asunción couldn’t hold me. I boarded the city bus for the bus terminal and tried to fit myself and my backpack through the tu...

I changed to the hostel where the Paraguay Peace Corps volunteers stay and met several volunteers there. Marcia worked in a small town where...

I’d arrived in Asunción on a Saturday and wasn’t able to change money. By Sunday night, I’d used the few dollars I’d changed at the border. ...

Asunción is hot and humid and dirty and on Sunday, everything, including places where one might buy food, is closed. This is the place where...

The next morning I was well enough to leave Salta. Jeff had left the day before for Bolivia. I was now on my own. I traipsed down to the bu...

Now that the farmers had left, there was more room at the hostel and we’d graduated to better quarters. Jeff went out in search of entertain...

The cowhide weighed three and a half kilos -- too heavy to carry in my backpack. We took it to the post office and I asked how much it would...

Primo told me that Doris wants to ship her winter clothes - her more than seven years' old winter clothes - up here for me to sell. Beca...

We’d had a boring morning trying to find food in Salta. The farmers had left so the scenery at the hostel was not so great. The Handbook men...

When we arrived in Salta, we went to a hostel where Jeff had stayed the year before. It was full, but Jeff persisted and the owner agreed to...