After a night near the border of Brazil and Paraguay, we joined the swarming line of vehicles making their way past the control lanes. We nearly swapped paint with a few of them as everyone wanted to be one car closer to the front of the mile-long line. The guards finally gave up and were just letting vehicles drive through without stopping, but we had to stop to deal with our vehicle's temporary import permit. We couldn't afford to flaunt the rules so found a place to pull over at the Immigrations building and cleared out properly. Then we were misdirected twice in trying to get to Customs to deal with the TIP. Finally, we were through the official clearances and went looking for a place to park in/near the border city of Ciudad del Este .
We'd been warned about scammers here but spotted a tire shop and pulled over to see about getting that tire rebalanced after our flat in Bolivia. We asked the English-speaking lady who helped us where to exchange money and walked through the shopping area to check out the places she recommended. Heard a motorcycle-car accident happen just behind us and my anxiety level shot up when crossing the streets here. One place wouldn't take our $20 bills; they wanted $100's only. Another place rejected about half of the bills for teeny, tiny marks or nicks. We got as many Argentine pesos as we could for our cash and went to find a parking spot.
Jason wanted to go see the world's largest hydroelectric power plant here, Binacional Itaipu, so we headed that way, but the guard said we couldn't see the dam and couldn't park and walk around without a reservation for a tour. The dam is only lit up with colored lights on Friday nights now, so we couldn't even hang around to see that. We left and found a great place to spend the night a few miles away. We couldn't get confirmation via the phone messaging about the next day's tour, but decided to try for it anyway. We drove out to the visitor center in the morning and they accepted our info to let us on the tour.
The purple blossoms from the jacaranda trees were falling like purple rain, creating pretty purple puddles on the pavement.
A large projector in the visitor center. It was used to take movies and pictures during the building of the huge dam and hydroelectric plant.
This photo in the visitor center shows the spillways full of water spewing out from the dam.
Global warming, drought, changing weather, or all the above has stopped the water flowing out of the spillways just now. Only water not needed for making power is sent through the spillways. Needed water is sent through the system via huge tubes and is used to make power rather than spilling over these ramps.
The spillway ramps are practically dry.
Jason studying a poster at the first stop on our tour.
A breakdown of a hydroelectric pump at the dam.
The dam is over 7kms long and spans the river that is the border between Brazil and Paraguay. This plant supplies 90% of the power used in Paraguay and about 12% of the power of Brazil. Driving across the dam is actually crossing a country border and we had to provide passport info to get onto the tour.
The huge water tubes where the river water is pumped up to turbines and used for creating power. Paraguay has 19 spillways to create its AC power, where Brazil gets 9 spillways to create its DC power supply.
Part of the old dam created during the construction of the hydroelectric plant.
This power plant, Binacional Itaipu, spans the Parana River and creates power for both Paraguay and Brazil.
It's not fancy, but it was quite interesting.
Part of the dam wall was made of rock, about 2kms of it extending beyond the spillways. The amount of concrete used in the building of this dam was staggering. Look up Itaipu Binacional and you can be amazed by the figures!
One of the turbine tubes with a pickup nearby for scale.
The purple jacaranda trees in the parking lot. They are so beautiful.
The wind blew the petals into piles that were just gorgeous.
As we drove away from the world's largest hydroelectric plant, we were tossed back in time as we passed this ox cart along the road.
We headed across Paraguay and realized we had no Paraguay currency. The roads here require tolls, but we'd been told that US Dollars are used a lot in Paraguay, so got all our small bills out to use for tolls. The first booth, the guy agreed to take $3 for the toll after first telling us no, that we needed local currency. When we didn't have any, he took an extra dollar for his trouble, but let us through with a paid receipt. The process got more and more difficult as we went, until we closed a toll lane and the National Police were called because we couldn't pay in local currency and the toll booth operator refused to accept USD. We were at an impasse, but the policeman eventually opened his wallet and gave us the toll amount in exchange for the dollars. For the final bridge crossing, we knew it was going to be 5000 pesos and got the sum from a guy at a gas station in advance to avoid a hassle. The bridge toll collector then claimed our charge was to be 10,000 pesos! We refused, said 5000 was enough and drove through the open gate. I expected us to be hunted down by the toll police, but we were at the last toll stop for the country and managed to get back into Argentina without going to jail! Yippee!
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