Ciudad del Este
We’d been told that across the border from Brazil was a massive shopping city called Ciudad del Este where you could get a electronics cheap. Being on the lookout for a new point-and-shoot camera we’d hoped we could find the Canon S90 there. After doing some research online before heading across, we’d found out that it’s not just a shopping city for cheap electronic goods, but for absolutely everything including guns and drugs. They even offered a service to smuggle the goods back over the border for you. So you can pop across, buy an AK47, 50 kg’s of marijuana and they’d deliver to your hotel room back in Brazil. Now that’s what I call service!
Instead of trying to find those places, we stuck to the electronics part of town and went searching for our camera. We quickly realised that whilst it’s cheap for South America everything is about the same price you’d pay in the US. This is still a lot cheaper than the UK so it was good value for us.
After 2 hours of searching, we eventually found a shop that had our camera model in stock and a couple of minutes later we were the proud owners of a new Canon S90.
As markets go, the place was huge. It wasn’t just one shopping centre, but a whole city of them that went on as far as the eye could see. It actually put all the big markets we’d been to across Asia to shame.
Afterwards we were back in Brazil waiting for our 24-hour bus ride to Paraty.
