I did manage to make it to the hotel, I park the truck and head inside around 5am and ask the VERY German looking woman, who speaks pretty much just Spanish-Guarani if there’s any chance I could check in to my room ten hours early.
“No problemo, di nada!” OMG, I could kiss her.
I’m staying in a huge old Euro-regal hotel, it’s old and fancy and interesting…….. and supposedly Hitler is buried in a tomb underneath it.
Not kidding, it’s a thing. I am also the only guest, and the place is huge.
If you read the self-published history of this hotel there is a screamingly conspicuous gap in the story, apparently from 1945 t0 1970 absolutely nothing happened.
Any amount of travel or interest in Paraguay is guaranteed to lead to Nazi’s sooner or later. After WWII, when thousands of Nazi’s escaped to South America they mostly tried to blend in and disappear. Except for the ones in Paraguay, here they took over the entire country and ruled it as a Nazi paradise for far longer than they did in Germany.
Sounds crazy, right, it’s 100% true. The second longest dictatorship in the 20th century, after North Korea, is the Stroessner rule of Paraguay, that the Nazi’s put in place. You just never heard about it because the world chose to look the other way.
My hotel was one of the buildings first confiscated by the Nazi’s, they shot everyone and moved in. Mengele stayed here, as did Stroesser, and Goebbels, all the monsters. They knew Paraguay had no weapons and no friends, no one cared at all.
A Bit Gone 