I went to Ciudad del Este for a couple of days. I visited an impressive set of Jesuit mission ruins (Trinidad), and I took a ride out into the selva (rainforest) – some scary looking spiders out there!
The city itself was basically just a blackmarket zone. If you don’t mind haggling you can pick up all sorts of cheap stuff – (but I wouldn’t necessarily vouch for the quality). Otherwise it seemed full of hustle and bustle, but no real charm or places of interest that I discovered.

When I went over the bridge from Foz (in Brazil) to Ciudad del Este, no-one asked for our passports or implied we needed to get them stamped. When we left Paraguay we crossed at Posadas. The bridge was manned by officials with guns who complained that we didn’t have our passport stamped, and then began asking for money to let us cross, threatening us with jail if we didn’t pay up. Seemed like a bit of a put-up job.