Skinny-shouldered parrots, jays with flaming crests, wisps of stork, jabirus brooding like butlers, raw-headed vultures, birds of prey frozen in attitudes of indifference, and flocks of black, brown, grey, white and blue; there was more wildlife to be seen on any bus ride across Paraguay than there was in many patient hours spent skulking about the undergrowth of its national parks. The roadside birds were largely unfazed by the buses thrumming past, while a single heavy bootstep in the parks was enough to put unseen creatures to flight, or to fill a forest with silence or alarm calls.

The parks I visited in Paraguay – and these were the most accessible, least-remote parks – are definitely not major tourist destinations. They were well-equipped, with guest services and rangers ready and waiting, and one even had bilingual information in its museum, but it is not exactly easy to arrive at all these quite-good facilities. Most visitors are locals who drive in, visit the war memorials and promptly drive out again. Hiking trails are well-marked on maps, but are fast receding into the rampant wilderness.

The war that spawned the memorials was the War of the Triple Alliance, in which the (then considerable) military might of Paraguay got embroiled in a battle against the less-prepared forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. During the six years of war Paraguay lost territory, had its capital sacked and had its population reduced to less than half of what it had been. The war effort was pushed on by the increasingly mad dictator Francisco Solano López until he was finally shot down while trying to flee the site of his final defeat.

Parque Nacional Cerro Corá is where Solano died and the war ended. With the end of the last dictatorship in Paraguay in 1989 the memorialising of Solano and his type has passed out of favour, but Cerro Corá is still riddled with monuments to the tyrant that almost saw his country disappear off the map.

The road to Cerro Corá crested the first brief suggestions of hills that I had encountered in Paraguay. Herds of bone-white cattle lay tranquil in patches of clear land studded with intransigent palm trees. Close to the park the soft undulations in the land grew more severe, and stone began to break through the earth, forming great stumps of isolated cliff among the scrub and forests of palm.

I was again dropped on the side of a highway, and pointed off along a dirt road. The park visitors centre, when I stomped up to it, was deserted except for a skinny black cat with a squint. Secure with my bag of bread and ramen I sat and waited for someone to arrive and let me into the bunkhouse.

The sun went down, I helped the cat dig chicken bones out of the trash; no one showed up. I squeezed my pack and myself through an unlocked window and claimed a gritty mattress for myself. I wondered how long I could live on bread alone, given that i could’t heat the ramen. I wondered whether the ghosts or the camp ground psychopaths would come for me first.

A ranger and some cyclists did eventually show up, but even though I wasn’t alone in the park after a full day of wandering its red-sand trails there were more of my footprints than of everyone else’s combined. Although few people explored the trails, they were scrawled across with animal prints; small dogs, big dogs, small cats, very big cats, pigs, deer, rodents, small birds, big birds, very big birds.

The whole park felt a lot like a land that time forgot, with its rolling plain of dusty green punctuated by those great molars of eroded mountain; the sort of place in which men in pith helmets are set upon by dinosaurs. A land remote and magnificent.

One of the great difficulties of reaching the other park was getting its name right. I did finally arrive at Ybycuí, but only after clarifying which Yby- I wanted to visit (I still can’t pronounce the park’s name comfortably). Ybycuí preserves some of the last stands of sub-tropical forest in Paraguay, a great swathe of trees and insects and never-seen animals. There were things out there, bounding through the bracken, but in Ybycuí their privacy is virtually undisturbed.

The memorial here was attached to an iron foundry that functioned throughout the war, manned by the swelling number of political prisoners. Its remote location wouldn’t seem to suit such industry, but I suppose the transport connections were better in those days.

Long loops of streams coil about the park, some flowing and chattering, others still and brooding. Waterfalls link them together and are prominently displayed on maps, but really the best of the park was not these secluded drops, but the grander seclusion of its long, forested slopes, the shadows and the sunlight, the things rustling in the green.

And this was really what the parks can best offer. There is nothing mind-blowing or jaw-dropping about them, but they offer a chance to disappear completely into the mystery and seclusion of their lands; war flickered among the trees and glades of both parks, but since that brief ripple these lands have remained remote and unspoiled. A place where wildlife can hide, and where infrequent gringos can lose themselves.