Even on bright overcast days we get 25 amps such that we have had enough energy to live well just from the solar array. We are able to not use Starlink as the campground Internet is strong and we try to use our inverter judiciously only turning it on to run my CPAP at night when we charge my devices. However I would call the solar panels a huge success.
They are also less glaringly intrusive the longer we live with them…
We went to look at a granny unit for rent which we were told was “just up the road.” Mostly out of consideration for Rusty we thought maybe a house would be a pleasant retreat from the heat. We hadn’t counted on the road to get there. We had to drive GANNET2 just one and a half miles but these were Paraguayan back country miles.
They are in the business of turning a sandy track into an all weather Roman Road one stone tapped down at a time. This is road building the way your great grandfather might have seen it trotting by in his horse and trap. Mind boggling.
If you were parachuted here from your commute you’d probably blow a gasket but…we’ve seen worse on this extraordinary journey so we pressed on.
It was a matter of working here and there to the surprisingly heavy traffic.
Cars trucks and motorcycles kept coming and going and dodging the big gringo van.
Oh, just to complete the picture…
And the side road off the main track just got worse.
It was washed out with trenches dug out by water running down hill, a small cement bridge, patches of soft sand. It reminded Layne of crossing Guyana and which road we have no desire to revisit.
Nice house, big garden, air conditioned bedroom, big German fans, cool tiles for Rusty, no workable swimming pool, terrible approach road requiring car rental for $30 a day. We decided even at $30 a day or $12 a day for a month we wanted to stay mobile. If we can get GANNET2 safe to roll our plan is to visit Bolivia as a replacement battery charger is at least two and maybe three weeks away. Don’t want to be stuck down this road in rainy season.
We had a weird interaction with the campground owners who celebrated the husband/mechanic Chris’ birthday. (Loki is draining an empty beer can).
We only got invited at the last minute by Chris’ volunteer live in helper, a German woman called Inge who has befriended Layne and she asked why we weren’t going to the potluck. So we went, somewhat unwillingly at this point but choosing not to snub the kindly Inge.
Inge made room for us among the Swiss couple (on the left) with the terminally broken Citroen Jumper van, sitting next to a German couple we befriended in Argentina so we were linguistically outnumbered supported only by Mark the Englishman who owns a house on Chris’ land.
We’ve had lots of campground gatherings and only the French for some reason make a habit of excluding others. Mostly everyone mucks in even if the common language in the end is English. We did the right thing and then left when Mark got up. Had we organized the evening everyone would have been invited.
I overthought the whole rather negative episode but Layne reminded me we are here for mechanics not kumbaya so rather than drive for Asuncion to find a shop to fix the damned second alternator we plastered smiles on our faces and ended up having a pretty interesting conversation with Teo and Pia our German friends who spends eight months of the year in their rather capable but cramped Toyota Landcruiser. They had to have their dashboard air conditioning fixed. We all have problems.
He is retired from a life as a university history professor and researcher. He traveled the Amazon with a back pack in his twenties riding the ferries in a hammock and staying in jungle lodges in areas where we have driven.
And then as we talked I said I thought Paraguay would be a great place to settle if you were looking for an undiscovered country to retreat to as the world around us seems to lose its bearings. Teo looked shocked.
We’ve met lots of German settlers here he said and they are very odd. He told us how they had needed mechanical help so while Teo did manly things with the German mechanic Pia was stuck with his wife for three hours and she got her ear talked off explaining how the Covid vaccine injected Bill Gates chips in the bloodstream and all that weird stuff. Apparently thousands of Germans got spooked not by Covid but by the German government’s response and Paraguay is easy and cheap to settle in. So here they are.
I asked Chris the first day here why Paraguay and he said blandly they had wanted to emigrate and the arrival of Covid pushed them in a hurry and Paraguay was easy so they chose to settle. I haven’t asked for a more detailed explanation but I don’t want to open the flood gates to the conspiracy theory flood that our van has allowed us to escape. I’m strictly here for the mechanical work.
Anyway if you think Jewish space lasers are real and vaccines are a conspiracy you’ll find fertile ground in Paraguay to sow your nuttiness. The requirements to get a temporary residence card ( which leads to permanent residence) are very low and no one as we have seen knows a thing about this country. The road to Bolivia is lined with German/Russian Mennonite communities apparently so people have been emigrating here for a long time. If you look up Filadelfia Paraguay you’ll get the scoop. And Mexico’s requirements for temporary residence have been increased so much many gringos can no longer afford it. That’s a bit of a change. For us the open road remains the attraction.
And where possible not the Roman type of road, thank you.
That left us relying on the Brazilian alternator installed in Brasilia. Bear in mind it’s the alternator that powers our house batteries and is an aftermarket installation that has nothing to do with the Promaster.
To put it bluntly the installation in Brasilia was half assed and the alternator was slightly misaligned which caused screeching and overheating and so forth as the misalignment slipped and got worse. Chris had the alternator cleaned and checked and when it came time to install it he found he had to cut back some material to get it to fit.
It was obvious they had tried to cut the casing back to get it to fit but it took Chris’ persistence with the grinder to work the problem and line up the alternator pulleys and give the belt a clean silent run.
His wife Astrid came by, ignored me as usual and handed him tools and nuts with her back to me. No idea why she is so stand offish but when Layne ordered a loaf of bread she brought it by, handed it silently to me and scurried off without so much as a “how’s it going?” I must remind her of a serial killer she knew as a kid maybe or possibly she despises Americans on principle. There are such people. 
