Packing Up

 Rusty looked at me rather balefully last night as I stuffed pill after pill into him and I told him, in vain I think, that they are for his own good. 

The vet gave him a check up Friday morning after he hobbled into the office on three and a half legs, and got his injured front leg shaved.  My poor patched dog.

When Fran jumped him he got some bruising on his lung but it’s decreasing according to the vet who stuck a stethoscope on him,  and the several bites he got in his leg are healing and none of them got him in the elbow joint, so that was lucky. Rusty the wonder dog is almost back to his usual self after all the trauma of the attack.

It rained Friday in Caacupé so the temperature dropped from the usual 100 degrees to the mid 70s, at least for a while. Layne has made friends with a German visitor who is staying in an apartment at the Little Bavaria campground and I delivered them to a Swiss restaurant for lunch. They had several capirinhas, sugar cane alcohol drinks resembling mojitos popular in Brazil and it seems in Paraguay which they used to wash down a Swiss lunch, steak with mushroom sauce and spaetzle:

Rusty and I hung out at the damp campground waiting for the call to pick them up. My lunch was a local version of an empanada which Layne doesn’t like as she hates raisins a popular Paraguayan ingredient in their meat pies.

When we drove back to the restaurant I was pleased to see Rusty take an interest and wander slowly around. He met a local dog which freaked me out but he just said hello and moved on as usual.  I the overthinker was all sentimental imagining how it might be after he dies but Rusty just got on with living. I’ve never seen him traumatized as he was after Fran attacked him and got a whole I thought he had lost the will to live which in turn traumatized me. I should have had a capirinha to slow my brain down: 

The drive to the restaurant was Paraguayan, lots of greenery, winding rolling roads and a few roadside attractions.

The country club isn’t what you think. It’s more like a water park in a country with no access to the sea so rivers and fresh water holes are recreation centers.  

I’m not sure which saint this is but usually St Francis is depicted as an animal lover though not usually with sheep. I consider Saint  Francis of Assisi as the second or third most famous Umbrian after me and possibly even St Valentine whose holiday you recently celebrated. 

Not sure what this was about, below, but I never had to invoke the deity this road was that smooth. 

And there was the billboard to remind us that the only real family is the traditional version. Which leads me to wonder if Paraguay is less socially rigid than I imagined. “We believe in original design; the family as god created it.” So I guess there are Paraguayans who are not in agreement. This country surprises sometimes. 

And then there is Chipa (pro: “cheaper”) which is a baked ring of something that tastes like corn bread with dill, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Sold warm at the roadside for 75 cents (five thousand guaraní) each.  I of course like them:

We are planning to drive 90 minutes on Saturday to visit a tourist city called Villarica as we are both looking forward to being actual tourists for a bit. Tonight Mark the English van dweller has a house warming for his new cabin as he moves out of his van into his $20,000 400 square foot brand new home surrounded by a fence to keep the aggressive Fran contained. I’ll write about that after we have the barbecue tonight. Chipa for sale in the baskets under the blue cloths: 

Sunday we are planning to leave and pay the capital of Asunción a visit. After that we’ll drive across Paraguay to Encarnación a river resort on the border with Argentina. We want to drive south to get to cooler temperatures and if we can we’d like to spend a little less time on things mechanical. This transformation of GANNET2 has taken a lot of energy but sleeping all night in 12 volt low energy air conditioning and waking with fully half charged batteries is so worth it. Sleeping comfortably in oppressive heat and not having to worry about energy consumption is liberating. Not to mention the 860 watts of solar panels which we’ve relied on  to keep our batteries charged day after day. Unlimited wild camping seems attainable now even with all our electrical  demands. 

Winter in Paraguay is apparently quite livable with temperatures in the 50s in July with no rain. We might have to come back and on our way to or from Bolivia and Brazil later this year. 

Dog Fight

 I feel like there’s a saying that applies to us at the moment: if we didn’t have bad luck we’d have no luck at all.

Marks dog Fran pounced on Rusty while he was napping next to us and savaged him. A young construction worker building a house on the campground land for Mark ran over and helped me pull Fran off Rusty. My 13 year old dog was bleeding on his front left leg and my 13 year old dog stayed down in the dirt traumatized. Eventually I got him to his feet and he staggered and hopped to his safe place where I lifted him onto our bed and turned on the a/c. He slept for a couple of hours but he wasn’t getting better so we drove him into town to the vet.

He got a check up and the vet pronounced he had a bruise on his lung producing some fluid but nothing serious. The bite on his leg missed the joint so that could have been worse but he was in a lot of pain. He got an antibiotic shot and an anti-inflammatory to reduce the pain and charged us $14 for everything.

The shot took effect in half an hour and even though he doesn’t want to walk around he hobbled outside, ate some dinner and sat up taking an interest in the world. Fran is tied up across the campground so things are at peace. Friday he gets a follow up vet visit and then hopefully he will be properly on the mend. For a while I thought he had given up and was dying; I was predictably a wreck. We are hoping to get driving soon, probably not soon enough for our very much alive Rusty.

Wrestling The Alternator.

 It took some grinding and filing and adjusting but the second alternator is in place and generating electricity. 

The short version of the problem, as short as I can make it, is that we basically dinged our second alternator to death on the roads we drove to the Guyanas.

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.  

After so many failures with the Swiss van that refuses to work Chris was pleased to see we were generating  90 silent amps at last. 

We were excluded from the campground gathering that evening, fine by me, and now we have to sort out the replacement shore power charger installation. Maybe we can get away for a few days and be tourists in Paraguay. I’d like that.

Mechanical Diagnosis

 I was in Chris’ workshop at two pm precisely after the ill fated Swiss Citroen van, the 2023 Jumper with assorted failed impenetrable electronic issues pulled out of the bay. It shuts down and stops running at random so I was glad they managed to back it out to make room for me. 

My problem of the day is the aftermarket second alternator that charges our house batteries as we drive. We had the original 280 amp accessory replaced by a Brazilian Bosch unit ($700) in Brasilia a thousand miles ago and it has been making ghastly groaning noises since we got to Paraguay, leaving us reluctant to drive. 

The Swiss have been stuck six weeks in Pequeña Baviera (little Bavaria) campground trying to figure out what’s wrong but right now they are waiting for a new engine control unit to be shipped from Lausanne so we get their space in the engine bay. First thing to do is remove the skid plate.

Then Chris and his Paraguayan assistant checked the belt alignment and it was not great. 

The thing that freaked him out was the heat generated by the alternator which he worried might be causing problems in the alternator’s bearings. It’s a 280 amp unit limited to about 100 amps output which means it is not going working too hard, one possible cause for overheating. But the belt alignment is a big issue. We had a new belt pulley installed (we carry a few spares for this irritating aftermarket alternator) in Brasilia…

…but the failed alignment had already started to wear the pulley bearings. Chris decided to replace the bearings inside the pulley. 

He has a complete metal working shop as he used to travel the world 200 days a year repairing -of all things - cheese making machines. He told me a story about encountering US empty container while driving laws in Texas. He was surprised to learn empty beer bottles in the US are not allowed in the center console of a car. I was astonished to learn that in Germany it’s not a problem as long as you are under the breathalyzer limit. Live and learn; I thought Germany would be way stricter. Anyway, rollers and belts…

He also found a slightly bent pulley support so that will need to be improved upon and the hope is that once the alignment of the belt is restored noises and heat will disappear. 

But because he is cautious he is going to have the alternator checked at a shop with an oscilloscope in Caacupé (town of talented engineering shops apparently) before he tries reinstalling it today, Tuesday. If it runs smoothly we will be free to explore Paraguay while we wait for our new inverter and 110 volt battery charger to arrive. 

With the alternator removed GANNET2 runs silent and sweet. I hope she will after the infernal alternator is re-installed.

Life in the campground continues with no great excitement, the heat in  the afternoon is intense but overnight temperatures drop and allow for pleasant sleeping. Relying on our solar panels allows us to have plenty of electricity which is wonderful but we try to be conservative in our use as sunshine can easily be replaced by clouds in this rainy season. My biggest worry is Rusty living in the heat but I think I worry too much about my old dog.

He digs holes in the sand by himself or if he feels like it he  sits next to me when I go and sit and read in a cool shady spot under the trees. We take a short walk on the grounds in the early morning and in the heat of the day he finds a shady spot to observe the comings and goings. Plus he eats like a horse so I don’t think he’s suffering too much. 

Paraguay Tin Foil Hat Refuge

 On the mechanical front there is no change. There are horrible grinding sounds coming from the front of the van most likely from the new second alternator. We hope Chris can check it on Monday but I drive GANNET2 only rarely and reluctantly in the meantime.  It is exceeding frustrating. 

The interesting news is that our new solar system is working perfectly. It does require parking in the sun to get best results of course but we have seen  50 amps of power from our 860 watt array.

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.

He has lots of stories to tell unearthing Mexican history in Oaxaca and so forth. His wife Pia still works part time as an architect from the road as well as during summers spent in Germany. Teo was telling me about the reduction of Jesuit missions founded in Paraguay and viewed as a threat by Spanish authorities in the 18th century because they educated the Guaraní Indians.

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.