Hunt The Package

 I am well aware that in the grand scheme of things, especially for a retiree with nothing but time on his hands and no appointments, a day or two more of standing still is nothing. But all this waiting is burning me up. Not that I show it. Publicly I accept my fate with good grace, but here in my diary page where one day I shall look back and remember, it is a slow grind to get through the day and not scream with frustration. I take my lead from my dog (my wife’s as bad as I am in this respect).

The 3000 watt Inverter which is paid for, is in Caacupé but the parcel delivery service is still sorting out the packages in the latest delivery to town and should be available for pick up Monday afternoon at two. That could mean we will spend Monday night somewhere other than here as we make a tourist journey at slow but constant speed toward Ciudad del Este on the Brazilian border.

We want to see a bit more of Paraguay by driving the southern edge along the mighty Paraná River, smaller than the Amazon of course but much the largest body of water touching four countries in the southern half of the continent. 

While Paraguay has no coastline it has traditionally controlled steamships’ access to the interior of this region. Nowadays trucks and roads do the heavy lifting but a hundred and fifty years ago the river was the best way to move freight from the interior to the coast and Paraguay controlled the river. I want to see it.  I know it’s just a river but it represents history. 

In 1864 about the time the US was wrapping up its rebellion Brazil and Argentina supported by a token 800 Uruguayan troops attacked Paraguay. It was a long involved story of politics gone wrong and a mad desire to fight in what is called the War of the Triple Alliance or the Paraguayan War . The weird thing was Paraguay went into it thinking they could win as they had a huge army and a navy that controlled the river and it was only after six years that they ended up getting soundly beaten and the country lost 350,000 people out of a population of 500,000. You read that right. After the war Paraguay was much smaller having lost territory everywhere and only 150,000 people remained alive, with women outnumbering men 4 to 1.  Just mind boggling. It’s worth reading about to get an idea of how mad people can become over territorial boundaries. 

Paraguay is an enigma. I won’t pile on all at once because it’s too much but the story of Jesuit missions and their subsequent expulsions is another extraordinary story. It just goes on and on in this little no account country. Look underneath the stereotype of a country known for nothing, and it’s full of magical realism. Anyway time for lunch. 

We went back to El Mundo the Swiss eatery and took Mark from the campground.  We spent $30 on a full service lunch, Layne had alcohol and I had dessert and we each had a plate of pork stroganoff with rosti (Swiss hash browns).

The rosti was crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. It was the best rosti I’ve had, a food I describe as Swiss hash browns. 

Mark joined me in having dessert, a tiramisu. 

This is weird isn’t it, eating Swiss food in a small village no one’s ever heard of in the middle of Paraguay. There’s stuff going on in the world that defies explanation. 

Rusty enjoyed the cool tiled floor at the restaurant and I can’t wait to get him out of this heat. I think he’s ready to travel as he’s walking normally now.

Back at the campground we saw a new arrival, a motorcycle and tent which had arrived while we were gone. Turns out of course it was just another German youth let loose on South America. Alex it turns out speaks fluent English, worked for a multinational American company and then quit to ride around the world.

He’s tired of riding a motorcycle, it’s exhausting in the heat, tiresome looking for places to sleep and with a budget of $40 a day he has to sleep in flea pits or in his tent. He’s studying campers he meets on the way, figuring in his head that one day he’ll have a Land Cruiser with a tent on the roof. For now he rides a Yamaha Tenere and envies old farts in a van…

Layne has been studying the Lonely Planet guide to Paraguay. A country well off the tourist trail they say. 

For now we keep fingers crossed the package arrives. 

Stuck Waiting

 This is the wrong time of year to visit Paraguay as it’s hot as Hades with not much relief except for the odd rain shower and the odd swimming pool.

For the locals it’s just another day at work and Caacupé is full of busy people being busy in the heat.

Abandoning your sandals on the sunbaked sidewalk seems akin to fire walking to me but I’m just a gringo. 

On the road to and from the campground, about five miles there lie a few dustcatcher stores. 

Luckily we have no room for full sized statues and bulky works of artisanal art. 

The main road between the two main cities, Asunción and Encarnación is a smooth pleasant freeway. A rarity. 

Since the alternator was fixed we’ve driven a chunk of it to charge up our batteries and test the installation. So far so good. 

Rusty is doing well, his leg is healing and he’s hardly limping at all. He doesn’t cross paths with Fran anymore, he reluctantly takes the pills I force on him, and his life has returned to what it was before Fran attacked him. He even gives me a kiss after our pill taking session in the evening to show there are no hard feelings. 

The trouble now is we need to wait for a package we ordered, a new inverter as part of a new installation with a new battery charger after ours quit. Waiting for a package to be delivered is the worse feeling of helplessness.  

As of Saturday afternoon it was overdue so our plans to get in the road have come to naught. Frustration is a pointless emotion…and we have a shady place to wait at $15 a day. 

We have lived for two weeks generating electricity from our new solar panels and they do so well we can run our Dometic 12 volt rooftop air conditioner all night and sleep comfortably. So having proved that we now want to travel and fix the shore power fiasco later. But we incautiously paid for the new 3,000 watt inverter and it hasn’t arrived. Luckily we didn’t pay for the new charger which apparently is no longer available. 

Our plan is to check out Paraguay a little but the heat is awful making tourism a fraught sweaty unpleasant business so we figured why not go west to the Brazilian coast. We both could use some beach time and the summer crowds should have dispersed by now. 

We had considered a straight drive to expensive Uruguay to get the shore power fixed but we now have solar power and a working alternator and are doing fine so we thought to have some fun and go back to dreary mechanical issues later. 

This is the mini market on the road at the bottom of the campground. Packaged goods, beer and sodas, a meat counter, some root vegetables and you have a collection of the basics. In Caacupé we use Superseis (Super Six) a modern full service supermarket. As we wait to be released, to go see more of Paraguay on the way to Brazil. 

Ludwig reminded me of me, riding a Suzuki 650 with minimal luggage he is on a one year sabbatical. 

He landed in Chile with his motorcycle in January and has already toured the southern tip of South America. He came here as a friend told him that the owners are from his corner of Bavaria in southern Germany.

He spent three days here resting and talking German and now he’s off to northern Chile to ride the Atacama desert, the driest place in the world.

I told him him how much I liked the coast of Chile between Iquique and Antofagasta do I hope he rides it.  A Canadian apparently rode in and out yesterday on a Harley Davidson. He was looking to rent an air conditioned cabin so he left before I had a chance to even see him which was a pity. For every ten thousand North Americans afraid to travel Latin America there is perhaps one who is wandering around unnoticed and enjoying life on the cheap in the sun. 

Ah youth! I’m glad I spent mine the same way else I’d envy him. Meanwhile Mark the English traveler and his attack dog Fran have moved into their new home in the campground built in seven weeks at a cost of $20,000. 

We had beer and single malt to celebrate (which delayed the publishing of this post) and I was glad to see Fran secure behind a solid fence.  

Mark lived twenty years in Los Angeles with his American wife. He has a son and a daughter but he wanted to grow old(er) in the sun and retirement is easy to organize in Paraguay. 

We do like a coastline which landlocked Paraguay lacks. I grilled sausages and vegetables on our folding Skotti grill, a solid stainless box that unclips and travels flat. It’s a quality addition to our travel gear. 

So we are now hoping for liberation and escape. It’s about time something went our way. I suppose I was foolish to assume car could rebuild that electrical system and have it all work perfectly right away but we are in a van in South America to be bonds and explore not sit still. We are both feeling the need to go be tourists.

It’s past time to go west and start to check out some of those famed Brazilian beaches.

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.