Electrical Nerdery

 If you have no interest in 12 volt electrical systems it may be better to skip today’s offering. Rusty is doing well, Layne has been overseeing a major clothes wash and the weather in Paraguay has been over 80 degrees and sunny with cooler good sleeping temperatures at night. We share the campground at Pequeña Baviera (Little Bavaria) with rescued animals not always to Rusty’s liking.

We came here for three jobs, new tires which are cheaper in Paraguay; fix our blinking red low voltage light and have a third try to fix a persistent tiny coolant leak. First up we seem to have fixed the low voltage light on the inverter  and that’s a major success. Chris at work:

The problem was the system worked perfectly, batteries balanced, charging systems doing their jobs but every time the batteries were being charged the inverter showed low voltage and occasionally shut down momentarily. The weird part was we could use the electricity with no problems. Sitting parked, cooking, running the a/c whatever, the inverter showed no problems. It made no sense.

At first it seemed like it might’ve the negative cable coming out of the dc to dc charger. Chris wasn’t convinced. He did some research and cave to the conclusion the batteries were incorrectly wired. This trial and error took all afternoon. Chris wanted to switch the location of the negative cable from the three batteries. He figured it was in the wrong place reading only one of the three in the battery bank. From here:

To here in the battery closest to the bus bar.

A test revealed no blinking red light as I started the engine and charged the batteries  as part of the test.no blinking red light. This could be the fix, re routing the negative cable from the long red line to the short one as marked by my finger tracing below:

I am not completely clear how this works but apparently this minor change gives a more accurate reading across the three batteries for the inverter. And that seems to have solved an insoluble problem. Up next a minuscule coolant leak in the engine already fixed twice so third times the charm. Maybe. 

Post Scriptum: 

One update we also ended up reducing battery charge voltage from 14.2 maximum to 14.0 maximum on the advice of a German submariner friend of Chris (!) and after 16 hours of charging by shorepower and by engine we have not seen a new red light. Yet  

Up next new tires and unhappily a new water pump which will hopefully fix the coolant leak.

Driving Paraguay

It took a long day of driving to get from Encarnación to the middle of the country 90 minutes from our destination at a campsite we have visited previously. 

We left the ruins and decided to follow Google’s alternative route through countryside that looked at least slightly interesting.

After a couple of miles our attempt at adventuring ground to a halt. The asphalt ran out. 

Once upon a time we probably would have given it a go but after tens of thousands of miles of South America and several misdirected attempts to find back roads in several muddy dusty difficult countries, Team Lost decided caution was the better part of valor and we turned around. 

So we took off across Paraguay Sunday afternoon and this is what we found in this little visited country.

A friendly man selling chipas, rings of cheesy toasted bread. It’s a cultural experience and he wished us a happy journey. He looks fierce doesn’t he? He wasn’t. 

Paraguayans are known for drinking cold maté and if you ask residents of neighboring countries where it’s drunk with hot water they think it’s barbaric but to me hot or cold maté is horrid and bitter.  Weird people drink weird stuff. I drink tea. 

Did I mention cows in the road? Paraguay is a poor country and curbside grazing is free.

Some of Paraguay Highway 8 was a wreck and some of it was freshly paved. We hit a speedbump at  speed once which shifted the load in our lockers but miraculously seemed to do no damage. That was a discouraging moment as I tried to concentrate on the road. This one was obvious: 

And we came across an accident marked in the usual way:

Don’t know who went in the ditch but they had it in hand. 

Rusty break on the road so he can stretch out in the grass and we can contemplate the meaning of life.

We took all day to drive most of the way to the campground in Caacupé and stopped at a little restaurant we saw when we were here in Independencia last summer. It looked intriguing with a sign board in Spanish and German.

Would you know it some kids told us it was closed for winter when all the Germans are back home for the season. Layne got a bit gringo complaining they had posted anything on Google so we had breakfast for dinner and slept at a gas station as usual.

Misiones to Caacupé where we hope to get new KO2 tires cheaper than we can buy them in Chile or Peru.  

Bolivia continues to have problems keeping up with demand for fuel and messages we have read from travelers say it takes a lot to fill the tank so we are postponing visiting Bolivia for now. 

“ From our perspective, the diesel situation in Bolivia is not good. We were unable to get diesel in Sucre, and it is also very scarce in Uyuni, with extremely long queues.

We were allowed to move to the front because the petrol station employee permitted it. Understandably, the other people waiting in line were not happy about that. The employee also told us that they only had enough diesel left for another one or two hours. Nobody ever seems to know exactly when the next delivery will arrive.

We managed to get through Bolivia with diesel, but we also carry several spare fuel cans and spent a lot of time waiting, discussing and negotiating. In some places, we were not allowed to fill up because we are foreigners. Overall, the situation is very chaotic.”

So we plan to bypass Bolivia on our way to winter quarters in Arequipa Peru.

A friend from Florida will be meeting us in Peru and she and Layne are scheduled to do a jungle tour in Brazil while I have finally knuckled down and got myself on a tour to Machu Picchu with 6,000 of my closest unknown friends. They let 6,000 people a day in to tour Machu Picchu and demand still outstrips availability. Just my kinds of crowds. Oh well.

Utopia Lost

One of the big tourist attractions in Paraguay is a bunch of ruins outside the city of Encarnación, an attraction we missed last time as it was just too hot in summer.

In the 18th century Jesuit missionaries had 30 Guaraní Indian villages along the Paraná River. They were called reducciones or “reductions” in English, a strange word for a simple concept.

The Jesuits rounded up the locals, converted them, educated them, trained them in useful skills and helped them create politically independent self sustaining communities called reductions. They had classrooms:

Behind the classrooms they had communal gardens to grow food for the community. They had housing reserved for women and children who had no men. And there was housing for families with their own additional gardens.

There was of course the religious element to the operation, the church:

The design of the front door incorporates Arabic motifs which were popular in Spain at the time. But Papal authority is ever present:

They had two pulpits in the church which is unusual. The idea was to have two preachers carrying out a dialogue to discuss points of theology to explain Christianity to their Guaraní parishioners. 

There is controversy of course about the reductions. Some say they were prisons, slave holdings forcing Christianity on noble savages. The other lot argue the Jeduits were seeking true autonomy for the Indians in the Paraná delta covering southern Brazil, northern Argentina and Paraguay. 

It’s a fact that the Jesuits educated the Guaraní and they armed them to defend themselves against Brazilian slave traders called Bandeirantes. And anyone who has studied antebellum slavery in the US knows there were two things slaves could never be allowed to do: learn to read and write or bear arms. So were they slaves? Certainly they had to become Christians which is no unusual thing when you thing of shelters requiring prayers before feeding the homeless but in the context of the time Jesuits knew they were saving those savages. If the certainty of the time is offensive today cultural relativism is a totally separate debate.

What get out of this place as I walk the ruins is the sense of lost opportunity. This place, the Mission of Jesus de Tavarangüe, was never quite completed. Ten years after they started building here, after several moves to find the right location, in 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from South America.

The trouble developed in Europe where various monarchs got annoyed at the Jesuits who tended to be rebellious and devoted to the pope not their local leaders which was terribly bad form. They persuaded pope Clement to disband them worldwide. 

By the time the next pope reinstated the Jesuit order the 30 Guaraní reductions had collapsed and dispersed despite the Indians joy at being released from the strict rules of Jesuit daily life. So that was that.

The reductions were independent city states, they unlike the regular Spanish (and Portuguese) colonizers tried to lift the Guaraní Indians and give them the tools to live independently.  Instead the end of the Jesuits spelled the end of the experiment that some described as a Utopia.

Nowadays there are three sites on Paraguay, all ruins that attract visitors and offer audio tours you can enjoy through your phone in a multitude of languages.

We were there early-ish Sunday morning ing and shared the ruins with a group of Spaniards. By the time we left, the chaotic little parking lot packed with cars. 

And that was our visit to the Jesuit ruins of Paraguay. 

Up next: new tires I hope. Paraguay sells the cheapest rubber in South America I’m told. Here’s hoping.