I should begin this post by noting that this was supposed to be a joint endeavor. Tim came for a two-week vacation in Ciudad del Este (with brief stopovers in Asunción), and during the trip we kept talking about writing a blog post together to chronicle our many adventures. However, our best intentions seemed to be thwarted at every turn by the vagaries and caprices of my internet connection (which, as I write, is still non-functional...I'm poaching the Fundacion Paraguay connection at the office, jeje). So here I am, all on my lonesome, attempting to do justice to our two-week trip. Tim: you’ll have to edit this from home since your impressions are probably far more entertaining than mine (I’ve been here long enough that even some of the most outlandish stuff slips by unnoticed at this point, just because it feels so habitual, [if still infuriating]).
After a slightly stressful twenty-four hours of transit (complicated by the fact that Tim and I were on different planes for the long middle bit between Miami and Sao Paulo…and my flight left two hours late because the ground crew had managed to lodge a shipping container full of fish in the cargo-bay of my plane, and we couldn’t leave until it was safely extricated…and I thought I’d lost Tim in Brazil/missed my connection to Paraguay…eeeeekkkk!!!!), we arrived with gloriously tropical weather in Asunción. I could tell that Tim was shedding layers of winter melancholy and malaise along with every layer of clothing (and maybe a layer or two of skin! Honey, I know you deny it, but you are looking a tad pink)…culminating in a tropical-vacation-worthy afternoon lounging by the hotel pool. That evening, we went to great little Peruvian restaurant on the corner of Ave. Tacuary and Estigarribia, where Tim thoroughly charmed the owner/wait-staff with his well-intentioned attempts at Spanish, and we inaugurated the vacation with a couple of rounds of Pisco Sours (the house specialty). Off to an excellent start!
The next day we bid goodbye to Asunción and embarked on the 5 hour bus ride to Ciudad del Este (360km due east). And arrived to a slightly less bucolic scene in my hometown: a band of grubby street kids greeted us at the bus terminal with a hail of rocks and imaginative insults in Guarani (their modus operandi is to menace travelers into tossing them some spare change), and in the middle of very raucous preparations for “Sexy Night” at one of the local nightclubs (viz, a line of cars with their trunks thrown open and subwoofers on full blast, screaming teenagers hanging out the windows, all parked on the corner of my block and passing out flyers to through-traffic). Pretty overwhelming. Especially since each of the cars was blasting a different pop song, which made the cacophony completely dissonant in addition to profoundly irritating. Tim told me that sometimes he heard the sounds of the city outside when we talked over Skype, but never imagined that it was as deafening as it turned out to be in person. And to make things even more complicated, the household was in a complete uproar because Modesta’s husband was about to check himself into the hospital for a quadruple bypass open-heart surgery, so all of my friends at home were a bit frayed at the edges as well. I worried that Ciudad del Este would ruin our vacation.
But Tim is a total trooper, so we managed to get things back on track by exploring the city and doing lots and lots of grilling. First order of business was to get the car in to the mechanic (the poor little VW Bug had died again right before I left for the states, and I decided to deal with it once I got back). And while we were waiting on the car, “normal” activities like going to the market to go shopping, riding city buses, and exploring the commercial center are pretty exotic, and constitute pretty much a full day’s work (and definitely require an afternoon recovery nap). So we took full advantage of the shockingly-inexpensive price and excellent quality of meat here in Paraguay, to gorge ourselves. I wouldn’t call it gluttony per se because we were on vacation, but it came pretty close. I made homemade BBQ sauce (Paraguayans are generally suspicious of seasoning on their meat) and Tim acquainted himself with my grill (an old car wheel welded to a steel tripod with a grate on top…to be filled with carbon wood chips [no briquettes here!] and started with wads of newspaper [no lighter fluid either!]…Tim seemed pretty pleased to spend the entire evening(s) lighting things on fire). In the course of our grilling adventures, the highlights included BBQ chicken legs, 1kg (about 2.2 lbs) cut of tapa cuadril or tri-tip steak (enjoyed over the course of two days), and an entire roasted chicken on the grill. Oh, and lots of chorizo sausages. Mmmm. Plus, it was pretty easy to justify the grill-fest because the entire tri-tip cost about $10 and a roasting chicken is about $3.50, so it was both satisfying and economical. But going to a churrasqueria on top of all that (i.e. a restaurant where waiters bring around huge skewers of beef and you point to the bits you want, and they cut it off onto your plate…and it’s all you can eat so they just keep coming, and coming and coming until you might explode or develop a serious case of gout)…well, let’s just say that it was a bit excessive.
So after exploring the city for a bit and walking off the pounds of meat (and getting the car fixed), on Saturday we embarked on our first transnational expedition across the border to Brazil. Saturday morning is the heaviest commercial day of the week so there is a TON of traffic on the bridge between Paraguay and Brazil. We had initially planned on going to the waterfalls but scrapped the idea after idling in traffic for over an hour, and decided to visit the huge Itaipu hydroelectric complex instead. On the positive side, Tim got to observe the very best of Paraguayan pirates at work (well, actually petty smugglers...but pirates sounds better). We watched as a guy nonchalantly lowered a package mummified in plastic garbage bags and packing tape and attached to a rope, over the side of the bridge and into the river far below (p.s. on a separate trip across the bridge, Tim pointed out the dudes in a canoe ferrying packages across…definitely river-pirates!). It’s all small scale smuggling to avoid import taxes. But between the illicit packages and the rifles/small-arms sold openly on the streets in Ciudad del Este, the place can seem a bit rowdy.
So we finally made it across the bridge, across the Brazilian border (nobody checked passports in either Paraguay or Brazil), and on our way to Itaipu. Except that halfway along the way to the dam, suddenly my accelerator pedal went down to the floor and the engine slowed. Depressed the clutch, engine seemed to be fine, but the accelerator pedal was useless. Hmmm. Pedal? Fuel pump? I just got the carburetor cleaned! Tim gets to push the car to the side of the road (latest in a long line of people who have helped me push my car), and we leave it idling as we investigate the cause. He pointed to what looked like a snapped bicycle cable attached to the accelerator pedal and heading back towards the engine at the back of the car. Interesting. But we didn’t even have a pair of pliers to try to splice it, so we decided to lock up the car and walk towards the dam, and find a way back to Paraguay either on the bus or a ride from Modesta if she’s visiting her husband in the hospital in Brazil. Tim commented as we walked that he felt a bit like we were R2-D2 and C-3PO from the first Star Wars movie, embarking on a quest through the desert with no clear sense of where we were going, complaining, “we seem to be made to suffer, it’s our lot in life.” But lo! We rounded a corner in the road and I spotted a mechanic shop with a VW Bug parked in the garage, surely they would be able to get my car up and running if it’s only the cable! The mechanic jauntily agrees (we’re communicating with only my pidgin Portuguese and lots of hand gestures) and grabs some tools and his busted-up Peugeot wagon (foreshadowing!! Queue dramatic music…) and we head about a kilometer back to the car. He immediately opens up the boot and starts mucking around in the engine as I try frantically to explain that the engine is fine and that the problem was with the accelerator pedal. After disregarding me and rooting around for a bit longer (I swear he was sticking wires and hoses into his mouth for a taste-based diagnostic, ick!) he suddenly turns to me, sheepish, and says that there is something wrong with the distributor and I’ll have to get it fixed. Mmm hmmm, I say, (thinking that the car had just come from the mechanic, so hopefully there isn’t anything terribly wrong with it) and gesture again towards the broken cable. Finally taking heed, he climbs into the driver seat and announced that the cable is busted. “Indeed,” I reply, my irritation mounting. After attempting to reconnect the cable using some spare wiring (and other bits of junk that he found hanging about), he tells me to test the engine. The accelerator seems to be back to working, but now there is something profoundly wrong with the engine, which had been FINE until be started poking around. And it turned out he had broken the cap to the distributor. Good job, buster…as if the car didn’t have enough problems already. Clearly the diagnostic-by-stiking-things-in-your-mouth-and-randomly-poking-at-stuff…not a resounding success. So the car limped along another two kilometers towards the dam and then coughed, wheezed, and shuddered to a final halt. So we locked it up (again) and flagged down a bus to Itaipu. And abandon the car in Brazil. Poor Tim, I felt like our vacation was a complete disaster por culpa de la fusca!!!
Yup, that's the carburetor on the ground. And Tim, still a trooper! We did a lot of pushing (of the fusca).
Tour around the very impressive dam (Tim was particularly interested since he’d been to quite a few power plants in his day), a very delicious salami sandwich and beer (mostly because we were starving at that point!), and a bus ride back to the foot of the bridge.
I figured we could walk across the bridge and take a local bus back home. Modesta said that she was waiting for us at home and lighting up the grill—hosting an asado, or Paraguayan BBQ in Tim’s honor…so we were supposed to get home stat! The walking path across the bridge routed us through Brazilian immigration and customs, so I had to do a little fast-talking about why we had entered the country without getting a passport stamp (while Tim looked on, exhausted but still a trooper). The sun was setting over the Paraná river as we walked home across the bridge, the city nearly deserted in the evening after all the shops close, the smugglers and hustlers and merchants have already packed things up and headed home, the only sounds were from the rustle of stray dogs and street kids picking through the detritus of packing material and discarded cardboard boxes. And finally home after a marathon day. And of course greeted by the delicious smell of ribs wafting towards us as we walked through the door.
(Photo-op on the bridge!)
I figured we could walk across the bridge and take a local bus back home. Modesta said that she was waiting for us at home and lighting up the grill—hosting an asado, or Paraguayan BBQ in Tim’s honor…so we were supposed to get home stat! The walking path across the bridge routed us through Brazilian immigration and customs, so I had to do a little fast-talking about why we had entered the country without getting a passport stamp (while Tim looked on, exhausted but still a trooper). The sun was setting over the Paraná river as we walked home across the bridge, the city nearly deserted in the evening after all the shops close, the smugglers and hustlers and merchants have already packed things up and headed home, the only sounds were from the rustle of stray dogs and street kids picking through the detritus of packing material and discarded cardboard boxes. And finally home after a marathon day. And of course greeted by the delicious smell of ribs wafting towards us as we walked through the door.
And that’s not even the first week of adventures!
(roll credits and queue John Williams soundrack (possibly provided by the speaker system on the pony cart. See below :) Sequel to follow shortly!)
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