Middle of Nothing Paraguay

Like I said in the last blog post, Paraguay has under 7 million people in it. Of those 7 million, probably 6.5 million live south of the line made by connecting Ciudad del Este and Asuncion. That means the northern half of Paraguay is barren. And, for good reason. Its mostly Chaco, which can be further divided into wet and dry, with the wet half being swampy and largely uninhabitable and the north half being like San Diego dessert. Incredible that life exists there at all, and even more incredible that people choose to live there. That, my friends, is approximately where Acacia and I were heading.

Our journey starts from Asuncion, where there are three main highways out of town. The one we came in on which goes east towards Ciudad del Este, one that goes almost straight north, and the other one goes northeast towards Concepcion, the only city of size in the northern half of Paraguay which is the main hub people leave for river trips north into Brazil along the Rio Paraguay. Thus, we had a 50/50 chance of getting the right highway out of town since we would at least recognize the way we came from. Fortunately, signs were well marked leading us along the Ruta Transchaco between Bolivia and Paraguay, which is a part of the Pan-American route. Unfortunately, signage stopped leading us along the road that we kept following. And after about an hour of driving and not seeing signs for any of the towns we should have been passing, we stopped at a gas station and asked if we were on the right highway. "Ruta 9?" The gas station attendant asked with a smile on his face that said 'you are very lost buddy'. And, there was really no shortcut back to the Ruta Transchaco. So, an hour back we drove to the intersection about 5km out of Asuncion where we should have made a left to stay on the right highway.

The road was relatively well paved for the first 5 hours or so, which actually made the drive a straight-as-an-arrow kind of never have to turn the steering wheel kind of drive. Oh, also we had left the phone charger in the hostel in Asuncion so no phone music. And, turns out radio is scarce in the middle of nowhere. So we just had each other for entertainment. Anyway, after about 5 hours the road turned into a pot-holy road which was fine until it got dark and I was trying to fly down this 120km/hr road trying to spot these pot holes with the world's weakest headlights. Lets just say the car took a beating. But, we arrived to this town that had been described to us as a small Mennonite colony in the middle of nowhere. Well, it kind of shattered my expectations at least. You could see the light pollution from a few miles out, and I dunno much about Mennonites, but there were plenty of "hoodlums" wandering around late at night, and cars driving around, etc. I guess I was expecting more of an Amish village from the 1800's. This was not that. Filadelfia was actually surprisingly much like any other city of its size we'd been to in South America. After driving through the main drag of town, we pulled over to find the address of the hotel listed in the Lonely Planet, and discovered that we were literally parked in front of it. Good sign.

We checked into the hotel and got our super hot west facing room, and then went to the restaurant at the hotel, which was pretty much the only one in town. Apparently Mennonites don't go out much. Dinner was good, we had a few beers and played some card games and went to bed since there really wasn't a whole lot going on in Filadelfia late at night.

The next morning I woke up wanting a giant breakfast, as usual. Fortunately, the hotel we were staying at had a buffet breakfast. Unfortunately, the breakfast was not included in the price of the room, so it took a little bit of convincing Acacia that we should in fact pay for a huge buffet breakfast, at which point we spent the next couple hours hanging out by the buffet. It was great. As we were trying to leave the hotel, an entire posse of missionaries walked in to use the computers/internet. We asked them a bit what was worth checking out in the area, and they pretty much said that they don't tour much when they're supposed to be working. Ouch!

Leaving the hotel we tried to go to this museum across the road, but it was closed. So, then we decided to try to find a phone charger before we began the longest stretch of driving without a city of the whole trip. But, as we were driving towards the center of town, there was some huge parade going on. We parked and watched as traditionally dressed Paraguayans danced and played music through the streets. It was pretty fun. But, it meant that, like the museum, any store that might have had a phone charger was also closed for the day because of the parade. Bummer.

Hardly traditionally dressed... John must be confused

 It also meant that getting out of town was pretty tough, but I managed after being directed around a roundabout the wrong way. The road was terrible, like it had been at the end of the day before. Loads of deep pot holes. After about 100 km the road got even worse, there would be meter deep ditches across the paved highway, or the highway would suddenly have a 50 cm drop onto a dirt road, riddled with more giant holes. It was terribly slow going and so hard on the car. On the way we had to stop at immigrations, about 400 km from the border to get our exit stamps because there was pretty much nothing between there and the border. After a police stop we attempted to navigate to a park that we were planning on camping in that night

The most interesting thing at immigrations, he was just hanging out with the truckers