The view from the airplane says it all: small parcels of land, plenty of green, small villages and red earthen tracks.
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Asunción, The City
Tag: Paraguay
It happens that some don’t know where I am, or wonder where the country I’m cycling through is actually situated, or that I am elsewhere than where some think I am. Confusion all over.
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Update: Views You Never See
Meet Alex Chacon What you never see in my blog posts you see now on Alex’s YouTube channel.
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Short Update: Meet the Mennonites
When raising the word Amish or Mennonites one might be inclined to think: ‘Devout hard working people, women in dark ankle length dresses and men in similar old-fashioned style clothing. They are pious, quiet and live an utmost simple life without pleasures as many of us know them whereby avoiding modernity and social jumble with outsiders.’
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Military Holiday All Inn
The only choice I have -and count on- for safe camping is the border check-post, 7 kilometer before the actual border crossing. Having arrived here after 110 kilometers cycling in a heat of 40 degrees, I surrender to the customs. That means I must first drink the offered tereré, as if I am not tired and hungry but tranquillo is the key to success.
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Mennonites and Indians in the Chaco II
Lomo Plata hosts many indigena in search for work. They just hang around at factories, dressed in poor, dirty clothes, arriving in truck loads. I am surprised when I see a Mennonite woman being homeless and asking for a rather big donation.
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Mennonites and Indians in the Chaco I
I notice the first bleak, sullen looking German-alike faces when I reach the turn-off to Hochstadt, another 35 kilometer on hard mud combined with loose sand. Whereas the average Paraguayan is hard to read, the German looking faces are reminding me of Stalin. I know Stalin isn’t German, so aren’t the Mennonites. They are Paraguayan.
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No Fence for the Feathered
‘It’s a dangerous route, the road is narrow’, ‘there are wild animals’, ‘not so many people live there’, ‘it’s too hot’, ‘many mosquito’s’, ‘the distance between houses is big’, ‘it’s a jungle, nothing is there, boring route’.
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Teetotaler Tereré Terrain
‘Paraguay is weird,’ said the student I’d met in Ponta Pora. Good, weird suits me. I’d heard little to nothing about Paraguay and so it only became more attractive to me. Paraguay is in the heart of South America, wedged between Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. 95% of the population lives in eastern Paraguay, which is easy to figure out on the map of this country.
Cycling Cindy 