Our journey can only start once we are reunited with the motorbike, so with pressed jaws, a backpack on my back and one in front, we set off in a city bus to the main bus station in Asunción. After a dull seven hour ride we are back in the capital of the Chaco, Filadelfia.
About a year ago: having attracted a bacterial infection makes walking painful, not a very welcome happening now we, Geo, who became my husband and me, are replacing the hardworking Andreas and Elvira at Iparoma farm. Meanwhile the news reports about a missing Austrian man in Cerro Leon reach us, and Geo and I decide to go another little trip as soon as we are relieved from our tasks. Off to Cerro Leon!
The big city. Asunción. It turns out to be a good choice. There where bus drivers drink térére while driving, watching their clientage wrestling out of the bus.
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.
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.
Cycling Cindy