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Skinny-shouldered parrots, jays with flaming crests, wisps of stork, jabirus brooding like butlers, raw-headed vultures, birds of prey frozen in attitudes of indifference, and flocks of black, brown, grey, white and blue; there was more wildlife to be seen on any bus ride across Paraguay than there was in many patient hours spent skulking about the undergrowth of its national parks. The roadside birds were largely unfazed by the buses thrumming past, while a single heavy bootstep in the parks was enough to put unseen creatures to flight, or to fill a forest with silence or alarm calls.
The parks I visited in Paraguay – and these were the most accessible, least-remote parks – are definitely not major tourist destinations. They were well-equipped, with guest services and rangers ready and waiting, and one even had bilingual information in its museum, but it is not exactly easy to arrive at all these quite-good facilities. Most visitors are locals who drive in, visit the war memorials and promptly drive out again. Hiking trails are well-marked on maps, but are fast receding into the rampant wilderness.
The war that spawned the memorials was the War of the Triple Alliance, in which the (then considerable) military might of Paraguay got embroiled in a battle against the less-prepared forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. During the six years of war Paraguay lost territory, had its capital sacked and had its population reduced to less than half of what it had been. The war effort was pushed on by the increasingly mad dictator Francisco Solano López until he was finally shot down while trying to flee the site of his final defeat.
Parque Nacional Cerro Corá is where Solano died and the war ended. With the end of the last dictatorship in Paraguay in 1989 the memorialising of Solano and his type has passed out of favour, but Cerro Corá is still riddled with monuments to the tyrant that almost saw his country disappear off the map.
The road to Cerro Corá crested the first brief suggestions of hills that I had encountered in Paraguay. Herds of bone-white cattle lay tranquil in patches of clear land studded with intransigent palm trees. Close to the park the soft undulations in the land grew more severe, and stone began to break through the earth, forming great stumps of isolated cliff among the scrub and forests of palm.
I was again dropped on the side of a highway, and pointed off along a dirt road. The park visitors centre, when I stomped up to it, was deserted except for a skinny black cat with a squint. Secure with my bag of bread and ramen I sat and waited for someone to arrive and let me into the bunkhouse.
The sun went down, I helped the cat dig chicken bones out of the trash; no one showed up. I squeezed my pack and myself through an unlocked window and claimed a gritty mattress for myself. I wondered how long I could live on bread alone, given that i could’t heat the ramen. I wondered whether the ghosts or the camp ground psychopaths would come for me first.
A ranger and some cyclists did eventually show up, but even though I wasn’t alone in the park after a full day of wandering its red-sand trails there were more of my footprints than of everyone else’s combined. Although few people explored the trails, they were scrawled across with animal prints; small dogs, big dogs, small cats, very big cats, pigs, deer, rodents, small birds, big birds, very big birds.
The whole park felt a lot like a land that time forgot, with its rolling plain of dusty green punctuated by those great molars of eroded mountain; the sort of place in which men in pith helmets are set upon by dinosaurs. A land remote and magnificent.
One of the great difficulties of reaching the other park was getting its name right. I did finally arrive at Ybycuí, but only after clarifying which Yby- I wanted to visit (I still can’t pronounce the park’s name comfortably). Ybycuí preserves some of the last stands of sub-tropical forest in Paraguay, a great swathe of trees and insects and never-seen animals. There were things out there, bounding through the bracken, but in Ybycuí their privacy is virtually undisturbed.
The memorial here was attached to an iron foundry that functioned throughout the war, manned by the swelling number of political prisoners. Its remote location wouldn’t seem to suit such industry, but I suppose the transport connections were better in those days.
Long loops of streams coil about the park, some flowing and chattering, others still and brooding. Waterfalls link them together and are prominently displayed on maps, but really the best of the park was not these secluded drops, but the grander seclusion of its long, forested slopes, the shadows and the sunlight, the things rustling in the green.
And this was really what the parks can best offer. There is nothing mind-blowing or jaw-dropping about them, but they offer a chance to disappear completely into the mystery and seclusion of their lands; war flickered among the trees and glades of both parks, but since that brief ripple these lands have remained remote and unspoiled. A place where wildlife can hide, and where infrequent gringos can lose themselves.
El Chaco, the vast flatland that covers the northern half of Paraguay and sprawls over into Bolivia, has a reputation as a harsh world of thorns and mud (in winter), or thorns and dust (in summer), where few men would dare or bother to try and scratch out a living. Once upon a time Bolivia and Paraguay, each backed by an international petroleum company, went to war over this region, when it was thought that (as yet undiscovered) oil might be lying beneath all that dirt and scrub.
The Trans-Chaco has a reputation as being a rough, tough stretch of highway that jolts and slithers from one nation to the other, but compared to most of the mountain highways in Bolivia, where every nighttime bump had me convinced we were about to topple over some immense precipice, this road feels tame and civilised. On the Paraguayan side of the border it is even asphalted. The endless, dead-straight strip, on which the vehicles appearing out of distant mirages took many many long minutes to finally pass the bus, was utterly unlike anything I had seen in the past six months. It was all so low, and straight, and flat.
This wild wilderness was where I bid my midnight goodbye to Bolivia, paid my expired-visa fine, and entered into Paraguay, a country I had prowled along the border of on my last South American trip, but had been unable to enter. This time I had the visa, and I was welcomed into the country by disinterested customs officials and straw-haired kids asking for food.
The bus dropped me at a big, blank intersection, and I was told that to get to Filadelfia I should hitchhike, and that it wouldn’t be hard because the Mennos were good people. I’d wanted to stop in Filadelfia for exactly this reason; to find out something about the Mennonite communities that had washed up in waves in El Chaco, and that had somehow managed to thrive and prosper out there.
It was a friendly rancher that brought me to the edge of Filadelfia, and into the strange world that the Mennonites built. Filadelfia is the centre of the Fernheim Mennonite communities, which were settled by groups of Canadian, Russian and German Mennonites fleeing various persecutions of the 20s, 30s and 40s. It is also the first town I’ve seen in South America not to have a central, monument-filled plaza. The Mennonites wasted no time with such things; the first buildings erected here were a hospital, an industrial plant, the cooperative centre where goods are bought, sold and bartered, and the town hall, which had to serve for all governmental, social and religious purposes in the early days.
Today Filadelfia is a logical grid of dusty streets, its ‘main street’ being the strip of shops facing the plant and old town hall across a wide avenue. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed children tinkle along on bicycles, and giant pickups roar through the town. A few blocks from the ‘centre’ in any direction and the asphalt once again gives way to dust tracks and wild scrubland of cactus, bottle trees and thorns.
The success of the Mennonites here is a great credit to their work ethic; ‘Faith, Work and Unity’ is the maxim on the municipality sign, and the communities have thrived and brought prosperity to the Chaco through an uneasy mix of disparate cultures and values. The Mennonites are big land-owners out here, and they have cleared vast tracts of land to graze the cattle (this is illegal today but continues) that produce renowned Menno dairy products, but there are many miles of Chaco and not all that many Mennos, and much of the hard and menial work is done by members of the indigenous communities that have existed in some form or other for centuries in El Chaco. While Filadelfia represented a new and remote home for the Mennos to preserve their beliefs in, it is also a successful farm town, full of teenagers on dirt bikes and pin-ups advertising cheap beer to those whose beliefs do not forbid such things. Street vendors sell pirated DVDs, which apparently aren’t overtly prohibited in the Bible. I spent my first night in a rough hotel patronised by brown folk and my second in a neat, clean place patronised by white folk. The town is more or less divided along these lines; the wealthy, white people are greeted in German, and the poorer, brown people are greeted in Spanish or Guaranì. A polite formality exists and maintains the balance between the two groups, and as long as that harmony survives the community flourishes. This is probably the most multi-lingual country town anywhere in the world.
I didn’t do much with my time in Filadelfia; the town can be walked in an hour, its only museum can be seen in a few short minutes (a few more if you can read German), but it is none the less a fascinating place, with its strange ethnic mix, and its rigid formality. A trickle of tourists pass through, and these generate cautious curiosity. Cameras provoke suspicion. I did have the chance to meet a fellow couchsurfer who was doing time as a volunteer out here. As interesting as she was finding her work, there couldn’t be many tougher places to live as an expat; the rigid Mennonite codes and sensibilities imposed upon her because, as a white girl, it is with these that she belongs. And even apart from this there is the simple fact that there is almost nothing out here; the town is as dry as Mennonite aesthetics, or the vast emptiness of El Chaco.
My favourite sliver of Filadelfia life was that although the community has adopted the long, catatonic siesta, this siesta is still commenced and terminated every day by a loud bullhorn sounding from the industrial plant. Not a minute more relaxation can be tolerated, and as the horn sounds the sleepy streets become busy with motorbikes as people rush to and from work, cleaving to their defining work ethic and bringing a few frantic moments to this otherwise sleepy scrubland town.
I’ve probably never been so full of preconceptions about what I would find in a town as I was when the bus brought me into Santa Cruz. From the Che sites the bus had lumbered ever downhill into overgrown, tropical lands where the clothing got scantier as the foliage got denser, until we reached the big smoke that I’d heard so much about.
From a tourist perspective it would be easy to overlook Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s largest city in terms of population and of urban sprawl. From a holistic, wanting-to-see-both-sides perspective, though, the city is impossible to ignore. Even if there is really nothing to see here.
La Paz is high and dense, crammed into a canyon, full of old traditions, and fanatically loyal to Evo. Santa Cruz is flat, low and tropical, sprawling over the by turns muddy and dusty flats, full of SUVs and American brands, and rabidly, rabidly anti-Evo.
None of this is any secret; Santa Cruz is billed as more Miami than Bolivia, and it has often erupted into violence and confrontation with Evo and his loyal factions. I was expecting to finds signs of all this, but on the other hand I’ve met great cruzeñas (one in particular) in other parts of the country, and these people testified to the friendliness and casual openess of the city. It is a world far removed from the hard stoicism of the mountains.
Walking the streets, Santa Cruz struck me as a weird cross between Houston and Manila, although the locals of either city would have good reason to consider Santa Cruz as small-fry in comparison with their own metropolises. None the less the similarities are there; Santa Cruz has grown out of a colonial Spanish outpost, and in its centre traces of this are still visible. Until a few years ago sloths hung from the trees in the leafy central plaza. The city has really only become significant in the last 60 years, though, as highways and railways have linked it with the rest of Bolivia, and more importantly with Brazil and Argentina. These allowed bargain-hunters in and agricultural produce out. Although how much more beef and fruit do Argentina and Brazil need? The rise of cocaine and the rise of Santa Cruz may form a far more important correspondence.
More important still was the discovery of grand gas reserves in Santa Cruz department. Thus came Houston to Santa Cruz, a city now of opportunistic businesspeople, of the nouveau riche, of urban sprawl, and of gaz-guzzling vehicles. Nobody is anybody without a car in Santa Cruz; how else would the world know what music you like to play?
I had no idea what to do in Santa Cruz. I wandered the city centre looking for guidebook-recommended restaurants, but most had moved on. Time and again I returned to the pretty central plaza, where old men gathered to play chess, and dignified, jacketed vendors sold steaming cups of coffee with rapidly-forming skins. Nuns flitted by and dogs attired in far more expensive clothes than mine strained on their leashes. Still, the most surprising thing about this place was how Bolivian it felt.
No true cruzeña would want to hear this. The woman I stayed with, among others, sang the praises of Santa Cruz, a modern, cosmopolitan city without the problems of the poor mountain pueblos. But the salons and boutiques of the centre quickly give way to familiar crumbling facades and dirt streets. The people here are whiter, many are taller and slimmer than the mountain-dwellers, but they are still filled with caution and curiosity and need to stare a bit when they spy a gringo. There are still people begging, people selling whatever they can to earn a crust, people sleeping on crushed cardboard in doorways. In Santa Cruz everyone can work if they want to, my hostess told me, but the city is known for its crime too, and even immediatly beyond the high walls and gates of the hostess’s house there are decrepit hovels, and streets that are little more than thick bogs of mud.
On my Saturday night in Santa Cruz the city gathered around any public screen to watch featherweight Venezuela beat the Bolivian national team in a world cup qualifier.Anguished faces and fists slamming on tables – just like those in every other city in the country – showed that beneath all the vitriol of regionalism these people are Bolivian, just like their highland rivals.
Why so much hatred then? Why the photographic exhibits proudly showing cruzeñas attacking police, storming government buildings, humiliating indigenous people? The uniformity of the bile on the tip of every tongue here makes me throw questioning glances at the media, which makes no attempt at objectivitiy, and is (of course) owned by the powerful and wealthy of the region. These people have reason to hate Evo; Santa Cruz has risen as a haven of semi-legal business, of tax evasion and of getting unmarked packages across the border. Evo wants to redistribute land, ensure the government receives its share of all profits; he wants to centralise and legislate, and hamper the freedoms these remote jungle traders enjoy. And from these people, I can only assume, spreads all the fascistic claptrap about the need to defend ‘liberty’, to fight Evo and his indigenous, pagan hordes. The same old, tired story of the cunning and the influential tapping into the credulities, ignorances and vanities of those propping them up.
Three days in Santa Cruz was more than enough. I grew tired of all the pro-Santa Cruz babble and the anti-Evo drivel; for all its wealth Santa Cruz is a dull city, low on art, low on prettiness or curiosity, low on traditions and culture, high on shopping and gas. The sad truth, I suspect, is that those making all the money know that this ia a temporary thing, and are just trying to make what they can while they can. The gas supplies will deplete, the tax and border regulations will tighten, and they will be forced to take their rackets elsewhere. There is thus little reason for them to invest in the city; SUVs are a safer investment, and will allow them to flee the scuppered city all the more quickly when the time comes.
I said my tearful goodbyes to my little world in Sucre, having delayed the inevitable for a full month, striking off one by one every name from my list of intended cities-to-visit, until there were only two names left, Samaipata and Santa Cruz; a cursory visit to the lush low and lower lands of Bolivia’s East before I left the country behind.
The last day in Sucre was all rushed goodbyes and slow shuddering hugs before a bus rushed me off and into the night. At 4am I was left on the dusty highway on the outskirts of Samaipata and spent the next few hours loitering about the town, the air full of rooster howls and dog cries, until a hostel opened its doors.
Samaipata is talked up on Bolivia’s gringo trail. Situated at less-than-troublesome altitude and between animal-rich national parks, milennia-old ruins and the villages where Che Guevara passed his last days, it is known as a place to relax in between partaking of the many adventures in the region. I’d long had my eyes on the Che trail, but as the time dwindled away it too had been scrubbed from the list of intended destinations.
Samaipata by daylight looked almost identical to Samaipata in the small hours of the morn. The town was empty, its lush central plaza abandoned, most of the shops and restaurants closed. Only the string of tour agencies had opened, but the price for a personal tour (there certainly wasn’t anyone around to share a tour with) per day was almost double what most Bolivian make in a month, and as usual the miser within me screamed his arid objections. There just didn’t seem to be any way to do anything in Samaipata; I was left my scratching my head and wondering whether Che Guevara had died of boredom.
On my first afternoon I wandered out to El Fuerte, the only Samaipata site more or less within walking distance. A pretty and mysterious place it is, perched, on a hilltop overlooking green valleys. ‘The Fort’ itself is a natural stone slab atop the ridge and riddled with ornamental carvings and niches for holding ancient, long-disappeared idols. The usual myths implicating extra-terrestrials, vasts hordes of gold and super-sophisticated, mysteriously-extinct cultures surround the site; more likely, though, is that generations and epochs of different groups, aided by the sculptural tendencies of nature, gradually hacked and wore away more and more of the site until what was once a curiously big rock became a bizarre bastion of half-terraces and empty nooks and crannies; a place that even today seems eerie and haunted by ghosts or fairies or deities.
The site is slowly being reconstructed and groomed back into service, and the pilgrims are coming, although mostly on half-day guided tours. I was there alone, picturing jabbering deities in every niche, and wondering why Che had picked such a tranquil and isolated spot in which to foment revolution in Bolivia.
I decided to visit some of the Che sites; no doubt there were ways of reaching them that didn’t cost 1000Bs per night. It was just that no one seemed to know what they were. Checking out of Samaipata I had to grapple with the usual dodgy maths and suddenly inflated prices, and speculated that maybe these had been responsible for the death of Che Guevara.
I was very lucky on the dusty highway outside of town. Before long an open-topped truck rolled up which was heading to Vallegrande, where the body of Che was presented to the media and then buried with minimal honour. Over the side of the truck i went; it was full of bags of rice, as well as decrepit furniture and one enormous karaoke machine. Alone in the back, I dozed in the sun, the silly truck-riding grin smeared across my face.
Approaching Vallegrande I asked the driver if he would be continuing on, and he rattled off a vague list of villages further along the road, including La Higuera, where Che was captured and executed. It was only later on, after an immense woman heaved up among the rice bags beside me had begun asking for money, that the driver explained that he wouldn’t actually be going to La Higuera, but that it was a quick walk to the village from where he would drop me off. I wondered if I had missed that point earlier, his clenched country drawl near impossible to decipher, or whether he had just felt no need to mention such details. And I wondered if accent problems and cultural barriers had killed Che Guevara (and apparently they had played their part, Che’s faction learning the Guaraní of the lowlands and not the Quechua of the mountains we were winding among).
The sun set over the endless folds of ridge and valley, and I was left at the roadside with another clench-jawed campesino who was very very uncomfortable in my presence. He kept his distance, head bowed, wolfing down bruised bananas, but with the aid of the cookies stashed in my pack I prised sentences out of him. The driver had said (this I am sure of), that this guy would take me into town, and that it would take less than an hour. After an hour the guy stopped abruptly, said that this was his home, and disappeared over a gate of sticks. Perhaps Che had died by the stoic mistrust and suspicion of the locals (and this too must have played a part, because the revolution certainly didn’t ignite out here).
Alone in the dark with a pack on my back, I decided that this was exactly how Che would have spent his time here. I followed my shadow cast by the moon, and tried to keep my imagination away from the things moving in the trees and bushes.
An hour later I caught a glimpse of La Higuera, a few lights glimmering among the trees. When I came to the town it was deserted, save for the grumble of the generator and the drawn-out creak of the guesthouse gate. The guesthouse was also deserted. Did Che Guevera perhaps die of a spooked and lonely heart? For one of the rare times in this whole jaunt, I craved gringo company.
The town was not completely deserted though; on the main plaza – consisting of three Che monuments and a few sleeping dogs – a gas lantern shone light through the open door of a tiny shop. Into that puddle of light stepped an old lady with a nervous tic and an oozing eye. She offered me stern hospitality, and a headful of reminiscences about the last days of Che.
La Higuera turned out to be beautiful and tiny and well worth the trek. As my host told me over dinner and then breakfast and then lucnh, before ‘the war’ the village had numbered 80 families. Now it numbers about 20. Those that remain are sustained by the slowly increasing trickle of Che tourists. Che may be revered all over the world, but nowhere more so than here, where he is probably alone responsible for the ongoing existence of the village, and certainly for the constant supply of Cuban doctors and investment (the newish school I stayed in was built with Cuban support). The town, being of Santa Cruz province but also of the Quechua-speaking impoverished mountains, is divided between admiration and distrust of Evo Morales, but for Che, a man of more extreme socialistic tendencies, they have nothing but adoration.
And finally, this is how Che died, according my hostess, told over stale bread and gritty coffee and piles of potato and corn, and quite different to how I had previously read, written and imagined the story to go.
Che had stayed in the village, sleeping outside the schoolhouse in which he would later be incarcerated, with his tiny band of revolutionaries. Three hundred soldiers had descended on the village in pursuit, and Che’s group had been forced to flee, jettisoning their scant supplies as they headed down into the dry quebradas below. The soldiers had been unable to find the group, though they had combed the area. They offered anyone in the town $100US for information about the guerillas, but no one would have betrayed them for any money. The guerillas had holed up in a natural cave, inside as big as a house but virtually impossible to find from the outside. Eventually a cattle farmer passing through the quebradas stumbled upon their position and informed the soldiers, who set out en masse. The final shootout took place on the banks of a stream, shaded by old trees. Thirty soldiers were killed, as were four guerillas; Che and his companions ‘Willy’ and ‘Chino’ were captured and taken to La Higuera. Che was a shadow of his former romantic self, his beard long, his face blackened, sick and skinny, his boots in tatters. In the evening he was given his last meal, peanut soup (sopa de mani) and chicken – such ingredients as can’t be found in La Higuera any more – which he devoured with hunger. At 3am he was taken outside and placed against a wall. He said ‘you are only going to kill a man, not the revolution’, and then was shot several times. A helicopter came, scattering the terrified locals. Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande where it was cleaned and exhibited. His hands were cut off and made their way to his widow in Cuba, his body was buried in Vallegrande.
