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Life in Paraguay is essentially life lived one-handed. The conductors on the buses as well as most of the passengers, the pedestrians in downtown Asunción, the motorcyclists in Concepción, the police, the shopkeepers, the idle knots of men in the plazas all manage to go about life using only one hand. Their other hand is forever occupied in clutching a tereré or maté cup; the accompanying thermos is always close by, wedged in armpit or crook of elbow.
Maté is not unique to Paraguay. In northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and in every street in Uruguay people sip on the strong infusion of tea through metal sieve-straws called bombillas. Paraguay, though, is the home of tereré, the same infusion served iced, sweet and packed with medicinal-or-otherwise herbs.
The prevalence of tereré, especially given the inconvenience of relinquishing forever the use of one hand for the sake of lugging it about, defies logical explanation. At all hours and in all situations, tereré is sucked upon in an almost preconscious, unintentional way. It reminds me of the relentless consumption of coca in Bolivia. It reminds me of a child fastidiously, resolutely dragging his security blanket with him at all times.
Perhaps because of this one-handed lifestyle, or the assurance gained by the touch of the tereré flask, or the properties of the tea and herbs, Paraguayan life takes place at a permanently sedate pace. It is a land in which hours and decades disappear easily, where things change slowly and horsedrawn carts still clack along the uneven paved or dirt streets. It is also a place in which people can hide, a haven of obscurity where people can do things they wouldn’t do elsewhere. In the 17th century the Jesuits set up camp here, building their reductions, their missions, and melding their culture with that of the indigenous groups to produce successful, syncretic communities utterly at odds with the exploitative style of other colonial projects in the Americas. In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish territories, and their little utopia came to an almost overnight halt.
Later Paraguay became the site of New Australia, an attempt by Australian leftist outsiders to build a socialist Utopia, This project in time also fell apart, as its members bickered and formed factions and breakaway communities. Eventually the Paraguayan government put an end to the project, dividing up the land among the community members. Apparently Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister tried to start an all-Aryan New Germany shortly after this.
More successful and showing no signs of disappearing or being disappeared are the Mennonites. The promise of unsettled land and complete seclusion drew them groups of Mennonites from the persecutions of the norths down to the wilds of Paraguay, where they could and can practice their religion in peace. Other groups (eg Japanese, Korean, Jewish refugees, Nazis, the Moonies) have also found their havens down in the obscurity of Paraguay.
The country is not always a sanctuary, though. A long history of dictators-acting-with-impunity has kept Paraguay a paradise of corruption, and at times cruelty and barbarism. It has long been a haven of contraband and cut-throat, cut-price shopping for big brothers Brazil and Argentina. Most of urban Paraguay hugs its river-borders, as close as possible to potential customers and commerce. Paraguay’s largest export is hydroelectric power, of which Brazil and Argentina enjoy vast amounts at criminally low prices.
The isolation of Paraguay has also preserved pockets of wilderness and wildlife, and perhaps most curiously of all, a language. Prior to European colonisation, Paraguay was inhabited by many small indigenous groups speaking a variety of languages, many completely distinct form another. Today though, Guaraní is the language of choice, and is more widely spoken than Spanish, with which it shares official language duties. This is the only case in the Americas of an indigenous language being adopted on a widespread scale by non-indigenous speakers, and stands in awkward discord with the plight of indigenous people and culture at large. Several indigenous groups today are on the brink of extinction, their entire remaining populace living in roadside shanties that look out across land they are legally entitled to, but still are powerless to inhabit.
I spent a good deal of time not quite sure of what to do in Paraguay. Its only superlatives, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and the world’s largest aquifier – a huge underground source of freshwater – are not the most thrilling prospective destinations. This is not to say that Paraguay is short on things-worth-looking-at; they are just little known or publicised outside of the country. I spent much time on buses or in plazas watching one-handed life trickle by me. The people I encountered were both shy and eager to help; they would point me in the right direction, pause as though to say more, and then quickly slip away. Although Paraguay has long been a haven for outsiders, these have tended to keep to themselves. The volunteers and tourists that turn up in Paraguay, hoping to find rather than lose themselves, are curious specimens for locals. Even the owner of my hotel in Asunción asked me what was keeping me there (for four nights).
Sometimes the cautious hospitality was incredibly helpful; in Encarnación I was eventually escorted by police patrol to the house of a friend of the couchsurfer I was supposed to be staying with but couldn’t contact. Other times the best-intentioned help didn’t work out; trying to leave Ybycuí I was told that Paraguayans always stop to offer a ride to anyone in need. This is true, but most Paraguayans aren’t on long-hall journeys from town to town. The few available rides on that empty road were mostly over the next hill to the next farmhouse.
The languid pace of life slows even further out there in the suburbs, the towns, the villages, the little concrete houses lost among overgrown gardens and herds of long-eared cows. On that night when I couldn’t find my couchsurfer I stayed in the poorest house I will probably ever stay in, a thing of corrugated iron and crooked-fitting wooden pailings and dirt floor. This was also where I received the warmest welcome fo Paraguay, where I was given a bed and plied with traditional food (including the chicken that had just had its neck wrung). It was here in this least probable of settings that I was finally, fully welcomed into the world of the one-handed, sipping on hot maté to counter the rain drumming on the iron roof and staining everything with brick-red mud.
I had few demands of Paraguay, but one of them was that I see elegant old buildings, their once-colourful facades now peeling, fading, flaking and crumbling. Asunción didn’t disappoint; its historical heart is full of buildings clinging to their faded grandeur, even as their windows are boarded up and they are abandoned to urban decay.
Downtown Asunción is a strange place, the streets are full of civil servants, money changers and shoe shiners. Everyone else, it seems, has moved out to the suburbs. One of the central plazas has become a tent city; people came from out of town to protest and got stuck here, huddled beneath tarpaulins and around smouldering fires. The presidential palace, the senate and the congress (which is a gleaming new thing built with ‘thanks for believing in us’ money from Taiwan) buildings look out across a sluggish curve of the River Paraguay, but between them and the river has sprouted a shanty-town that now shares a back fence with the palace.
Needless to say the palace is well-maintained (and heavily heavily guarded), as are a few other monuments of national pride, like the Pantheon of Heroes where unknown soldiers and dictators lie coffined side by side. Around these proud edifices the downtown is crumbling. Some of the more significant historical buildings are being restored by various cultural centres – Spain, Catalonia, France, Germany and Japan are all involved in preserving Asunción – but these are well outnumbered by the buildings doomed to obscurity. It is a strange feeling, walking the evening streets and realising just how many of the buildings are uninhabited or underinhabited. It was just as strange realising I was the only guest for four nights in a three-story hotel.
Where once the city might have clustered around its palace and cathedral, now it centres itself around the malls. Giant shopping compounds, skirted by drive-through everything (including the first McDonalds I’d seen in seven months) are scattered around outer-Asunción, and these are a far far better place for sampling the contemporary culture of the city. The centre of the city might be decaying, but out around the malls everything is fresh and hip and glossy.
I inevitably cringed, as most backpackers will cringe, at the idea of spending too much time among the malls. The old downtown was full of fantastic, free galleries and museums and cultural centres. The malls were full of people. The old downtown was full of crumble and decay that for whatever reason attracts me so, but the malls had places to eat, supermarkets, bookstores. For any Paraguayo the choice must be easy; grub around among the emptying shells of the past, or hang out with your friends and meet people among the foodcourts and cinemas of new-Asunción. It is a shame for the city, and after visiting the malls the centre feels all the more forlorn and lonely, but this was exactly what I demanded to see. So the malls and the McDonalds, the SUVs and the siliconed wives, the enormous parking lots and air-conditioned foodcourts, maybe they’re all just the inevitable consequence of my search for elegantly crumbling architecture.
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.
