From the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:
Walter warned that we might lose our film if we took pictures of the border, but eating chicken interested the border police much more than we did. There was an advantage to traveling on the New Years Day holiday. We were the only people trying to get in and Walter was ecstatic, because it usually can take an hour or two there, but this only took about three minutes.
Disappointing, predictable Cuidad del Este, Paraguay’s East City, squatted in the sun, poor and dusty and ramshackle, low buildings crumbling in lumps along the highway, traffic lights out and money changers in leather money belts glowering on the side of the road. Walter stopped, didn’t like the rate, then did a deal at the Esso for fifty Argentina pesos worth of Guarani.
Walter was a big man. He had to open the Peugeot’s door and stick his leg out to get the money in his pocket. I thought it was unlikely he could spend that much today unless it was for gas.
In Cuidad del Este you long to be out in the country again. A John Deere heavy equipment store, red dirt, no landscape and litter. You’d think there was a competition to see how foul they could make the roadside. Men with guns sat on stools. On the other side of town they’d torn up the road and didn’t appear to be planning to fix it.
The caballeros barracks was the nicest building in Cuidad del Este. We could imagine that if you were a young man living in the dirt, it’d make you want to join.
It was as humid as it gets, just sopping drippy. We and others double-passed some of the slower cars on the two lane road which, if nothing else superlative can be said, was in tolerably good shape all the way to Asuncion. Good enough to speed.
Somewhere a road wandered off to the left. A sign with an arrow read “Novotel 247K.”
New Year picnics had the rural population of eastern Paraguay out in their front yards just like they might be anywhere in the rural south – guys in their undershirts, everybody in flip flops. They sat in twos and fives in lawn chairs under trees.
To move was to sweat, but still some played the odd volleyball game. A funeral procession moved slowly alongside the road on foot, a cluster of men carrying a simple wooden coffin.
Here was a girl with a bag on her head as big as she was, there was a stickball game. Red dirt and dust everywhere, and people at every water hole. Tethered cattle. Roosters. Hippodromos. And Gomerias (tire repair shops).
There were so many Gomerias, I got cross at seeing them. I mean, really, every kilometer or two for five hours, a tire out at the road painted with the word “Gomeria.” You either don’t need anything to set up a Gomeria or maybe there was a government subsidy if you did. That’s it, the government must pay people to own Gomerias so they can be in the record book as “Proud Paraguay - home of most of the world’s Gomerias!”
Paraguayans don’t honk their horns. Well, okay, there’s not much
traffic, but that doesn’t stop the rest of the third world’s maniacs.
Here in Paraguay, it’s quiet.
Out into the country we’d occasionally roll past carts with chest-high wagon wheels, and pigs, graineries, geese and people in the open backs of trucks. Lots of old original Volkswagen beetles. There weren’t too many potholes and I was surprised.
Roofs were terra cotta or tin, wells built of brick. Grafitti: “Ricardo y Fatty C.” A car sped by us with the license plate: “Georgia Bulldogs.”
Two hundred kilometers out of Asuncion little colinas (hills) sprang up. A horse wandered too close to the road. The highway stretched ten kilometers ahead, flat and straight, and cumulus appeared on the horizon as the first clouds of the day.
Towns now, not dirty outposts like Cuidad del Este, but proper little villages with centers and trees. 86 K from Asuncion, one town was open for business, stores, shops, kids on motorbikes and police on patrol, they put three-cornered stools out by the roadside. White cloth on top kept chipas, or cheese buns, warm.
Nearer Asuncion wealth was more manifest, cattle and sheep, and farms well tended with well-maintained roads. For a while there was a passing lane.
It stayed unrelentingly hot, with grassy-topped palms and wild cactus. Vendors sold bananas or garlic. As we got toward the big city, you could buy baseball caps and underwear by the roadside, and one sign advertised “Sex Toys.” Signs supplied by advertisers like Bremen beer lit a few shops, and always there were Gomerias.
An excerpt from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey, by Bill Murray.
Photos from EarthPhotos.com. See more photos from Paraguay in EarthPhotos.com's Paraguay Gallery. Read more stories on EarthPhotos.com, about Greenland, Siberia, Tibet and Malawi.
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