Filadelfia, Paraguay - These Are the Voyages of the Trans-Chaco Highway

The bus stopped at 6:00 a.m. and everyone had to get off. I sensed the dust swirling up around me as I stepped off the bus in the darkness. Shivering and stretching and wiping sleep from our eyes, we filed up the dirt road to an unknown destination. The Irish guy caught up with Michael and me and gradually we began to realize we were going to Immigration.

There was no line, and Michael and I were near the door to the small concrete building where all the stamping was to take place. Then suddenly there was a line, and we were at the end of it. The story of our lives in Latin America. We just can’t get a handle on the lineal rhythms. But no matter – the bus couldn’t leave until we were all dealt with.

 “Are those new boots?” the Irish guy asked Michael.

 “No, I had them shined in Santa Cruz.”

“Shouldn’t do that,” the Irish guy tsked. “You don’t want to look too good. You’ll be a target.” I’ve heard that before, but I’ve also heard the opposite – dress well and you’ll garner more respect. I can’t say whether or not the Irish guy had prevented himself from being a target, but he certainly wasn’t getting much respect in the Immigration line. He was still in the shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops of the previous evening and the locals were all discreetly snickering over the half-naked foreigner. 

 “No tienes frio?” one of them finally asked him, laughing. (“You’re not cold?”) The Irish guy had been cold all night, it turned out, but he didn’t seem to have suffered too much. Not as much as I would have, anyway.

There was some question of whether the immigration proceedings would cost money, but in the end, they did not. We were stamped out of Bolivia with no problems. The sun rose. No one was in a hurry to get back on the bus, and we all milled around.

This delay allowed us time to buy a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice from the local woman who had set up a stand with everything that the early-morning border-crosser might need, from snacks and gum to toothbrushes and combs. The juice was warm, but delicious as only fresh-squeezed juice can be.

A local man strolled up and engaged Michael in a political conversation. I wasn’t sure whether Michael was being respected or targeted, but I was being left entirely out of the manly-man discussion, so I got back on the bus.

I was looking out the window when the dog-and-monkey appeared. A regular looking dog, with a tiny little monkey clinging to his back with all four limbs. We don’t know where they came from, or why they were attached, or really anything at all about the phenomenon. Maybe it wasn’t even a monkey. All we knew was that it was Weird and Freaky.

Passengers murmured and chuckled and pointed as the dog ran back and forth and around in circles and the monkey just clung. From inside the bus, I saw Michael pull out his camera and start taking pictures. An ordinary white dog came to join the commotion, panting happily, but someone helpfully shooed him away from the special dog and out of Michael’s camera view. Poor little monkeyless dog.

It was fully light when the bus finally took off and for the first time we could see our surroundings. It wasn’t much. But then looked at another way, it was amazing. We were trundling along the trans-Chaco highway, a flat dirt road with greenery on either side. Sometimes the greenery was high trees, and sometimes low bushes, and sometimes there were narrow foot trails curving through it, but that’s all there ever was. A beige-brown road cutting a swath through green plants to the horizon. And dust. Flat and calm one moment, and the next moment billowing up to obscure the windows.

The Gran Chaco is about 650,000 square kilometers of hot, dry, emptiness that falls partially in Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Hardly anyone lives there, and some call it South America’s final frontier. And the trans-Chaco highway cuts right through it, taking us where relatively few people and certainly relatively few foreign backpackers have gone before.

Dust seeped through around the window-seals and dulled the air. Gradually the bus began to smell. Nothing terrible, just the scent of fifty or so people cooped up in a bus all night, unable to open any windows because of the rampaging dust. But we were lucky that it was dusty. In the rainy season, the dirt road becomes a mud trough. Dust might be annoying, but it doesn’t keep us from our destination. And it makes for a nice soft ride.

We were still in Bolivia, but the landscape did not have the fantastical jaw-slackening characteristics of the northwest, and after a couple of hours I felt like we’d seen all there was to see. A breakfast of Choco-milk and pastries distracted for only a very a short time. After that the view was back to either swirling dust or the knuckles of the guys in front of us. I couldn’t manage to fall back asleep, and so the hours crawled.

At some point during the day, we stopped at a Paraguayan drug checkpoint and all bags were pulled out from under the bus. I barely recognized mine. The forest green material was almost completely beige with dust. Michael, who’d made it off the bus first, said that when the luggage hold doors were opened, dust poured out in streams.

The checkpoint was tedious, but it allowed us to stretch our legs and use the bathroom, which cost 1000 guaranies. ($1USD = around 5,700 Guaranies.) Paraguayan money is going to be tough for me, I know it. The high denomination money is always a problem for me. The agent who dealt with me asked quite a few questions about my passport, but declined to actually examine my newly-filthy pack.

A while later our bus turned onto a blacktop road, and shortly afterwards stopped at Paraguayan Immigration. Two of us at a time stepped into the small air-conditioned shed wherein the current World Cup game was blaring as two officials stamped passports. I fed the last of my dry Peruvian granola bars to the chickens wandering around out front.

Aside from time spent queuing up with our passports, we had spent the entire day on the bus, and finally it was dark again.

Michael fidgeted and worried and examined our map, still certain that we were going to bypass Filadelfia. I don’t know what he was seeing out the windows, because it was all a dark, dusty blur to me, but we finally passed something that inflamed his suspicions, and he went to the front of the bus to talk to the driver and his ayudante.

We’d passed the turnoff to Filadelfia. (Allegedly the driver had never known we were headed there.) So, just exactly as we’d feared, we ended up on the side of the road in the middle of the Chaco. But there was a bus stop, and the ayudante promised that there would be a bus coming along in less than an hour that would take us to Filadelfia.

Our confidence in him was low, but we didn’t want to go all the way to Asuncion just yet, so getting off the bus at this random stop was our only other choice. At least there was a gas station across the street, some sign of civilization in case there wasn’t really a bus.

Michael was in a dark and terrible mood – he hates this type of uncertainty. I was fine. Cheat me out of a quarter and I’ll fume indefinitely, but tell me I might have to sleep by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere all night and I’ll just shrug and say it’s all part of the adventure. Which is what Michael feels about the quarter. Anyway, I clowned around a little and Michael gradually started cheering up until we could both laugh about it.

It all worked out in the end. We found a NASA shed across the street. (NASA, the Paraguayan bus company, not, like, spaceships or anything.) Inside was an old man who sold us two tickets to Filadelfia and then took us back across the road to wait for the bus with us. There were two busses scheduled to come by, and he didn’t want us getting on the wrong one.

He was a very nice man and we were tremendously grateful for his help, but we had a terrible time understanding each other. Michael and I finally decided that he probably didn’t speak much more Spanish than we did. Paraguay has two official languages, Spanish and Guarani, and a lot of people don't speak Spanish at all.

Anyway, he got us on the correct bus – a paragon of cool, clean, fresh-smellingness – and after twenty-three hours on the first bus, an hour by the side of the road, and another hour on the second bus, we arrived safely in Filadelfia, Paraguay.

HOURS ON THE BUS: 356