Loma Plata, Paraguay - Everyone's Super Nice And There's Lots of Meat

This morning we actually managed to get up early. We had no choice, because there's only one bus to Loma Plata, and it leaves at 8:00 a.m. This meant we were able to avail ourselves of the free breakfast provided by the hotel, a German-style buffet of ham, cheese, bread, cakes, and juice. After we settled up, the owner of the hotel sent her daughter to help us find the bus station.

The little girl wasn't much of a talker in any of the three languages (Spanish, German, Guarani) that she speaks, but she was sweet, if slightly weirded out by us. She had left us at the small clapboard bus station when we realized that we (and by we, I mean Michael) still had the key to our room. Crap.

There wasn't time to go running back to the hotel, so we told ourselves we'd return it on our way back through Filadelfia. We're definitely going back through Filadelfia, because you can't go from Loma Plata to anywhere else in Paraguay by road without going through Filadelfia first.

We arrived in Loma Plata at around 9:00 a.m. "Looks like we made it to Pinsk," I joked. Michael had no idea what I was talking about, so I tried to tell him about this children's book I'd had, about a guy from Minsk who wants to travel, so he gets on a train and falls asleep, and when he wakes up and leaves the train, everything looks exactly the same, and he thinks he must be in Pinsk. Everyone says hello to him, but he ignores them because he doesn't want to talk to strangers. Then later he wants to go home, so he gets back on the train and falls alseep again and when he wakes up, he's back in Minsk and decides it's a waste of time to go anywhere since every place looks the same anyway. Of course kids are supposed to catch on to the fact that the train didn't move and he never left Minsk at all.

Michael still had no idea what I was talking about and also he hates it when I tell him stories while he's trying to suss out new situations. But the point of all that was that Loma Plata looks pretty much exactly like Filadelfia, and I think that anyone who remembers the book would think that was a pretty dang funny joke. Pinsk, ha ha. (Please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers that book? I tried to Google it and had no luck.)

Right. So Michael changed some more money at the bank and afterwards he inquired of the cops out front how we could get to the Hotel Mora. They told him which way to walk, but said it was very far. So Michael asked if there were any taxis.

That made everyone laugh and one of the officers, Diaz, according to his shirt, beckoned us over to his police car. The car was very, very beat up. It looked reasonably presentable from the outside, as presentable as a compact hatchback police car is ever going to look, but the inside was completey stripped, to the point where it was difficult to figure out how to open the door.

Still, the cops were right, it would have been a long walk and we were grateful to Officer Diaz for saving us from it. It was strange though. He had us in his car, but he didn't seem interested in us at all. Neither did he seem to think he was doing us much of a favor, judging by the confused "um, ok, settle down, kids" look he gave us in response to our effusive thanks.

The Hotel Mora was quiet and sprawling and breezy and there was no one in the reception area. We hung around and examined the maps on the wall, and the animals embroidered on the chairbacks until finally a woman came around the walkway with a bunch of cleaning supplies.

"Buenas dias," Michael said. "Hay habitaciones?"

"No hablo aleman," she replied.

I giggled. Michael tried again, trying to enunciate more Spanishly so that she would know he was not speaking German, and this time she understood. But she couldn't help us, we'd have to wait for the boss lady. Ok.

The boss lady, when she finally arrived, spoke German and very little Spanish, so the room price discussion had to be translated through yet another employee, but finally we were in our small but freakishly spotless room.

Michael had somehow taken it into his head that he wanted to tour a cheese factory, and the boss lady made a phone call for us to someone named Walter. She talked to him for a long time in German and then passed the phone to Michael, who began speaking in halting Spanish and then paused and said, "Oh, you speak English!" and started speaking English.

Anyway, it turned out that it would cost us $140 USD to tour the cheese factory. Walter said he didn't know if any other cheese factories would be the same price but at any rate he could not help us with that because he wasn't allowed to go to the facilities of other Mennonite colonies, just his own.

We (and by we, I mean I) napped through the siesta and then took the long, hot, dusty walk into town. It was seriously eerie how similar Loma Plata is to Filadelfia. But one new thing Loma Plata had was the little cafe attached to the supermercado, where we had a snack of empanadas among a mixed crowd of brown-skinned Guaranis and white-skinned Germans, all eating empanadas or ice-cream, and all staring at us. We then set out to find the Mennonite Museum.

When we couldn't immediately find it, Michael asked directions of the two white teenagers manning a charity collection table in the foyer of the supermercado. They turned out to speak English, and one of them immediately hopped up and walked us over to the museum himself. He'd lived in the US for a while, and said he was probably going back at some point. He was extremely helpful.

The museum was closed, but our friend went around back and collected one of the guys sitting around sipping mate from thermoses and had him unlock it for us. The museum was a small space housing a huge collection of black-and-white photographs chronicling the growth of the Mennonite communities in the Chaco.

In the second part of the museum, a hodgepodge of old trunks and buggies and farm implements, we met another foreigner, quite likely the only other one in town. He was English and he already knew who we were. It turned out he'd been following Michael's blog.

After the museum, Michael and I wandered into the tourist office and met Walter. He still wanted $140 to take us to the cheese factory, (it's apparently a ways away) but sat with us for about half an hour talking about Mennonites in the area. He spoke absolutely perfect English, except he would pronounce butcher as buht-cher and it made me giggle silently in my head, because I'm immature that way.

Anyway, he told us about the great deal the Mennonites have in terms of collective insurance and healthcare. I didn't understand the bit about insurance, but Michael was blown away. He also talked, in response to our questions, about the issues of the different ethnicities in the area. He said everyone gets along famously and there are no problems.

But when Michael brought up something he'd read about groups of Paraguayans allegedly sniffing around the perimeter of Mennonite prosperity and moving in only to commit crimes and otherwise cause problems, Walter responded by telling us how the trans-Chaco highway is graded twice-yearly. Michael and I kind of glanced at each other like, hmm, guess that's none of our business then.

Dinner was at a churrasqueria. We've eaten at places that choose to call themselves churrasquerias, but none of them were like this. This was the deal: for a flat fee (38,000 guaranies each, which is less than $7 USD) we had unlimited access to the buffet, a plethora of breads, salads, side dishes (black beans, yum!) and desserts, and unlimited access to the meat man.

The meat man periodically comes from the grill with a skewer full of meat, a different meat each time. Chicken, chorizo, ribs, big hunks of beef. He goes from table to table and carves off a slice or two for whomever would like some. He will do this until you tell him to stop. And then he will try to tempt you with more, just in case you were maybe lying when you said you couldn't possibly eat another bite.

The beer was icy cold, as cold as it could be without being frozen, just the faintest slush of ice floating at the top, and to keep it at this optimum temperature, it was served in a giant foam beer-cozy. The meat was hot and tender. The buffet selections were fresh and unpawed at. It was a good meal. And it was good that we had a long, long walk back to the hotel afterwards to work off some of our gluttony. The walk, by the way, at least along the main street, had a soundrack of nineties rap, courtesy of teenagers' car stereos.(Friday night!)

Back at the Hotel Mora, the owner wanted to know if we had stayed at the Hotel Safari yesterday and if so, if we had our room key. Apparently she'd had a phone call while we were out. I would have loved to eavesdrop on that call. We sheepishly admitted that we did have the key, and plan on dropping it off tomorrow.

HOURS ON THE BUS: 357

NUMBER OF HOTEL KEYS ACCIDENTALLY KEPT: 3