Río Paraguay, Paraguay - The Cacique II

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. convinced that our few remaining guaranies would not be enough money for the boat. That after a week of waiting for it, we'd have to watch it sail away without us and then trudge on over to the bus station like we always do. I wasn't fully awake, just awake enough stare into the darkness and worry. As soon as the alarm went off at 5:00 a.m. I told Michael my thoughts.

"Well, we'll either have enough or we won't," he said.

"It's all my fault. I shouldn't have told you to pay for dinner with cash. Why did you listen to me?"

"I don't know... because you sounded so sure and you're usually right about things like that."

Well this time I was sure I had not been right at all. We showered and packed, with me worrying the whole time. I had fixated on this South American riverboat trip for so long that the thought of losing it just because I'd wanted to save 10% IVA on a $15 dinner was just too much to bear. And after Michael had been so willing to stay one more week so that I could have the boat trip, too.

I had one last twenty dollar bill among the leftover cordobas and quetzales and pesos in my money belt. Michael took it out to the front desk and returned with over one hundred thousand guaranies. He said the guy had told him he wasn't supposed to change money, but he did it anyway. The guy had also told him that he now had no more guaranies. But he had so easily solved our problem completely. Bless him, and bless the Hotel Frances. I hope he didn't get in trouble.

Michael and I boarded the Cacique II at 6:45 and had enough money not only for the basic tickets (string up your own hammock or sit in a rickety chair below), but also to spend the extra 30,000 guaranies to get ourselves a camarote (cabin). If our friend hadn't changed our money this morning, we would not even have been able to afford the basic tickets of 52,000 each. The two tickets with camarote set us back 134,000 guaranies in total, about $23.50 USD.

Our little cabin was so cute. It bore a striking resemblance to the room we'd had in Bethel, yet I loved it. The smallness, the grubbiness, the third-world-green paint, it all added up to a charming setting for our South American riverboat experience. It's so funny how much context colors an experience. There was even a fan, a large floor model that took up a third of our floor. There was a delicious breeze all day and we didn't need the fan, but it was a nice touch.

We bought some empanadas from a vendor to supplement our already ample food supplies and then went to explore the boat. We were pretty excited when the boat first started moving. The sky was an early-morning silver and we moved pretty quickly over calm water broken only by random clutches of floating water plants. Sometime after we passed under the impossibly high bridge that leads to Concepcion, the sky began to turn blue.

Nothing much really happened all day. The only excitement was of the "wow, I'm traveling down the Río Paraguay on a riverboat! This is so cool!" variety. The boat crew barbecued up a mess of big Flintsones style ribs and some rice and they gave a plate of them to Michael. It was not clear whether that was a part of the service or whether they were just being nice. Either way: good deal.

Michael and I hung over the railing and admired the green riverbanks visible on both sides of the boat. We looked for navigational signs, comparing our wildly divergent nautical educations. While his grandfather had told him all about things like "red right return," mine had told me that the blue ones were the buoys and the red ones were the girls. (You may have noticed that my boatly terminology is spotty at best.) But we both really like being on a boat.

Every so often the boat would ease over to the riverbank and stop so that people could debark and goods could be unloaded. Families waited to meet the boat, noisily climbing down the muddy embankments to collect bundles and children, dogs barking and wagging and running up and down.

Michael and I sat and observed the family reunions and speculated about the circumstances. We watched a couple of young boys, one from the boat and one from the shore, trying to manuver a rowboat across the narrow gap between boat and land. "It's like City Mouse and Country Mouse," I said. I put on my Library Lady tone. "City Mouse doesn't wan't to get his pants wet. Country Mouse doesn't know how to use a Walkman."

Later we talked with the two other foreigners on board. She was English and he was French. They'd just spent a couple of months in Brazil and the English girl asked if we'd been.

"Well, yes, but," Michael began.

"Wonderful! Such an amazing country! And how long were you there?"

"Just two days-"

"Two days! Two days? But how can you appreciate such a big country in only two days? How can you see anything? There is so much to see! What can you do in two days?"

Michael explained how we hadn't planned on going but had ended up there accidentally. She quieted down, but she still looked at us in suspicion. Later he told me that the next time someone asks us if we've been to Brazil, we're just going to have to say no.

They offered us terreré, which they were sipping from a plastic cup. It had a pleasant minty taste, but something wasn't set up right and all kinds of leaves were coming up through the bombilla. So I declined subsequent offers to screeches of, "Come on, you're in Paraguay!"

Michael asked them if they knew about the terreré ritual. The woman said no, she didn't, she hadn't noticed anything about a ritual - a ritual? Like some systematic thing? No, she didn't know anything about that at all.

When Michael finally got a word in edgewise, he started to tell her how the youngest person is responsible for pouring the water, and-. She seized on that immediately. "Oh, that's me!" she said. "I hope! No, I am!" (I'm not so sure about that. But I also don't care as much as she seemed to.)

"America doesn't have any rituals, does it?" she said. "Maybe a milkshake ritual." She laughed.

Yes. Every day at 4:00, Americans put down their guns, get into their SUVs and drive to the mall to have a nice, big milkshake. All 300 million of us. We feel very proud of this aspect of our culture. 

The nice thing about having a camarote on your riverboat journey is that whenever you feel like it, you can go in there and close the door and lie down on your bunk and watch the shore scrolling by through the window and enjoy the cool breezes and the peace and quiet.

Michael, far more patient than I, stayed to talk to them further. He asked the French guy how much longer they would be traveling and the response was a disdainful look and, "There is no leemit." Michael came to join me soon afterwards. We have learned a lot on this trip, and one thing we've learned is that we really enjoy each other's company.

We watched the sunset from on deck and then went below to try the food we'd heard such bad things about. It was a fairly basic and reasonably decent but not delicious rice dish with hunks of mystery meat in it, 4000 guaranies. The much-needed hot sauce was free. They had no beverages of any kind for sale.

The bunks were comfortable, and after shivering on deck and admiring the sharp, icy stars for a while, we went to bed early. There were no blankets, so we bundled up in all our techy clothes. It was the first time on the trip that I wished I had a sleeping bag. Still, even curled up and faintly shivering, it was thrilling to be sleeping in bunks in our own camarote on a riverboat in Paraguay.