Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Luckily that wasn´t the case. But I did see many other people on the river is little lanchas (personal boats) as they slowly crossed back and forth the Rio Paraguay.

I now know where Gabriel Garcia Marquez (he´s a Colombian author if you´re scratching your head) gets his ideas. Read Love in the Time of Cholera and you will roughly understand my 3 days on the Rio Paraguay (minus any of the relationships, which is what the book mainly is).

Pure peace while on the river. And pure mayhem as soon as we dock at any tiny port along the way. Even in the middle of the night entire towns would come out to meet the boat.

At the beginning I thought it would be a hellish trip as we had well over 100 passengers crammed into every nook and corner. However, with every stop more people exited than entered (there were several exceptions to this) and more space slowly opened up. I ate next to nothing over the several days - some fruit and some granola bars. I just wasn´t hungry.


My hammock, which I rented for $3, was precariously placed over a bench on which several ladies would sit with their heads bent to the side to see around my feet. I generally went to bed late so as not to bother them too much, because by that time the bench had become a bed for one of them - the other even further down on the floor with her a sack of flour for a pillow. My view from the second floor included a window out to the river, 7 or 8 other hammocks in the hall to my right, and a vantage point above the maze of sleeping bodies strewn across the floor .

The banks were littered with crocodiles sunning themselves and cal (lime) factories spewing white dust. The sounds were the motors and the occasional explosion from lime quarries. Those and my bad harmonica playing. I now have Oh When the Saints and Amazing Grace down, though!



My hammock´s view. The chalky cloudiness surrounding every Cal factory.



I thought some of my Northern California friends might enjoy the name of this cal company - Norte Cal.




On the river was my favorite part. Camalotes (a lilypad-esque floating thing) brushed my legs as I sat with my legs dangling over. I bought a cheap harmonica in Concepción before embarking and it was a great companion.

The harmonica also allowed me to meet lots of people. They would come over to listen or inquire and I would pass it off and watch as someone new gave it a try. Some of the young indigenous boys loved it, but I ended up selling it to a guy who was going further upriver to work for a few months. It was interesting that the indigenous people mainly stayed and slept out of the deck while others were inside...just one of the small things I noted along the way.





We carried cargo of every type. Probably 15 or 20 motorcycles made their way on and off the little ramp used for boarding over the several days. We had fruit, furniture, bread, veggies, fish (dead), livestock and pets (alive) like pigs, dogs, cats, etc. Things came and went, sometimes without us stopping but merely having a small outboard motorboat tie on until the goods and people were loaded on.



The people were of a wide variety. So were the hats.



The stars were amazing. Great weather and plenty of mosquito repellent resulted in few problems.