The alarm creeks from my phone on the other side of the room. It’s 5:30 am. Somehow it’s already light out and that light is trying it’s best to make it inside, creeping through every crack in the wooden walls and every seam between the misplaced roof tiles. I get up off the ground, find the phone amongst the clutter of last night’s late-night dinner remains and switch it off. We’re not working today. It’s Thanksgiving – even though it was really yesterday – but hey, you take what you can get. Somewhere on the other side of the country a feast of turkey and all that goes with it is awaiting us – all we need to do is get there.

The wake up call has me wishing, ever so briefly, I didn’t stay up as late as I did last night. The three of us met up yesterday to get an early start on the trip and travel south together. It’s a long trip – you may as well have some company. I unlatch the front doors and they swing in hitting me in the shoulders as I squint into the school yard. The house, or old classroom, is falling down; the floor sloped so badly the doors don’t want to say closed. By the time I walk back from the bathroom, across the dew covered soccer field, the other two are up. As they pack up and make their own trips across the grounds, I peel some mangoes and a few bananas I carried in yesterday, throw them in the blender with a little water and some sugar – and all of a sudden this day is getting a little better.

After everything is packed up we finally get moving, chain up the doors and walk over to the neighbors. We need to find a canoe. John’s site is an island. Actually, it’s a peninsula that everyone calls and island. The quickest way in – or this morning, the quickest way out – is by boat. We’d planned on throwing one of the local kids 2 mil to row us across, but like most plans around here, this one is quickly falling apart. John goes off searching for a boat, while I entertain the 10 year-old neighbor kid (or mainly myself) in the hopes that he’ll be our new rower – to bring the boat back at least. Word has it there’s a boat at the shore, but now I find out this little fellow isn’t old enough to go across on his own yet. After a few minutes of discussion with the family we get it all worked out that somehow him and his sister have the right combined age to make the crossing together and can bring the boat back once we all reach the other side. Eager to make up for lost time we all head down the hill toward the water.

The wooden rowboat needs bailing. After that it’s time to load. One bike, two guitars, 3 backpacks, 2 kids and 3 Peace Corps volunteers. Kyle and I share the plank that spans the back edge of the boat, John rows, Juan-chi is amongst the bags somewhere making goofy faces back at me, laughing at the way John works the oars (or more appropriately, very fat sticks) and the sister is perched up on the bow, feet up on the front wheel of my bike. It’s nearly 7:45, but the water is still like glass. We cross over what used to be a community sitting beside a small crystal clear stream. The dam changed all that when it created a nearly 100 km long reservoir sinking all those houses beneath it and leaving dry only the longer, higher peninsula that John called home for two years.

We make it across, unload the gear and I throw Juan-chi a high-five telling him I’ll see him in January. His huge brown eyes grow bigger and I try to make my own do the same and we both laugh. They hop back in the boat and make their  way back to that “island” only imagining where we could be going and why the hell we’re taking so much stuff. We’ve got another 3k to go to the ruta where the bus passes. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who came in on bike – and so now am the only one trying to peddle along at walking pace. About halfway up the red dirt road I get tired of this and decided to ride ahead to look for a place to drop off my bike for a few days – and of course grab a few empanadas to even out that mango juice.

As we wait for a passing bus in the shade of some tree on a makeshift bench – munching empanadas and mandioca, hoping the heat will hold off long enough ‘til we finally start to get on our way – we do the quick math to realize not everyone has the money on them to make this journey and that a stop a the bank needs to be added to today’s itinerary. Luckily that’s just the next town over. A few minutes later the first a bus passes, stops, opens the door and then decides it’s not worth their while to take us such a short way down the road and pulls off. Another thirty minutes pass. A second bus flies by and as we throw up our arms in confusion (and a little mock rage) it swerves into the shoulder, pulling off the ruta some fifty meters down the road. We run towards it and reaching the door, it begins to back up – on the shoulder of the highway. Now we’re walking towards the front of it as it backs it’s way back to where we just ran from. Back at our starting point they open the door and let us on – somehow confused that the señora they flew by fifty meters before us isn’t coming down the road to met them with the four feed sacks she had at her feet in tow or balanced upon her head. I tell them she’s not coming and we pull back onto the road.

The bus is full. Packed. Even the aisles. The first few folks crammed in the aisles refuse to move back but we manage to scooch past them and a few others. Wedged between seats, standing passengers, luggage, our own backpacks and guitars we quickly become thankful we’re only headed 10k down the road. When the doors open in O’Leary and we fight our way past the same stubbornly rooted passengers at the front and spill onto the cobbled pull off in front of the small terminal. It’s getting warm out. We split up – John and I to the bank; Kyle for some food for the rest of the trip. A few minutes later John and I are back a the terminal where all bets on personal space are off as one of the ticket hawkers is trying a little too aggressively to sell us a ticket for a bus that may or may not be coming. We sit down at an empanada stand and go through the motions of who we are, where we’re living, from, going and all that.  Kyle arrives and the whole event repeats itself, with people on adjacent benches eying the whole encounter with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion – even though two of the three of us pass through here weekly. The ticket guy really wants to see if they can play the guitars they’re carrying around. Finally a bus arrives. We hop on passing by the driver and chauffeur and the through the second door, into the passenger cabin, only to see that it’s standing room only again. We fight our way to the back, past the more stubborn standers to where there’s space in the aisle. As the bus pulls on and off the road every few hundred meters we struggle to keep our balance and eventually resign to the Paraguayan move we all love to complain about so much – standing sideways in the aisle, leaning with our butts against the sides of the chair backs of the aisle seats. I put my headphones in and try to tune out for the next 50 km ‘til we reach the turnoff to head south.

By the time we arrive at the Ruta 6 turnoff, two of us have found seats. Grabbing our belongings off the overhead shelves, the seats are quickly claimed by other standers. We’re the last ones off and no sooner then I hit the ground the bus pulls away in a cloud of red dust. Across the triangular space left by the intersection of what seems like more roads than there needs to be, we spot a bus facing the direction of Encarnacion and make our way towards it, passing alongside the vendors beneath their low-slung orange tarps that seem only to magnify the heat in the tang-colored light they flood the area with. Ticket vendors quickly accost us, offering over-priced tickets – or what we assume to be over-priced since none of us have been before or really know how far we are from our destination. John talks him down 5 mil in typical fashion and I learn we’ve got another 4 1/2 hours of this left to go.

The front of the bus is full and we make our way to the back. At the same moment that I realize everyone is sitting on the left side to avoid the sun pounding in through the windows on right, it hits me that the seats I’m eying are exactly where the bathroom is usually found. Four and half hours seems like a long time to go without a pee break. I tell the driver I’ll be right back and run back through the vendors to a gas station and find a man mopping out the men’s room. I usher him out as he mumbles something about it not being a public bathroom. I throw 1 mil on the counter on my way out as I run back across the triangle to my waiting hot vinyl seat. We pull off, yet again, and ramble down the road, windows open and rattling, curtains flying and fluttering any which way and seats with blown springs jiggling us toward Encarn. I search my iPod for something I’d never listened to until the night before and close my eyes.

An hour later, after a “nap” of what can only really be described as a series of neck-reflex exercises, I open my eyes and stare out the window. This is my first time traveling south through the Departmento of Alto Parana. It’s the last “state” before the eastern border with Brazil and as I look out the window it seems I can see unobstructed all the way there – nothing between me and border but a sea of soy. They grow soy in my community, but it’s all on individual plots in some sort of quilt-like pattern, broken up by other crops or what little is left of the remaining forest. Here, the soy doesn’t even stop at road fence, it grows right up under, using every sliver of arable land. All that distinguishes the sky from the ground on the horizon is the color change – occasionally punctuated by one lone tree – like something off of an environmental awareness poster – no doubt only left there to provide some shade for anyone crazy enough to cross the green desert on foot. It continues on for another hour and half.

A group of kids barrel down the aisle and interrupt my daydreaming and John and Kyle’s chatting on the finer points of something I’m sure they thought was quite interesting. They’re slinging warm sodas. We decided to ask for cold beer and the one with a fistful of fluorescent colored straws tells us what we had already figured – they don’t have any. And that they aren’t really bus vendors, but raising money for some kind of school activity. Realizing that no one else on the bus wants to by their warm sodas either they settle into conversation with us. A few minutes later the bus makes another stop and they hop off. Just as we’re about to pull away they re-appear outside the window with three cold beers and and an extended palm. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.

Eventually we pull into a town that doesn’t resemble any kind I’ve passed through in Paraguay before. With more dust, more bustle, and something almost like a visible heat, I felt like we’d pulled into what the border between Mexico and Peru would look like if there was one. Everything seemed to be painted in a peeling off tone of orange – including the corrugated metal canopy the bus pulled up under. We take shifts watching the bags and finding the bathroom. On my way back I search for some empanadas and must have said something out loud, because no sooner then I thought it, a women behind one of the white tile counters set up next to the bus port offers to sell me some. As she bags them up and her co-worker searches the cooler for the additional beverages I’ve requested, another coworker and I go through the motions of where I’m from, where I’m going, what I’m doing in Paraguay and the usual. But all three of them seem more intrigued then usual. Then I remember where I am – there’s no Peace Corps Volunteers any where near here and anyone of them or other traveler headed south surely wouldn’t be doing it along this route. They want to talk more, but the bus engine turns on with the sound of a cement mixer rolling over and I have to run off before it leaves me stranded in this odd little town.

We pass through three or four more of these towns, each one having no problem being a stand-in for the next. The bus slowly empties itself out until it’s just the three off us and couple other stragglers and then slowly fills itself back up until the only free seats are back with us, where the bathroom should be.

Four hours and fifteen minutes after we boarded – a little over 6 hours after crossing over that sunken community in an overloaded canoe – we step off the bus onto the side of the ruta. Just on the other side is the arched gate of the hotel’s sign and below it the road leading the way there. We cross over and into the shade of the winding downhill road. Five minutes later we can hear the shouts and splashing of people in the pool. Silently we all hope to ourselves it was worth the trip and then forget we even asked the question as we’re greeted at the door and put off thoughts of the return for another two days.

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