My Adventures and Travels

This is the cabin we stayed in. Well, it turns out I took a LOT of pictures of the place, and they didn't all fit in my last post! Here are some photos from our second day. After a leisurely morning drinking coffee and eating breakfast, we walked into the town of Belen. In these little towns, you have to learn how to entertain yourself! We stopped by a tiny craft fair, walked forever looking for the river, talked to a really old lady who spoke mostly Guarani, got some ice cream, walked through the cemetery, and walked through a lot of mud! All in all it was a good day.  The next morning we walked a few kilometers up to Belen. Belen's claim to fame is that the Tropic of Capricorn runs through it! Cemetary This is the guy that crawled out of the lake!

Our first long weekend of the year is Spring Break, in September. As with all long weekends in recent memory, epic rain was predicted, foiling our original plans. A group of 8 of us (5 teachers, 2 spouses, and 1 teaching from another school) was originally planning to visit a lake and beach in Paraguay called Laguna Blanca. However, Laguna Blanca is at the end of a 40 km. dirt road. If it rained, we'd be stranded out there-possibly for days. If we made it. Our backup plan was to visit an Ecolodge outside the town of Concepcion, which is up to the north. It took about 5 hours to get there. One interesting thing was this weekend coincided with a big event, the Trans-Chaco Rally, a 3-day car race, said to be one of the most difficult routes in the world. We did see some of the vehicles while we were driving. Paraguayan Traffic Jam As always, as soon as we got out of Asuncion the scenery changed drastically, and it was beautiful. I love driving through the "chaco"-it ...

San Bernardino is a tranquil little resort town, originally settled by German immigrants, only about an hour outside of Asuncion. We took a day trip here to see what there was to see. Our first stop was a flea market. There wasn't really anything of interest to buy, but it was fun to be surrounded by people speaking German! Then we went down to Lake Ypacarai to watch people and boats come and go. It was a beautiful fall day so we just soaked in the sun! After that we started exploring. One of our Paraguayan friends had mentioned an old, abandoned amphitheater. We are the type of people who think that could make a fun afternoon! After many dirt roads, U-turns, asking locals for directions, we finally found it. The last concert held here was Ricky Martin in 1994. After that, the amphitheater was closed and basically became completely overrun by jungle. A couple years ago someone decided to clean it up-but since then it seems it's just a place teenagers come to drink, as ev...

After our hike, we moseyed down the road to an iron foundry called "La Rosada." It was used to make weapons for the triple alliance war in the 1860s-and was also destroyed in the same war. Now it has a museum and you can wander around and look at stuff. Parrots! This is a common scene in the countryside. There are many cows roaming all over the place. After all this adventure, we stopped in the small town of Ybycui to stock up on food and drinks, then went back to our hotel and did some more cooking, and leftover heating-uping. Another fun night of eating, games, and drinking led to this: LEMONS! Now for some reason lemons are not even available in Paraguay anywhere. It's not like they don't grow. In fact, on the hotel property they actually do grow on trees. So at 1 or 2 in the morning, Kristi and I went lemon picking. I'm not sure why it was so fun and hilarious, but the beverage selections of the evening *may* have been ...