Forget Tarrant and ‘phoning a friend. Just go to the banco’s hole in the wall and draw out a few dollar’s worth of Guaranies, check the docket and count the zeros. Now you’re a millionaire. They’ll even lay on an armed guard for you, if he can be bothered to lay down his tereré and lift his rusting muzzle from the ground.

Simplify, simplify, simplify….to paraphrase Henry Thoreau, which leads to the mantra for life de-cluttering: ‘one in, one out’, add to the kit list only if you’re prepared to ditch something else, to which we’ve added the further filter: it should ‘have a dual use’.

Even on the road, gizmos have their magnetic fascination, and like all gizmos they arrive from that planet that trades-in Bic pens for traffic cones and coat hangers. Arriving with their own individual machinations, of unique plugs, indivisible chargers or a cordage of cables. A cabal of conspiracies designed to antagonise, frustrate and breed a further requirement for yet another adaptor or chip after crossing the next international frontier.

To this collection we’ve now added the best that the Mercado plastico has to offer: a Boili and a Fuji. One is an manglification for a single cup heater coil, the other the generic for a plug-in bug zapper. A hotplate that disperses a chemical warfare of pollutants that downs mosquitoes with satisfying satisfaction.

We seem to have given up on cooking in hotel bathrooms, not because they’ve started to install smoke detectors, but more to do with weather and substituting dehydrated carbs with canned corn and tinned lentils. Gone back to what one appalled observer called ’funky salads’. Fruits, carbs and cold carne all in one bowl. It saves on washing up, but leaves a problem: a cup of coffee. Hence the boili. On the road, there’s never a problem, all the gas stations have hot water for flasks, just like all the rooms have mosquitoes for annoyance. Hence the Fuji.

The problem now is to find two ditchable items and a couple of secondary uses for our acquisitions, so as to be able to comply with our own rules. Start by dumping all the brochures from the town three before last and use the Boili as a substitute cattle branding iron. As for the Fuji, in extremis it probably could be used to fry a single slice of chorizo, but it is so small, so useful.  Just think Dengue, then it falls outwith the simplification commandments.  

The net result is that we now carry a bigger volume of techno hardware than we do clothes. It would appear that simplify just isn’t so simple.

Cattle Crush,anyone?

You purchase the headboard in Roque Gonzales, the slatted base in Oviedo and the mattress from the travelling salesman who operates out of Carapegua.  The first choice is an optional artistic one, the second is between wood or wooden, the third is the crucial decision, between ‘colchon and sommier’. Between a flaccid, unorthopedic foam block or a firmer, cooler, sprung mattress. Between a warm, squishy broken night’s sleep and a decent night’s rest.
Paraguayan towns with an apparent single industry are a feature of travel here. An historical aberration of the dictatorship decades. Go to Ita for kama-sutra themed ceramics, to Areguia for clay piggy-banks, to San Miguel for woollen ponchos, to Itagua for ‘ñanduti’ spider lace, to Quindi for plastic footballs, to Lucki for silver craft work, to Oviedo for wooden toys, to Colonel Bogado for chipas, to Atyra for leather, to Caapucu for cattle crushes. What makes, to our western eyes, this so surreal is that there will be multiple stands, metres apart, all along the road side, all selling the same, identical items. It’s not unusual to be on a long, slow pull out of town, ascending the climber lane and passing shack after shack offering only oranges and watermelons.  On occasions, for a bit of variety, there will be a shelf of

Chipas – definitely more useful!

reused  plastic bottles. All unlabelled, one a glutinous brown that might be home produced honey or decanted engine lubricant, the next a questionable pink that might be soap or juice, or another, an unnatural blue that could be juice or soap. Your problem being which stand to patronise and which to offend, our problem being the ten kilo bags of fruit and the melon’s girth.

The sorbo rubber pillow that feels like it’s been stuffed with foam boulders, a thin mattress that can’t disguise the wooden slats below. A mosquito net that excludes the bugs and any air that the stratospherically-mounted fan manages to disturb. These buildings suck up the heat throughout the day, building an oven that slowly dissipates in the dark, like a night storage heater. The vague sense of cool only arriving with the crowing cocks and the first glimmer of light in the east. Then the cycle sets off again, a slow but persistent incremental increase in warmth with each day. Yet for the price of three bottles of soda we have a place out of the direct sun. It’s only when The Navigator mentions the room rate that I query her. We’ve passed several ’Motels’ that advertise this same charge, only it’s for a couple of hours. She hesitates for a moment, a small doubt is writ large. “no, I asked for una noche, I know I did. Anyway there’s two beds, no shower, no towels, no car port curtain. We’re alright.”

‘Motel’: Paraguayan style, is part of an industry spawned from a lack of privacy offered to most local couples. They’re not what we had assumed on that first day in the country last time, as we blundered in like true gringos, missing the tell-tale signs of eponymous names like: ’Kiss’ or ’Venus y Amour’, or the high privacy walls  painted with love hearts. Yet I can’t help but note a steady inflation in the ‘love room’ market; the rates have remained constant, it’s the duration that has dropped. Still, you could use your loyalty card to help defray costs. For the Virgen de Caacupe pilgrimage in early December, householders along the route sell cooked meats and serve cold drinks to the observants, and one motel offers a ‘quarter hour’ rate, which has led to the axiom: ‘they came as two and left as three’.We, if we want a half-decent night’s sleep will need to seek out the ‘habitacion con aire’; that, or find some elevation. Some 3,000 metres of it. Time to start heading west, heading for the Andean Puna.

The liturgy: ‘de donde son’, ..’esc’…..followed closely by a series of gesticulations, the hand passing mid thigh, the fluttering of fingers and puckering of lips. The kilt and the bagpipe. What a lot Wattie Scott and a visiting Royal have to answer for.

I defend as best as my limited Spanish will allow, ‘it’s our national dress’ and struggling to find an Americas simile. The gaucho’s bombachas, cap or poncho. I’m not convincing.  Theirs is sensible every day workwear. It’s hard to get past the image of a man in a skirt. Then we pass through San Miguel.
The man himself is rendered in painted concrete, in an amphitheatre of national flags and ’crown of thorn’ cacti. But more importantly for my case, I now have a further argument to offer. He’s wearing a kilt.  A tad mini and in truth the clan tartan is a touch McRoman. But what I take to be significant is the fact that the saint’s namesake pueblo claims to be the Paraguayan  ‘Capital of Wool’. Now, ‘la falta Escosesa’ is, if not bought on the Royal Mile or as an Aldi Burn’s night special, made of wool.

Even if he is the patron Saint of British underwear, I find it difficult to decide if he’s wearing the kilt in the approved manner. However I don’t think he can be a true Scot. From his back sprout Archangel wings.

There’s an election in the offing, it’s a near annual event in Paraguay. Our last visit coincided with polling day and everybody had blue fingertips. This one is five months away, but the starting gun has been fired. One of the downsides of a fixed term presidency is that everybody knows when it’s coming. The freehand wall-painters are back in demand, the politically pertinent coloured paints spatter every bus shelter. Stickers adorn the front side of cars and the back side of road signs; the opposition’s are crumpled balls in the gutter. The prospective candidates’ faces have been scrubbed and polished, passed  through the ‘lavadero politico’ and decorate the billboards and banners, along with their vowel-less party initials. Their names are ethnic Germanic; Fiti Shultz is running for Gov’nor, his side kick is Walter Harms. The bronze statuary in the town plazas are of woodcutters and field-tillers rather than the usual liberators and saints. The beer is Kaiser, the script is Gothic. The architecture, the hotel titles, the town’s dual language ’Welcome’ board all point to their ethnic source. We’re on a well ordered Teutonic campground in the ‘United Colonies’, a prosperous German ex-pat enclave.

This was the direction that this piece was heading in, a collection of indicators that are part of the Paraguayan economic story. That is, until we ended up in a beer keller.

It’s autumn in the northern hemisphere, it’s harvest festival in Germany, it’s OctoberFest in Bavaria, it’s Choppfest ’12 in Obligado, Paraguay.

‘Club Alemani’ is a vast humid hall, decked out in the tricolours of two nations in a Gordian knot of patriotic flags, draped over a high stage perched at one end. A  league of local dance troupes are strutting their moves when we arrive, classes of lost, bemused toddlers being led by older sisters, dressed in pig-tails and black bodices, red skirts and white aprons.   

‘ticky-tacky, ticky-tacky, oi-oi-oi’ … is the refrain that keeps repeating with each performance, such, that I start to wonder if this evening has an element of competition, the set piece…..
 
‘ticky-tacky, ticky- tacky, oi-oi-oi’. It’s all good clean protestant decorum, with one small exceptional moment; when one young all-girl group that’s more Latino dark than Saxon blond, dressed in multi coloured pompoms and flounces of crinoline, show their ethnic credentials with a risqué nod to carnival and a butt waggle. They’ve even brought along their younger siblings to provide the groupie scream. Then it’s back to tradition. Part one of the evening closes with a student group in lederhosen and sage hunting hats sawing lumber, chopping timber and swilling beer. The woodman’s dance.
 
Part Two: The evening progresses as a four piece takes to the floor in braces, shorts and leg warmers. At least the three grey heads do, the drummer is the exception, just as they are the world over, this one’s Latino black locks and conventional. The accordionist crouches on his stool like a wood imp atop his toadstool and leads the quartet into a series of polkas as the beer starts to flow. It’s steins of cerveza, two brands of indistinguishable fizzy amber liquid served or promoted by their respective ‘lager lovelies’. Remember Tennant’s cans of the 70’s?  Well, they’ve been reincarnated in the flesh. At least the ’Bramah’ girls have more flesh than the ’Pilsen’ ones. The former are pastiches of the Bavarian buxom wench, in white lacy tights, short red skirts and bust enhancing bodices, who must take eyelid exercise classes to cope with the sparkly falsies and the trowelled mascara. The latter are of the size zero, boobless, long flaxen haired type, squeezed from a mould into the sponsor’s blue body tube, and then elevated on blocked up platform shoes. Too superior to serve ale, but happy to pose with the grinning, testosterone charged balding males, whilst their greying frauliens glower, unamused.

It’s difficult to know if this is a parody, a fake ethnic memory, like the Scots abroad who are more Scottish than the ones at home. The Highland games, the Caledonian Societies. But it’s all good fun. As our Germanic German neighbour said, ‘We’d never be caught like this at home, but here‘…. as he launches into another  beer drinking song. Then that prophetic wee ditty reappears yet again…..’ticky-tacky, ticky-tacky, oi-oi-oi’, as the assembled chant and stomp the refrain: ‘ticky-tacky, ticky-tacky………’
It’s now that you remember a good Lairig Club ceilidh, a hot sweaty night in the old Union’s dungeon, kilts and rugby shirts, beer and stovies. All culminating in an inebriated ‘Auld Lang Syne’. There’s not much difference to this. In place of the tatties n’ dripping comes, what sounded like ‘ice vine’, but was sweinn. Ham haughs, sauerkraut, boiled potatoes and the Paraguayan touch of two white buns. Good heavy winter fare, stolid food fit for a forester. The plates are cleared and I sit back, replete, when along comes the pudding. Boy, do they know how to put it away, but I’m proud of my heritage and nurturing, my plate’s licked clean.

The band plays on. We’ve had ‘Y Viva España’, ‘Tulips from Amsterdam’, when, and I can only suppose that the minstrels want to call time. That wee gnome, atop his perch, calls the next dance: ‘El Paperito’. I don’t need the intro bars to get the message, the bass’ clucking hands and his flapping elbows are enough. It’s the ‘Birdy Dance’. As a method for clearing a hall, it’s effective, yet again, there’s not a great deal of difference from a group of  part inebriated students forming a circle, offering trusty hands and singing the two solitary lines that they know from their national bard’s  most famous song.  Our hosts call ‘enough’, and we leave for our tent.

For those of you who are following these epistles, you will no doubt have realised that there’s a time lag, worse than a Skype call, between word and map. The former has reached late October, and the jungle of Misiones, the latter is on the Puna, the Altiplano near the Bolivian border. Two worlds separated by four thousand metres of altitude, ninety percentage points of humidity and a calendar month. At the present rate of production and publication you’ll be in for a tedium of tales, long  after we return. Many establishments claim to offer a Wi-Fi connection, it seems to be a standard accoutrement , along side a toilet and a hand basin. When the reality is otherwise, strength is weak and the virus software bullies me into offering it priority. So when we get lucky and find the right place, hoping the local kids aren’t in the cyber-caf next door, destroying a virtual world and hogging any  available capacity, we go for a burn and post logs like the fire might go out.  So to keep in sequence, I now have to compose the Christmas Letter. Groan on both our parts. As we have no hyperactive offspring or overachieving events to relate, can I offer a thought and piece of lexiconic trivia?

Why Xmas? The spelling, not the event. It’s one of those assumptions that I’ve never thought to question, half assuming it was piece of slovenly shorthand or a pictorial reference to crucifixes. Time to delve… The 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet is ’x’ , ’chi’ – actually it’s slightly different but as this is a Spanish keyboard and yours is  probably an Anglo-Saxon one, you’ll need to visualise the ‘kiss’ letter, only with elongated tails. This is transliterated as ’kh’ or ’ch’, and represents the initial ’chi’ of the Greek ‘khristo’, Christ. Hence, Xmas. The ‘mass’ comes from a different root, from old English: moessa’, through ecclesiastical Latin, ‘missa’, possibly from the closing liturgy: ‘Ite missa est’, ’go, it is the dismissal’. Educational trivia.

Why Christmas? A message, not the event. Yesterday we were passing Alfarcito, a small Andean pueblo which seemed to be the centre of considerable activity, stopped to see what was happening, and more prosaically, to hunt down a tin of lentils. A place with a few low adobe dwellings, all with their mandatory PV powered satellite dishes, Coca-Cola signs and a stone church. All the standard constructs for any local village, only on this occasion, to one side stands an incongruous, smoked glass, reed thatch building.  Father Alechandro meets us and explains. The event and all the activity is to commemorate the passing of their priest a year ago. A young rugby playing man, who had been disabled in a parapenting accident seven years previously, yet as a paraplegic, had managed to minister to his congregation from his ‘donkey quad’, and to build this secondary school where none had ever existed before.  A message of Hope, writ large in tinted glazing.

A Salt Christmas Tree

I’m penning and the Navigator will be advance blogging this, from a small mining town that extracts talc. The sun is intense, but there’s little of the debilitating heat found on the lowlands. This morning’s tent was frost-armoured and I rode in double gloves and heavy boots, which is possibly the only Venn diagrammatic point of contact between scribe and recipient this post-dated Christmas. Where we will be on the day, fate un-tempted, you will no doubt learn sometime around St. Valentine’s day.

Since it’s Christmas, and it is sooooo easy to buy books for the Kindle, here’s another one for you.

This is a wonderfully accessible take on a fascinating area of social history; the Chronicler and I have been exchanging brilliant gems of information as we’ve both been reading it on our respective Kindles.

Who knew that the perfect overbite, so beloved of modern dentists, only appeared in western populations about 250 years ago?  Coinciding with the adoption of the table knife to cut food up; the change has happened too quickly for it to be evolution. Or that in 1885, Marshall’s Patent Freezer was making ice cream in 5 minutes – way faster than most modern kitchens can manage today?  

A great book for quoting from over the Christmas dinner table!

The buses are clogged beyond standing room and every set of traffic lights becomes the starting grid for a Grand Prix race, the verges are broken and the trucks take no prisoners. Lost is the courtesy of the campo roads, it’s every person for themselves. Yet life is good. The Navigator has found her first chiperia.  A man with a gingham clothed wicker basket and standing on the corner calling his wares. After the diet of over-refined, nutrient-deficient white bread, it’s a pleasant chance to get a change, even when that product comes with it’s own dietetic devils; namely a larding of dripping that would lubricate a bike chain.

Hello; for a change, this is the Navigator. I know, I’m usually just the editor and facilitator, but given that it’s nearly Christmas, I thought I’d like to share this with you.

I’ve just finished reading a couple of books which I loved so much that as soon as I finished them, I started over again at the beginning. The books are the first two of a trilogy by Deborah Harkness: A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night.  The third is still in progress and hasn’t been published yet.

Deborah is an historian with a few learned tomes to her name; this is a departure, and she tells some wonderful stories of witches, daemons and vampires.  Don’t let the currently populist subject matter deter you; suspend your cynicism and get stuck in.  These books tell a grown-up fairytale, a fine tale of adventure and a love story within a framework of real historical facts and characters – particularly in the history of science and alchemy. During and after both readings, the story and characters stayed with me, and left me really looking forward to the next book.
 
Let me know what you think.