Dec 10: camping trip rained (long, but good)

Tara eating ice cream in the rain.

We discovered early afternoon yesterday that we had one all there was to do at the park pretty early in the day. We had yet to determine what to do next when the weather made that choice for us. Tara convinced us it was going to storm so we moved her tent and all of our equipment under a gazebo. The rain started to fall just as we were finishing up.

Earlier in the morning, we had been talking about the possibility of rain and Nev said the driver told him it hadn't rained in a while and the hard, clay-like surface that resisted the tent stakes confirmed it. I joked that rain seemed to follow Tara, since it had rained the time she visited one of the driest places on the content and that we should expect rain.

There were five people under the gazebo as it stormed pretty hard: the four of us (Nev from Australia, Katy, our German friend we met at the boarder, Tara and me) and as luck would have it, the fifth was an ice cream salesman. Sometimes life is like a movie, sometimes life is better than a movie. What are the odds that the only person in the world stuck under a gazebo with us would be an ice cream man?

I think each of us had two or three ice cream snacks as we waited out the storm. The best part was the cost, 5 G, or about a buck, for one ice cream cone and two popsicles.

Since Katy didn't exchange enough pesos to G's, she was short on cash so I bought her an ice cream cone too. She promised to pay me back when we got back to town, in addition to the 2,000 G's I loaned her earlier in the day for an empanada. She made good on her promise today and gave me back what is equal to about $1.

I heard today Peru is cheaper than this country. I think it's great countries seem to get cheaper as we go along our trip and our money starts to run out.

Anyways, after the rain finally stopped, Katy and I went on a walk while Tara napped and Nev just hung out. We weren't gone very long when it started to rain again. We made it back to the gazebo, but sadly the ice cream man had left.

The rain didn't fall on us very hard this time, but it lasted much longer. We spent most of the afternoon hanging out under the gazebo napping, reading, talking or playing cards.

After the rain finally stopped, we were all hungry and managed to find enough dry wood to cook with, which we did using the fire pit under a different gazebo in the event the rain returned. We had eaten most of our food on the first day so we pretty much cut up all the vegetables we had left and mixed it into our pasta sauce and ate it with noodles.

It was pretty good, most of the food I've eaten down here has been pretty good. We've done a lot of our own cooking at hostels or campsites.

By we, I mean mostly Tara though I wash the dishes in return. Tara's a vegetarian and apparently all the fruit and vegetables down here are really fresh, cheap and good. As a result, I've eaten a lot of vegetables and fruit on this trip prepared in ways that are new to me.

I don't mind, I know they are healthy for me and honestly, I'll eat pretty much anything I don't have to cook, though most of it ends up coming out pretty well.

I was joking with Tara the other day I was going to come over for dinner everyday once we get back. She said she'd make sure all her doors are locked. I reminded her her family likes me and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't let me go hungry if I showed up around dinner time.

Anyways, we had to cook in the dark because something was wrong with the lights but they came on halfway though our meal.

We were awaken this morning by the sound of thunder. Nev wanted to move the tent under the gazebo before it started pouring again. I didn't really agree with his decision, since the tent had withstood the storm the day before and it was 6:15 a.m., but I went along with his plan since it was his tent.

As I threw everything in my bag and moved it under the gazebo in one trip (Vicki and Stacey, this is when the book fell out of my bag and got muddy) , the misquotes took advantage of my skin I had spent the last days successfully trying to protect from their bites. I laid on a bench and got inside my sleeping bag to combat this problem. An added benefit was sleep quickly followed.

When I awoke, I was thankful for Nev's decision as I repacked my bags under the gazebo as the rain continued to fall.

As I was packing up, I noticed something different about the face I've seen almost all day everyday for the last three weeks. Namely, her lips were a different shade of color. When I asked if she was wearing makeup, she said yes. I assumed it was because after spending three days in the field, she wanted to look/feel like a girl again.

At 10 a.m., our taxi driver showed up and took us back to the bus stop, effectively ending our rained-out camping expedition in the jungle.

Tara had visited the site's doctor the first night there to get some cough medicine and he invited us over to his house when we got back to town so she called him when we got the bus top and he said he'd be there to pick us up in a black car in 10 minutes.

A short time later, a black car pulled up and this young-looking guy with curly black hair, who you could tell was ripped though he was fully dressed, got out. My first thought was, "Tara managed to find the Paraguar' version of McDreamy, no wonder she put make up on today."

It turned out he was the doctor's 27-year old son who is a national kickboxing champion and might be the only person in this country who speaks English. He was pretty cool. We introduced him to facebook and he promised to add us all.

After we visited with him and his father, we went to the bus stop and headed to Asuncion. There isn't much tourism in Paraguay, though so far it seems pretty safe and extremely pretty. Though, I felt like we didn't get to see the real area we were in as normal Paraguayans do because of the color of our skin.

It seemed like the people there went out of their way to ensure we were safe and to be helpful to us. In this way, I felt safer than the average citizen there. It was as if everyone we met wanted us to enjoy the place so we will go back and tell everyone we know to come down here.

Almost every store or shop in the city had one or two security guards with huge shot guns standing in front of them. The taxi driver said they shoot people who steal on the spot. Tara said the man with guns scared her since they could shoot anybody at anytime.

They had the opposite effect on me as they made me feel safer because I assumed so many security guards with such large weapons must act as a pretty big crime deterrent. While they can, and do, act as the judge and jury with just one pull of the trigger, I figured the fact I didn't plan to steal anything meant I had a good chance of not getting shot.

The Curcidad del Este (City of the East, where the bus stop was) and Asuncion are across the country from each other so we got to see a lot of the countryside on our 5.5-hour bus ride.

The country is extremely poor, we saw lots of people living in tents or small houses. Every once in a while, we would see a nice house thrown in the mix, a clear sign that any wealth here is not proportional, though that is the case in any country.

Tara said, and I agreed, that the images we saw from the bus ride were exactly what people think of when they hear third-world countries. Many streets weren't paved, just dust and there were several ox or other animal-driven carts being used on the streets.

The bus ride to Asuncion mirrored Greyhound travel in the U.S. The busses weren't as nice as the ones we traveled on earlier in our trip and we seemed to stop at every little town on the way. The biggest difference was here people get on a bus stop and they sell things, then get off at the next stop. People tried to sell soda/snacks, bagel lookalikes, CD/DVD's, orange juice, an Icy/Hot-like product, lotto tickets and a few other things.

We took a taxi from the bus stop to find a hostel. Each street we drove down looked like the part of town you would try to stay clear of in the states. However, Nev said it was the nicest country he'd been to out of several third-world countries down here.

As we drove though town, I felt pretty stressed. A few minutes later, I realized I was scanning the streets with as much intensity as I would a street in Iraq (or Caldwell). I made myself go though the images in my head that I had seen and realized there weren't any guards or guns, the streets looked clean and relatively quiet for a city this size, that I had seen a number of women walking around by themselves- including a few too busy texting to pay attention to anything around them, two ladies walking with eight kids and a wedding.

Everything seemed pretty safe so I relaxed a bit. We found a hostel and went to dinner with a guy from Poland and a guy from North Carolina who used to live in Boise for six months. I tried a bite of Nev's cow tongue. It felt weird having an animal's tongue in my mouth, like we were making out or something.

Tomorrow we're going to discover the rest of the city.