Make sure to get your passport stamped
Trip Start
Dec 07, 2005
1
21
78
Trip End
Apr 10, 2007
Mariscal,
Paraguay
Monday, April 17, 2006
at times during our exodus from paraguay, it felt like the country was trying to make it difficult for us to continue on our way. this is the one about how not having an entrance stamp comes back to bite us in a little outpost called mariscal.
to get to bolivia from filadelfia, we had to take a bus across the paraguayan chaco (a vast scrubland punctuated only by a dirt road called the ¨trans-chaco route¨). it´s a 30 hour trip from asuncion to santa cruz, bolivia, but since we would be catching the bus past filadelfia, we were expecting to be on the bus for about 23 hours. all told, though, our adventure took about 34 hours
A nother bus stuck
. it broke down more or less like this:
since our bus didn´t stop in filadelfia, we had to catch it in mariscal, about an hour down the road. problem is, the last bus for mariscal leaves at 6pm and our bus wasn´t due in mariscal until 4am. but the mennonite lady who sold us our ticket (at full price as if we were leaving from asuncion instead of mariscal, mind you) assured us that there was a sizeable terminal where we could wait. so we caught the 6pm bus. the bus dropped us off at the immigrations post at 7pm. it was dark, and there was nothing else on the road but us and our bags as the bus pulled away.
we trudged down past one small cabin and past a bunch of shady looking guys who met my ¨buenas noches¨ with hard stares. ok. we continued on another 75 meters or so to the immigrations cabin, where we were met by a skinny guy, a fat guy, and 5 or 6 dogs. one of them had three legs. we put our stuff down and handed our passports to skinny guy. after a bit, he called us in to the cabin and told us that we didn´t have entry stamps and that we´d have to pay a fine. he went on and on (very calmly) about how we had entered the country illegally and that paraguay is the same as the usa in that you have to get stamped, blah blah blah. when we told him that our bus just dropped us off in ciudad del este and that we never saw any sign of paraguayan immigration, he said there are signs everywhere in ciudad del este. ok. then we asked him why we would have gone through the trouble and to obtain (and pay a good deal of $$ for) visas but not get FREE entry stamps if we were trying to sneak into the country
Got to get unstuck
. he just reverted to the arguments he had already made. the whole exchange took place in very low tones, though, and we were all pretty calm. we were definitely nervous, but homedude was sipping his mate and telling us that we could pay the fine here in dollars or guarani. when we told him we didn´t have that kind of money (it was $50 a piece), he offered that we could return to asuncion to take out money (there are no internationally linked atms outside of ciudad del este or asuncion). that would mean forfeiting the bus tickets we had paid (full price) for and putting ourselves considerably behind schedule. ok, we don´t really have a schedule, but it would have been a great big inconvenience.
as if on cue, when our conversation with skinny guy reached a dead end of us not willing to go to asuncion and skinny guy not offering any alternatives, fat guy came in and took the part of good cop perfectly. he asked us what the problem was in understanding tones, and before long there was an offer to only pay one fine for the both of us. that seemed like a good deal, and as soon as $50 was on the table, skinny guy was talking about how he´d arrange a ride to take us to the bus terminal, which we learned was 2km down the road. Ok. Crisis #1 averted. And we had a ride to the termminal.
when we pulled up to the terminal, i remembered the mennonite lady´s promise of a sizeable terminal where we could spend the wee hours waiting for our bus. and to be fair, the terminal was sizeable. but it was completely open to the air. there was a corrugated steel roof set on 50 foot high poles, and that´s it
Thats the road for about 16 hours
. so we piled on the layers and spent most of the night trying to sleep. even though it was cold enough to need a blanket and layers, it was not cold enough to keep the mosquitoes away, so sleeping was nearly impossible. of course, the bus scheduled to pick us at at 4 am didn´t turn up unti 520 am.
but we were glad to finally be aboard. the bus looked a little worn, and we noticed that the box that once housed a tv was empty. no movie on this route. we fell asleep for a little while, but the bumping woke us up around 9am.
all day tuesday we watched our driver deftly pilot us through one treacherous mud puddle after another. we stopped at one point and spent an hour trying to pull another bus out of the mud where it was stuck. the trans-chaco route, which is really the only main way to bolivia, is a series of dirt roads that vary in quality and can get incredibly muddy in the rainy season (which we´re just at the end of). anyway, our bus had a crew of three who were responsible for driving, digging the bus out whenever it got stuck, and generally keeping things moving forward.
luckily, the weather was great on tuesday and we only got stuck a couple of times, but the crew managed to get us through both of those puddles in a matter of minutes
The guys
. we met some kids from ireland, england, and the US who had been stuck out in the wilderness (there is nothing around at all on this route) for two nights...their bus had left asuncion on saturday, and our bus had left on monday, and both buses reached the bolivian border at the same time. by the time we caught up to them at bolivian immigration, they were all covered in mud from helping to push and pull the bus through muddy spots. we met our muddy friends again later that night, as three buses were stopped to assist another bus that had broken down. this is when we learned that they had been on the road for 3 days, and we shared some fresh pineapple and stories with them. finally, when we stopped for a bathroom break in a small town a couple of hours later, they ended up transferring onto our bus for the last 6 hours or so of the trip. i guess their crew and bus had had enough of the trans-chaco for this trip. now we´ve got some new friends from wales, japan, dublin, yorkshire, and indiana.
