When I arrive at the border of Argentina/Paraguay, night has fallen. About ten trucks are parked here in the dark; they won’t head out until tomorrow. I cross the old metallic bridge on foot, barely lit, and approach the customs booth.
 

“Can you…[sign language: ‘stamp my passport’]…to go to Uruguay?”
 

He furrows his brow. Silence.

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“Uh, no, not Uruguay, Paraguay! I want to go to Paraguay!”

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Well, I’m finally mixing up my countries. I have to say that today I was in Argentina, and yesterday in Uruguay. Of course, even though Paraguay ends in “guay” and is a small, flat country in South America, it has nothing else in common with Uruguay.

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Here, the heat is stifling, the sun burns, and jeans stick to your skin.
Most of the Paraguayans are indigenous, so it’s difficult not to stick out.
In Asuncion, I get grabbed by the street vendors. There are many. Panhandlers, too. And a slum five meters from the cathedral, further down. Many of the houses and stores in the center are abandoned.

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An old man explains that “It wasn’t like this before,” that people went bankrupt because of the financial crisis ten years ago. According to the girl at the hostel, the colonial downtown was left to ruin because people prefer to live in houses with gardens, and therefore in the suburbs. (It’s also less expensive.) As a result, the shop owners left for the suburbs, too.

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On Saturdays at 4pm, the stores close until Monday. There are not even ten bars for going out at night. Only the presidential palace, surrounded by a large vacant lot, reminds me that Asuncion is a capital…and also the army, who surround the cathedral, because the president is going to church today!

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I stick out my thumb and escape this city.
In the car, my drivers offer me a taste of the national drink, terere (a cold, succulent, sugary mint maté). At the edge of the highway, a family is breaking stone with a hammer. They are sitting in white dust, sweating, next to a pile of cut slate.

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I arrive at Jennifer and her father Carlos’s home; Carlos is Italian, and loves Paraguay because it looks like Italy. I spend a few days in the country at their house. Jennifer explains that Paraguay is one of the most deforested countries in South America.

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In the Chaco region, in the north, 1000 hectares of forests disappear each day, or 360,000 hectares a year. The satellite images clearly show a green landscape turning gray. By the side of the road, I see very few trees – just scrub as far as the eye can see.

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An out-of-the-ordinary moment: I speak in German and drink beer with my driver, Hans, in the middle of the Chaco desert. He is Paraguayan but a Mennonite. It’s a Protestant denomination that originally formed in Switzerland. Many Mennonites from Germany and Russia migrated here in the 20th century. The most religious denounce all aspects of modern life: electricity, cars, the telephone, the internet, etc. As far as their look goes, it’s more like “Little House on the Prairie”: overalls and caps for the men, long dresses and braids for the women. German is the local language.

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Unlike his German grandfather, Hans does not practice the religion.
He drops me off at Patria, a hamlet of five houses.
A drunkard gets excited about my hitchhiking trip. The other residents do, too.
I show them my map of the world, my pictures. No cars pass by.
Three hours later…a Chilean stops to ask the way. We leave for Bolivia.