Do you leave home with ease? Do you have faith in flight? Do you feel like you have seen all you need to see?
Well, I don´t, I don´t, and I do not!
But, because of the third I just about manage the first two.
Leaving LSF mid afternoon on Cafe Day, as the November sun sat low beyond the bottom garden, was emotional and exciting. Using the men´s loo at Swindon´s main Bus Station was not.
Am I allowed to say that the National Express coach driver was phenomenally young and friendly? He said things like this. ´You have another 4 minutes to say goodbye to your friends. You can get off the coach. No problem. I won´t go without you!´
Before I knew it, I was checked in at Heathrow´s Terminal 3, where the nice clerk said, ´You have an an aisle seat but for $87 you can have a window seat by an Emergency Exit.´
In Departures, I found a stool in a corner, got a beer, sat down, and sighed, with relief, delight, and amazement. I am a traveler! I am traveling again, even though I do not understand why people are queuing to put cosmetics and personal bathroom stuff into little see-through bags, or why my pockets full of paper clips should be of such interest to the security scanner guys.
Had not been sipping my beer in the corner for long when a nice man came along and said, ´May I join you?` He did and we talked. He turned out to be a Fraud Investigator from the Czech Republic, a skier with a gammy leg, and whose wife has run a marathon in 3.35.
Suddenly, I am on a plane and a nice stewardess is finding me a window seat, albeit by a toilet at the back of the plane.
We are still on the tarmac and I settle down and check the seat-screen Flight Map. It says Altitude 28 metres and shows London and Swindon but not Oxford and Bristol. (What put Swindon on the map?)
Soon, we are airborne, and before we are halfway across the Bay of Biscay, I have (for the first time ever!) beaten the on-board Chess Computer at Medium Level. Witnessing my success, the passenger next to me punches the air!
Are you bored by what I am writing? Do you have better things to do? You may not even have got this far. Your life may be full enough for you not to have time or the wish to read this.
OK. Maybe it will help if I take you into Paraguay.
Am spending my first couple of days in the noisy capital, Asuncion, in its old part in a little white-tiled pension called Palmas del Sol. My room is very white and looks out onto the swimming pool. Yes, I have succumbed to it.
Had a first-night invite, from the director himself, to go see the Asuncion Symphony Orchestra playing Mendelsohn and Tchaikovsky. It was a night for the city´s glitterati to be seen in all their shiny finery. I shared a balcony box with three of them who knew just when to clap, after key moments in protracted speeches and not between musical movements but not always how to stay awake. What a way to start a two-week adventure in the heart of South America, with two hundred year old music from the heart of Europe. Odd but terrific!
Next day was get-connected day, internet connected and mobile phone. Neither of my sophisticated but antiquated bits of equipment worked here. For 100,000Gs ($15) idealistic philosophical curly-haired taxista Fulgencio drove me round the city to find durable dongles that would get me a signal in the outer reaches of Paraguay and a ´celular con teclas´ (mobile with keyboard) deemed very ´no de moda´ (old-fashioned) here. Well, we found the latter but not the former so, obviously, to celebrate the one and lament the other, I needed to accept the offer of a game of tennis on the red sandy clay courts of Asuncion. Had a good sweaty sandy run around. My friendly opponent, a handy player half my age, took me to the cleaners but said it was ´un buen juego.´ Not quite the way I saw it from my side of the net.
Saturday, my body clock, still on English time (three hours ahead) had me up at 5 in the morning local time, and, it being Saturday, my mind immediately turned to the weekly communion that is part of a key routine back home. Yes, parkrun. (see http://www.parkrun.org.uk/
But now I hear you say, ´Why does he go all that way, to do just what he does in the UK?´ Well, one answer is, you wait, just you wait. And the other is, why not do what you love to do wherever you are. It´s especially enjoyable to do so in a new setting.
And now, as Saturday slips away, I have slipped out of Asuncion and am ´en el interior´, in the countryside, the provinces, actually in small town Coronel Oviedo some 300km east of the capital. Am paying a long overdue visit to first contacts in Paraguay, the Galeano family. One of their daughters Angelica, who has been to LSF, introduced me to a young `Paraguayo puro´ called Matthias, who plays tennis, has just returned from a year in Austria, and speaks German! And so I´m expected to play tennis again. Yes. I know. Have made a rod-racket for my own back. Asi es la vida.
And so it was, at 9 at night, on the only floodlit red clay court in Oviedo, with nightjars flitting about, giant moths circling the lights, and mating frogs croaking in stereo, we played. It was much more than tennis! More like total tennis, an immersion in something physical, aural, and emotional, a complete experience beyond belief. The watching locals called it El Davis Cup: Paraguay contra Inglaterra! It was great fun, enough for the result not to matter, unless you want to guess it.
On Sunday, just at the point when the luxuries of twenty four hours with Paraguay´s welcoming, nice, and newly-rich were wearing thin, I spotted a juggler at traffic lights; borrowed a wonky pushbike, and cycled back through town to find him. It was as if I was going to see Jake, and needed too. The newly-rich and well(over)fed simply could not understand why I was doing this.
But I did, and had a lovely time with him, in the rain, under a tree, by the lights, sharing a beer, and stories. His name is Sebastian and he is on the road from Argentina, needing to escape an office job, and looking like he really has, tanned, smiling, and with a splendid mix of realism, joie de vivre, and idealism. At the traffic lights, in the rain, with coloured balls and clubs, he made people smile and like one another more than they already did.
Now, for a whole new scene. On a Sunday midnight bus, I head 400 miles north, to Belen, on the Tropic of Capricorn, to my little house, with its garden of fruit trees, near the free-flowing Rio Ypane.
More from there, if my dongle does what I´ve paid for it to do.
Matt
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