Freedom Run Report Number 2 from Paraguay

Though now in the capital city of Asuncion, the midweek training run was out in the campo on a red dirt road, which led to a fast-flowing river, for which the crossing was a narrow rickety hump-back bridge.

Nicely into my run rhythm, I set out over it. As I got the middle, the humped bit, so did a heard of grey hump-back Zebu cattle, coming the other way. They had sizeable humps, big ears, and huge horns. To go with their humps and horns, some had calves, some rolling eyes, and others only balls.

They snorted but did not stop coming towards me, nor I towards them. I was loath to turn back, or turn my back on them. But I did wonder about the colour of my shorts, bright red, and whether I was about to find out if there was any truth in the saying ´Like a red rag to a bull . . . ´

As we got closer to one another, I reflected on advice once heard, that, when facing a herd of cattle, whether on a country stroll in England or a hot run in Paraguay, it´s best to ´stand your ground´ and take your dog off the lead.

Suffice to say, I toughed it out, jogged on, took the right side of the bridge and they the left. In passing one another, within hot breath and horn-touching distance, we exchanged the occasional snort, the kind that some people do naturally part way through parkrun. Happily, I got to the other side of the bridge without mishap, except for putting my foot into one cow´s parting pat!

This Saturday´s Freedom parkrun proper in Paraguay was a city run. Since this part of South America is three hours behind Swindon and, of course, I wanted to be running in synch with everyone in Lydiard Park, even though your 3 degrees is somewhat cooler than our 30, just before 6am local time, I slipped on my trusty now dusty trainers and headed out onto the silent streets of old Asuncion.

Through an obstacle course of protruding paving stones, I ran past the occasional armed guard, sleeping policeman, or cluster of soldiers; past hard-working chipa women on street corners with their big baskets of fresh oven-hot chipa (begel-like buns made of maize flour and cheese, a breakfast staple in Paraguay) setting out their stalls for the day; past inevitable sightings of the indigenous poor sleeping rough; and past feral dogs beside them. Apart from these, there were virtually no other signs of life in a usually bustling city. 

Giving myself half an hour of running time, in true steady parkrun style, I headed for the big Rio Paraguay, a great sluggish snake of a river more than a kilometre wide.  On a newly built walkway for the traditional weekend paseos (walks) I ran along it, as the sun rose over the sleeping city. Bliss!

And bliss too on my return, was the cold shower, the endogenous morphine, and the jug full of freshly-squeezed ice-cold orange juice.

Hope yours was a good one too!

Saludos a Swindon.

Where does truth lie?

It occurs to me, especially on this truly wet Wednesday in Paraguay, that, in my sporadic scattering of often Brahma-fuelled emails, written under mango trees, by river, or under starry southern night skies, I may have, somewhat gushily, and because of its easy alliteration with Paraguay, used the adjective paradisal (= ideal, idyllic, of great beauty and happiness) once or twice too often and given the impression that here was such a place.

Well, let me now set the record straight.

Paraguay is not paradisal. It can be hellish! In fact, barely a toad´s jump north from where I am, an area the size of Wales is known as the Green Hell. 

Bits of here are very nice, when it´s not too hot, humid, or hit by tropical storms. A profusion of plants and creepy crawlies love it here and thrive, tangling and climbing all over one another, eating each other too, and often bits of you!

This flora and fauna also likes to inhabit human dwelling places. There are two toads in my second bedroom and three frogs in the bathroom. When it rains, they croak. Freaky, esp in the middle of the night. Two giant moths spend the day camouflaged flat against the wattle and daub wall and the night trying to mate with the light, scattering showers wing dust over my keyboard.  Beside my wooden table, there´s trail of termite tunnels, which enter all parts of the house and lead who knows where. If I drop a crumb of food, ants appear out of nowhere and haul it away, to who knows where. There may be a whole network of ant and termite colonies right below my feet, my bathroom, my bed, who knows where!

On the first day here, I had to cut back inga tree branches, vines, and liana-like creepers that were finding their way under the pan-tiles, through the wooden shuttered windows, and into the house. This stuff, which looks like it´s growing metres a day, makes English ivy and Russian vine look backward, unadventurous, and slow.

Outside, feral dogs roam, lie in the middle of the road, or chase English men out for a run. Litter lies everywhere. Plastic bottles and bags, in their thousands, blow across village plazas.

Many houses are shabby, dilapidated, and uncared for. Last night, the power went off five times, and most of the morning today we had no running water. Among the people, what some might call tranquilidad, might equally well be called weariness, lassitude, indifference. Even mañana might be meaningless.

And as for the food, well, fresh fruit apart, it´s meat, meat, and more meat, mostly tough and coated in some sort of greasy schnitzel-fry stuff. Even in restaurants, meat and fish are often ruined by frying and fat. A decent salad is unheard of. (Am craving an LSF supper!)

Riding horses rubs your legs in wrong places and when swimming in the river, invisible things nibble you, underwater, and on the bank, hot sand gets between your toes! If you sit under a mango tree, or almost any tree, things keep falling on you, like insects, sticky bits, or bird droppings.

As for culture, apart from great harpists and good gaucho sing-songs, there´s nothing really ruinous or high-art to satisfy the more sophisticated traveler here.

In fact, but for satisfying curiosity, and the veracity of what I write and say about Paraguay, I cannot imagine many of you enjoying anything or any time here. It occurs to me that my only reason for coming here is therapeutic, trying to work out why I was a happier child here than in England.

There you have it. Which way does truth lie?

Hope you all know what´s meaningful, good, or not, where you live.

Am off now, to buy more ant poison.

Run Report for a Freedom parkrun in Paraguay!

So there I was on Friday 13th, sitting shirtless, shoeless, and somewhat un-sober under a mango tree by a river deep in the heart of South America in temperatures approaching 40 degrees, when I thought of Swindon parkrun re-starting the next day.

 Denying myself another ice-cold beer, I decided to have an earlier night than usual in preparation for an earlier start than usual at 5.30am, to put on my trainers, eat a banana, warm up, and run 5k at exactly 6am local time, in synch with Swindon, three hours ahead of Paraguay.

 The sun was rising as I set off out of the village along a red dirt road to the sound of cockerels crowing. Within five minutes, I was way out in the campo (= countryside, but not exactly the Cotswolds) where the only signs of life were screeching parakeets and wading wading birds.  By kilometre two, I had so relaxed into my running rhythm, with only my shadow for company, that I mistook an extra-green patch of campo for grass. It was swamp and I was in it, up to my knees. No bother. Got out ok, scraped the mud and leeches off my legs, and ran on, with trainers squelching.

Headed towards dry sandy stretch and immediately spotted a trail of what looked like very fresh big pussy paws. The puma, though rare hereabouts, is, I seemed to remember, only known as  a calf-killer. So I carried on, a little nervous but preferring sand to swamp, and hoping my memory served me well.

Suddenly, round a bend, facing me, in the middle of the track, with swamp on one side and jungle on the other, was the paw-print creature. It was huge, underfed, and looked hungry. 

It was rather odd, out there, in the middle of nowhere at that time of day, that wandering about on its own should be a Great Dane mongrel dog. As I jogged by, very slowly, with a palm leaf of peace in my hand, it ignored me, and lay down to rest.

 Approaching fifteen minutes into the run and, to make it a genuine 5k parkrun, and feeling I should be turning round and heading back to the village of Belen, I saw a strange sight ahead. A battered pick up truck, with a blue light strapped to its roof, edged out of the trees, and stopped halfway across the track. Three men in ragged uniforms, with lots of badges and armed up to their armpits, got out and signalled me to stop.

`Identificacion señor!´ said the one who looked least like he had ever run in his life. `Mi pasaporte esta en casa, pero tengo este.´ I said, offering him all I had by way of identification on my pocket-less shorts, my tied-on parkun barcode, of course!  They looked at it, frowned, then laughed, and waved me on.

It was good to get back to the safety of the old mango tree and even better to take a dip in the river. Ah, that wonderful post-parkrun feeling, even in perilous but paradisal Paraguay, from where thoughts go out to Paris . . . 

Ridiculous: barefoot, shirtless, in shorts, in paradisal Paraguay

It´s hard to know where to begin . . .  in bare feet, under a mango tree, temp 40 degrees, wanting to go  for another swim in the river, or eat another banana from own garden . . oh how sweet they taste!.... from trees whose leaves flap and hang like elephants´ ears, as I watch two women driving cattle along the red dirt road, the older one looking resigned to life as she knows it and the younger looking resigned to life as she expects it to be, or maybe neither neither . . . .?

In a way, it´s all too much, too much to do with being not writing about being.

Even when it´s raining, with fat drops and claps of thunder, all is well in this paradisal world. You can be shirtless in the rain! The frogs sing! Rain running off broad leaves is a delight to watch!

A remarkable situation, that would hardly figure in anyone´s dream holiday, and yet . . .

Leaving LSF, flying over the Atlantic, arriving in Paraguay...

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/swindon/) So slipped on my trusty now dusty trainers and headed out onto the silent streets of old Asuncion. I ran past the occasional armed guard, policeman, or cluster of soldiers; and on street corners, past hard-working chipa women with their big baskets of still-hot chipa (begel-like bun made of maize flour and cheese, a breakfast staple in Paraguay) setting out their stalls. There was virtually no traffic or any other action in a usually bustling city.  Giving myself half an hour of running time, in true parkrun style, I headed for the big Rio Paraguay, a great sluggish snake of a river more than a kilometre wide. On a newly built walkway for the traditional evening or Sunday paseos (walks) I ran along it, as the sun rose over the city. Bliss!

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