Yep, Still a Doofy American

The time was running out. My visa only had a few more of its 90 days left before it would expire-- a few more precious days of legal residency in Paraguay before I’d become an illegal alien and open to all sorts of problems. In my irresponsible procrastination I’d put off renewing my visa until the last minute, and when I finally went to the migration office, I realized the documents I needed would take longer to procure than my short time allowed. I decided to take a drastic measure and go to Argentina, hoping and praying that on my return to Paraguay I’d get another stamp on my multiple-entry-visa that would allow me to stay for a longer time.

The trip lasted an afternoon, and made me realize I’m still much more of a foreigner than a resident in Paraguay. I got to the central bus station all right – a short trip from Lambare on a single bus. At the station, though, I found an amazing array of bus companies, each offering various trips to destinations all over South America. I was hoping to go to Clorinda, the first major city in Argentina beyond the Paraguayan border, and began asking in earnest at every company’s line whether they had buses that went that way. The Paraguayan workers, perhaps afraid to offend me with a simple answer of “there are no bus lines to Clorinda,” kept pointing me on to other companies with promises of my final destination. After trying four or five companies, though, I realized that mine was a lost cause. Clorinda was too close (about an hour drive) and not an important enough destination for any bus line to have a route there. I finally asked a police man how I could get there, and he pointed out a place where shared vans were supposed to pick up passengers and take them to the Argentine border.

Waiting for half an hour and not seeing one official-looking vehicle, though, I became quite discouraged. Finally, I saw a decrepit old van with a young 20-something driver and asked him if he could take me to the border. Come to find out, he had just dropped off a load of people coming back from Argentina and was looking for more passengers back that way. He was going to be returning to the border anyways, but had the courtesy, you might say, to charge me 50 mil guaranies- about ten extravagant dollars- for the trip. Desperate to get to Argentina, though, I paid.

The ride was bumpy and rough. The steering wheel on the van kept turning all around even though the vehicle itself miraculously went forward in a straight line. The wooden floorboards nearly burned through the bottoms of my sandaled feet as the heat came up from Heaven-knows-what overused mechanical parts underneath. One consolation of the ride, though, was that my driver loved 80s American music. In my desire to please him as much as possible (as my life really was in his hands), I tried translating for him the songs “Red, Red Wine” and “We Don’t Need No Education.” It didn’t work out well.

After an hour ride we arrived at the desolate border, a crossing point in the middle of nowhere. There were a host of people and buses and trucks crossing, though, as three- days-before-Christmas seemed to be a popular time to travel. My driver told me that I’d need to change my money over to Argentine pesos before crossing, and kindly arranged for a friend to do the job. I gave him 100 mil Paraguayan guaranies, and got back 50 Argentinean pesos. After the exchange, I paid my driver for the trip, at which point he also told me that I still needed to pay him 50 mil more guaranies for my 50 Argentinean pesos. Not knowing the exchange rate (Oh, fool that I was!) and trusting the man (he had told me that he used to go to a Pentecostal church, after all), I obliged him, said goodbye, and headed to cross the border with another of his friends who would help arrange things for my crossing. I’m not sure how this new guy, who had one bloody and broken eye that looked like it’d been sling-shotted out and only spoke Spanish like everyone else, was supposed to help me cross over, but somehow I felt a little more comfortable being accompanied by the acquaintance of a stranger I’d known in a foreign country for only a very short while.

Providentially, though, I got out of Paraguay and into Argentina all right with my right hand man who lacked a working right eye and arrived at a small coke, smoke, and empanada joint on the other side. I learned the trip to Clorinda was further and more expensive than I wanted, so I decided to turn straight back around again for Paraguay. Luckily, the immigrations officials coming back into Paraguay were different people in a different location from the ones I’d just seen (I had told them all I was planning on going to Clorinda, which was true at the time, but then I changed my mind), so there should have been no problem upon my reentry.

It seemed that I hit a snag, though, when I spoke with the Paraguayan migrations official. After looking at my passport and visa, he invited me back into his nice air-conditioned office for a privileged conservation with. A kind grandfatherly figure with a huge gut, the immigrations official asked me if I new my visa was soon to expire. I told him that I did, and that’s why I had gone to Argentina and come back to buy some more time. He gently lectured me and told me this wasn’t allowed, then offered to give me ninety days more time if I’d pay him a certain amount. Not having the money on me a suspecting it was a bribe, I kindly thanked him and asked for a shorter, but-free-of-cost, stamp on my visa. He ended up giving me a month’s more time in his country – a kind Christmas present, he told me, and certainly enough time to get my official documents in order.

I left with my prized month-long stamp and, accompanied once again and hurried on by my one-eyed friend, I came back to the money changers. Not needing my 50 pesos anymore, a money-changer took my Argentinean currency and gave me back 60 mil guaranies. Not thinking, I dumbly accepted and continued on. Thus, in my two money exchanges, I went from 150 mil guaranies, to 50 pesos, to 60 mil guaranies, and didn’t buy a single thing. Somewhere in the process, I lost some 90 mil guaranies (about 17 dollars) and got screwed over.

I arrived back to the van loading area and got on with the same fellow who had driven me the first time. Now, however, the 7-passenger van looked completely different, packed as it was with some 15 people. I dropped my cycloptic friend a two-dollar tip, then boarded for Asuncion. Miraculously, I made it back home after a long day of being taken advantage of like some ignorant foreigner in a strange land. Indeed, though, I really was an ignorant foreigner in a strange land who learned a good lesson that procrastination doesn’t pay. The cost of this adventure was far too high for me, and from now I’ll be doing to best to keep everything legitimate and on time.