The 7:00 to Yuty

I stayed 3 days at the McKissicks again before heading further down Route 8 to Yuty to stay with the Reichs.  Route 8 is the only major road in Paraguay that hasn’t been paved yet (and when I say major road we’re talking 5 or 6 buses, and 20 trucks, per day) so travel, especially by bus, is often determined by the weather.  If it’s sunny then everything is good, the red dirt road is dusty and hard, but if it’s raining then there’s no dice because it’s like driving on butter.  I was leaving at 7pm but knew if it rained I’d be leaving the next day.  If a storm is even forecast then the buses don’t leave Villarrica further up the road (where the tarmac ends and the dirt starts), but if the bus had reached San Francisco by the time the rain started it would trudge on to Yuty rather than turning back.

It was quite overcast near 7 but nothing bad forecast but perhaps some isolated showers.  The bus came early and cost 20,000 Guaranis (£2.60 or so) for the 90-minute trip to Yuty.  I paid the driver as the conductor put my luggage in the hold, and we set off.  And everything was good for a few minutes until we left San Francisco and reached the wilds and the driver booted the bus up to between 50 and 60mph on roads where 25 was often too fast.  Lightning started to flash to the West after the sun had set and the streaks lit up the huge grey billows that covered nearly all the sky.  The flashes came every few seconds in multiple areas, some far off through a few layers of cloud, others were striking a mile or so off.  The driver was trying to beat the storm, a storm that hadn’t been expected from the San Francisco area.

By 8pm the bus was overtaken and engulfed by the fast-moving, huge storm and the rain was lashing down.  Lightning struck trees less than a few hundred yards away with a zap and a pop.  The bus slowed down to 5mph and carefully took to the slick roads like a cat on a very narrow fence.  Many times buses have slid off the road and the occupants have had to bed down for the night, or until the storm passes, before the slow rescue vehicle (tractor) rumbles out to save the day.  

Many times, especially going up hill, the back of the bus swayed a yard this way and a yard that way, and once began to drift sideways on the curved path that had been heavily cambered by the rain at each side.  On a slight upward hill we approached what appeared to be a parked truck.  As we got closer the dim bus lights began to pick up its partially spilled load hanging from the side, and reaching the front we saw no cab, as the truck had jack-knifed and the cab was rammed into the ridge 90 degrees off the trailer position.  It looked from the tire marks to have been both recent and a slow-speed accident whereby the truck had simply lost traction over the course of a dozen feet and had slid holus-bolus into the verge.  The bus drew alongside and the conductor shouted out the door to the trucker but nobody replied.  After a few minutes of nothing we continued on and the darkened truck was engulfed by the night again.

Around a corner not far from there, on the steepest hill yet, a motorbike and 2 passengers lay across the dead-centre of the road leaving no space either side for the bus to get passed.  There are stories of people laying dead in the middle of narrow, isolated roads like this, so that drivers are forced to stop and then a pack of thieves jump out of the bushes with guns and rob everybody blind, so the bus driver showed caution and didn’t slow down but flashed his lights and honked his horn.  Out of nowhere, overtaking us at that very moment was a 2nd motorbike (unnervingly we hadn’t seen anything else moving since the rain started).  The odds were heavily in favour of criminality due to the location, timing, and position of all key players, but, rather amazingly it turned out to be the nigh-on-impossible innocent happening, or maybe it wasn’t, because the driver didn’t open the door and the fallen bikers picked their muddy selves up and got out of the way of the revving, less than sympathetic bus.  From a standing start it seemed unlikely that we would get moving again, but we did.

I then got a call from Dan Reich in Yuty (who was going to collect me), and he said the bus was about to reach Yuty as he had spoken to the wife of the driver.  The wife of the driver was sitting in front of me and soon turned around and said hello.  It transpired that the bus driver and his wife are the Paraguayan mom and dad who Hannes, the young Swiss missionary I met on my first Sunday in Paraguay, is living with in Yuty!  It’s a town of 6,000 people, 3 times the size of San Francisco, yet it’s an extremely small world.