Negotiating Tricky Spots!

Foreigners are encouraged not to drive at night, as even in the daytime all roads in Paraguay have tricky spots.  I’d encourage them not to travel at all as a tricky spot is found on nearly every road.  Tricky spots even for pedestrians are road crossings without pedestrian signals (I’m yet to encounter even one!), roads which are rendered gauntlets by the 6 lane expressways (one, helpfully, if not negotiated, has a major graveyard on the other side to ensure you reach the other side in death if not in life); sidewalk sculptures such as rock gardens that surround major trees that leave sometimes no route past without stepping onto the road; interesting parking procedures which means a car can be parked to cover 100% of the sidewalk to force the unfortunate into the path of traffic; sudden drops of over a foot (one guy in a wheelchair had to use the expressway to get around, and it was a harrowing sight); and my favourite obstacle: the 1ft drop from sidewalk to road immediately followed by the 8ft drop into the river if more than your leg could fit through the rain drains.  It’s good that most of the time the sidewalks are raised, because low ones are used by impatient motorists as slip roads around queues. 

On the SIM street is a clothes shop and daily from 7am the clothes are hung out over the sidewalk under the shop’s overhanging roof.  The roof is 7.5ft high, and the average t-shirt hung from it is about head-height.  Further obstacles are placed deliberately in the way of the already ducking or blinded walker by the setting out of 2 large chairs, a water flask for terere, and a foul guard dog which lays in a heap in the dust and looks in a state of rigor mortis.  The shopkeepers then sit themselves down at waist hight (below the hanging clothes) and look flabbergasted as to why people are getting caught up in their wares.

The Low-Flying Clothes Shop

Things get trickier when you venture off the high, Crypton Factor sidewalk and climb inside a dodgem.  All cars here carry scars, and some cars are left where their life had left them, minus their chairs and radio.  To observe a busy road here is to observe a scene of an accident moments before it all goes wrong: buses and taxis charge the wrong way up one-way streets to make time; traffic lights are few and far between (and not programmed for rush hour); most junctions of minor roads onto major ones require looking for a space between a couple of weedy bikes and an onrushing truck and flooring the gas over the two lanes, then braking in the middle of the road, ready to be t-boned by the truck if he didn’t see you or can’t swat the bikes out the way in the 2nd lane to make space, whilst you wait for a gap to open in the other two lanes.  Drive defensively, they say.  There’s a lot of horn honking (mainly to make people aware that you are overtaking them -or undertaking as the case usually is), motorbikers trying to get themselves crushed by dodging cars and buses like flies buzzing around a cow’s slapping tail.  When safely onto the 2 lane expressway then it’s best to be in the fast lane as if you aren’t paying attention there might be a 30ft tree growing in the other lane, or, like on the road to the airport, someone has extended their house onto the slow lane so motorists are faced with an actual brick wall in a 60mph zone (I’m not making this up).

A 20ft long storm drain into a river with a human-sized section helpfully cut away to illustrate the peril.

However, the most devious device in Asuncion is the speed bump.  They are everywhere, usually a few yards before a junction, but others are just thrown here or there.  They are the full sleeping policeman that reach across the road (some leave a slight gap by the kerb and motorbikists swerve towards them bringing themselves perilously close to telegraph poles, and the branches of thorny shrubbery).  Some still have their yellow war paint from when they were first constructed, but most have been plastered with hot, black rubber from cars that have launched from them into orbit leaving them, especially at night, almost invisible.  There is a cross-roads next to SIM HQ with a disguised speed bump and constantly there are cars screeching to a halt as they approach, and the clattering of loose suspension with cars leaping over them, and once the smashing of glass as one van carting glass-fronted fridges found speed bumps can certainly rock your contents about with force.

I have had the opportunity to drive once, at the tricky time of 9pm (Monday) when it was dark.  The vehicle was a left-hand drive 4x4.  As I was negotiating the crossing of major intersections without blinking or prising my clenched teeth apart, I kept telling my passenger, I’m really enjoying this!  I think I was, and I lived to tell the tale.