Gran Chaco With NTM

This past week 4 of us have travelled to the North West of Paraguay into the sparsely-populated, arid Gran Chaco region.  The Gran Chaco spreads into Bolivia to the North and Argentina to the East.  SIM works south of Asuncion with subsistence farmers whilst a lot of NTM’s work is North with the tribal people out in the wilds.  As I’m working 2 weeks with NTM it gave me the only opportunity to see this part of the country and visit some of its tribes.  I’ll write some more about the tribes we saw at some point later, but as much of the adventure was set on the epic road trip there and back, I’ll talk of that first.

Much of Paraguay is totally flat with the occasional hillock, and when we reached the bridge over the river beside Concepcion it really struck home just how flat the country, especially the Chaco, is as there was not a single hill in sight.  What it lacked in hills we hoped it made up for in wildlife since there was such a huge area of scrubland with so few hunters/people, as the rest of the country has been disappointing in the lack of wild animals.

Exiting the bridge we found an immediate decline in traffic (from medium to almost zero) and a steep falling away in the road -literally as huge, 0.5ft deep potholes littered the tarmac road as it cut an almost straight line through the low, thorny scrubland.  Long grasses reached out onto the road and made the 2-lane highway seem long-abandoned, desolate and narrow.  After the bridge it took about 20km until we passed a house, and each further house or settlement seemed to be separated by a similar distance.

As it was extraordinarily flat, the slightly raised road often had long patches of floodwater on either side, not more than 1ft deep but covering large areas.  Some shacks we passed were surrounded by these low floodwaters, but life inside them seemed to be continuing.  Last week we were supposed to have driven out here, but the Chaco was hit with torrential rain which left much of the area flooded this way.  The local news had called it a disaster zone, which sounds extreme until you know how very tranquil Paraguay is with its weather.  It is never struck with the kind of storms the southern states of America get, so what is a bit rough for us in the UK or USA is extreme here.

We drove about 300km over bad roads, through the vast prairie, but in all this distance we scarcely saw anything in the way of animals besides the small herds of cows and goats which crossed the roads, and various vultures and storks.  We were, however, blessed with an encounter with a groundhog who posed for us and bit Jeremy’s leather boots, and later he and Anthony jumped out the car and captured an armadillo.

Here are some more pictures of the things we saw on the roads between Concepcion and Filadelfia.

My rather poorly made 360 of the Paraguayan horizon from the vantage point of the bridge outside Concepcion.

Anthony and Jeremy catching an armadillo

The snared beast.

Set free.

The groundhog photoshoot.

It wasn't afraid of anything.

A dear old tribal lady who hitched a lift.

A field of flowers by a small hut in the middle of nowhere.  Reminds me of how God grows beautiful plants on distant mountains and places no human eye will ever see, all for His glory.

This truck slid off the road into thick mud.

A flooded Chaco hut.

Harvest.

The unloved guard dog who jumped into the car when we stopped at a peanut butter farm.

Windscreen.

The black dots are horrid, big-butt spiders in vast, 20ft webs.

Flowers in a flooded field.

A vile, big-butt spider.  Its tread was like nylon.

A stork hiding in the grass in a rare area of meadow.

Due to the floods and amount of unmoving water, the Chaco was teeming with mosquitos.