Here It Is or There It Went

Concepcion was a nothing town, but it was a town, and there aren´t a lot of those in western Paraguay, so I took my chances. If you were to believe Lonely Planet, it sounds like a calming respite, an oasis in the vast Paraguayan plains - it isn´t. It´s a nothing town, with nothing, no one, and nowhere. I spent two days.

The only men in town were gathered along the one paved road in front of the national bank, waiting for government money to start the sesame season. They stood there, an average group of Guarani, men with wide eyes and sunken cheeks, clad in worn denim with straw hats, kicking the dirt with the toes of their boots, laughing and talking until the bank door opened, then the talking stopped and the men surged forward, looking only at the door and the guards in front of the door; looking hungrily, greedily, at what could be on the other side.

I spent a dollar on half a chicken and hit the road.

Armed with two bags of bread and virtually no information, I went north towards Brazil to go camping; alone, without a tent or a sleeping bag, and - as I found out later - no insect repellent. In retrospect, it´s easy to say this was a bad idea, but in the moment, with no one to disagree with me but myself, ideas tend to grow and expand without reason. Only the most aware mind can remind itself of external opinions.

Well, I wasn´t thinking of this when I jumped off my bus somewhere along a deserted stretch of highway north of Ybiyui - all I wanted to do was piss, and I did, into the forest, with my pack on the edge of the asphalt. In South America, as in North America, I refuse to pay to urinate, as I am yet to find a bathroom that looked like it spent my fifty centavos on actually maintaining the facilities.

I walked back along the highway about a mile without a car passing me, turning at the small park entrance, and continuing up the dirt path to the visitors center. It was dusk, or thereabouts, and the last birds of the day were making long spirals in the sky. The crickets joined in as the temperature dropped and the sun´s last bit bled over the hills to the west. I walked up the path with nothing behind me.

Lucky for me, I didn´t have to improvise a shelter - the park had an extra bunk in the rangers´cabin. I ate some bread and fell asleep, exhausted.

At times, sleep can be a terrifying thing. For about a month I´ve been taking Larium, an anti-malarial pill with extreme psychotropic side effects ranging from irritability and depression to ¨homicidal psychosis.¨I took it in Africa and I´m taking it here, and I´ve had the same problem each time; namely, dreams so vivid, so clear and life-like, that they are indistinguishable from reality. But they follow a pattern, more or less:

Towards the end of all my dreams on Larium, there is a moment that could only be found a dream, and I am suddenly aware I am dreaming, and mentally (that is, second-mentally, in my character in my dream) I think about how strange it is to be a character in a dreamworld filled with such bizarre choices. I count out my options, slightly bemused by the situation. While this is happening, my first mind, the mind that is dreaming, discusses with itself the action I, in my dream, should take. The other parts of the scene - the other people, the setting and mood - simply fade away until it is just me thinking about what to do as I think about what to do.

Suffice to say, I don´t understand why Larium isn´t used recreationally. That night I dreamt a dream I can´t remember, as I can´t remember most of my dreams in South America.