Looking at the state of the cars parked before the departure to Asuncion in Paraguay, we were beginning to feel quite concerned as so many were battered or leaning with broken suspension that one wondered how they would ever finish. The first Stage was just outside of Londrina and ran through a coffee plantation, the start of which was picturesque with its dilapidated farm buildings and families of bantams scooting about on the red earth, and white doves nesting in the damaged rafters above under a hot blue sky. We took it slowly down these rough undulating tree-lined dirt lanes of rural Brazil though we were always glad when we saw the finishing flag as it meant we had survived without damage and could relax from the perils which these scenic farm roads ensured were ever-present.
As it was going to be a long day and we had done our SS we decided that we would take a steady and relaxing drive straight to Asuncion, but on the way to the Brazil/Paraguay frontier we came upon Bill and Eileen in the Chrysler 77 which had broken an axle tie rod and, then a little later, Alberto who had hit something which was going to become very familiar from now on – a tope. These topes or sleeping policemen were going to become the curse of travelling through South America. They are not the gentle curvaceous thing found in Europe, but rather an aggressive piece of reinforced concrete of angular construction going across the entire road and repeated sometimes up to four times. They are painted to be visible, though often as not they are the same colour as the road and therefore invisible. We later accounted for three at about 50mph, and could never believe that the car was functioning after flying through the air and crash-landing. Alberto had hit this one doing 60mph and had done some damage to the Mustangs front suspension and slithered off to a local garage practised in the art of straightening out the damage done by these topes. These fortifications are across the entrance to garages, hotels and every bridge and very annoyingly they are sometimes unsigned, but they do slow down those cowboy lorries.
Arriving at the border we found it heavily congested and Hero’s temperature gauge was soon reading 90°C as we jostled in a column of traffic six cars wide all trying to squeeze their way to the frontier. It was all good-natured stuff with no aggression though with plenty of nudging and bluffing. I badly ‘cut-up’ a small van which was coming along our inside but he was not at all put-out and put his wheels up onto the banking to overtake us at an angle of about 45° only to say, when he got level with our window that he loved our car and just wanted to be near it. We gave him a photograph of Hero and were very soon through onto the dangerous road that runs from the east to the west of Paraguay.
If you imagine a very dangerous helter-skelter that runs 230 miles, you have some idea of what it was like driving from the border to Asuncion. Probably because of the name we had associated Paraguay with Paradise but there was little evidence of a tropical rain-forest paradise for us. Instead it was a congested highly populated land with intensive farming and ugly development while the road was under the control of bullying cavalier bus drivers who took unparalleled risks with their powerful Chevrolet buses; whatever momentum they had lost on the up-hill, they more than doubled up going down hill. We clocked these buses doing more than 85mph despite being overloaded and stacked high with luggage on their roof racks. Between the lorries and the bus drivers we knew that we had to be into Asuncion, or at least its outskirts, before dark. To make matters worse the radiant blue skies of Brazil had left us at the border and we were now travelling under a leaden canopy that threatened heavy rain and reduced visibility alarmingly. We were buzzed as we came into Asuncion by Mikkola driving his Av-gas fuelled Escort; it was like a Spitfire weaving and ducking through the traffic around a lumbering Lancaster. He is a driver of great precision. Asuncion was chaos itself with no clear-cut sense of direction to the city, bad lighting, narrow roads and manholes minus their grids. All this coupled with the Paraguayan fatalistic way of driving had us feeling exhausted on arrival at the hotel in an inky blackness. We were never to see much of Asuncion having arrived in the dark and having to depart for Argentina the following morning in the same pitch black of pre-dawn.
Now this was it, this was to be the big day and mercifully there would be no Special Stages. Asuncion to Ju Juy was given in the Road Book as 775 miles and with the first car out at 6.01am we departed at 6.27am on half minute intervals driving through the deserted streets and suburbs avoiding the open manholes, though occasionally coming up a little too fast on a tope. As dawn broke, we were going well, through the marsh land that is the border between Paraguay and Argentina, where on arrival at Customs we had a two hour delay caused by a totally confusing nonsense of form filling.
Having escaped from the border and the usual awful roads that lead to it on both sides, we were now travelling across the big flat grasslands of Argentina known as The Pampas, and mercifully we were under that travellers friend – a big untroubled blue sky. The road stretched out before us narrowing down to a pinpoint in the horizon. The black tarmac was billiard table smooth and with the sun behind us, we headed directly west ahead of it with our sunroof open and the cooling slipstream blowing through all our open windows. This was it, not the terrifying congestion of Paraguay under dull leaden skies but the open endless untroubled road which reminded us so much of the roads in Central Asia, the freedom and the adventure.
