Each year Peace Corps Paraguay in corporation with A Todo
Pulmon hosts an environmental camp which they call Paraguay Verde. This year I took a girl from my community
named Romina who is eleven years old and who grew up and goes to school here in
Yukyry Central. This year the camp was
held down in Ayolas Paraguay which is the furthest south you can get here right
on the border with Argentina. In order
for us to get there when the camp started on Thursday morning we had to leave
here on our early morning (5 am) bus to begin our journey. This blog post is just about the traveling
down to the camp itself and I will just be showing the pictures of our journey
and explaining as we went.
We left our community a little after 5 am and traveled into
Caaguazu where we caught another bus to Villarrica. In Villarrica we had a couple of hours until
our next bus so we went around and explored the town. I had been here before when I had my PCV
visit my third week in country so I knew my way around a little bit.
Our first stop was a park in Villarrica was visiting Parque
Manuel Ortiz Guerrero which is just a few blocks from the bus station and below
you can see some pictures of the park itself.
Also we saw some carpinchos which are a type of animal that lives in
both the water and on land. The last
time I was here I wasn’t able to see them but we were able to get up close to
them and get some great pictures. They
are very interesting animals and were not afraid of us at all.
This is a picture of a huge cathedral that we saw in town.
This is the municipality building in Villarica.
Next we visited the Plaza de los Heroes which tells the
story of the battles of the Chaco war and these seven pillars (which you can
see in the picture) represents the seven moves of the city to where it has
finally settled down here.
This is just a picture of Romina with one of the statues in
the park.
This is a picture of us with our matching hats (in case you didn’t notice) on our long bus ride.
After we had our nice tour of the city (some of which was in
a horse cart which Villarrica is known for) we met up with one of my friends
who lives close to Villarrica so we got lunch and the boarded our bus to go to
Paraguari. Once we arrived there we had
another couple hour wait so we just sat around at a taxi stand talking to
locals and eating some wonderful chipa.
Our bus finally came at 4:30 and we got on the bus for our wonderful 4
hour journey down to Ayolas. We finally
arrived at our destination around 8:30 in the evening so we had a long but
wonderful day of traveling.
On Thursday morning we got up and went and visited a
wonderful museum that was built in conjunction with the Yacyreta dam. The museum has archaeological objects,
minerals, and examples of the native fauna.
They also had a short video that told some of the history of the dam and
area around. After our short tour we finally
met everyone there at the museum and were bussed out to Paraguay Verde which my
next blog post will cover.
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