The route to Laguna Blanca

 After about 29 hours of travelling and almost no sleep, I arrived at Laguna Blanca. The bus journey from Asucion to Santa Rosa - the nearest town to the reserve  was an experience in itself. After some very poor Spanish and lots of confused faces I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the bus at the Terminal de Autobus. The air conditioned double decker set off through Asucion and since Asuncion is about 117km squared (about 72miles) you can imagine it took a while just to get out of the city, around 1 and a half hours. The bus picked up a few locals on the way stood at bus stops and casually stopped and let on men selling a range of items from neatly pealed oranges and the biggest apples i've ever seen, to home made breads, chewing gum and torches, mobile phones and even socks.

The city centre has a few posh looking hotels but mostly looks run down. As you move further out of the city centre you find cows grazing on football pitches and a few timber yard. Further out still is more rural residence and people growing food and keeping sheep and goats  in their gardens. There are amazing pink and purple trees and lots of colourful birds flitting in and out of bushes, not forgetting chickens and dogs that walk themselves across the highway. 

I'd been told that the journey could take anywhere between 4-6 hours so 4 hours into the journey I attempted to ask him how long it would take to get to Santa Rosa. The thing about Paraguayans is that you never get or yes or no answer. I handed the bus conductor a pen and he wrote 3:30 on the back of my ticket. By this time the lady sat next to me was eager to get involved in the conversation and she looked eager to tell me something, I handed her my translation book and after an hour and a half of more bad Spanish and confused faces, she had reconfirmed that the journey would infact take another 3 and a half hours.

The translation book lacked most essential words for small talk but by using some basic English the she knew, I found out she was a Teacher from Concepcion - a city about 2 hours North West of Santa Rosa. She taught art and dancing. I used pictures to explain to her that I was studying monkeys at a reserve, that I had worked as a zookeeper and showed her some pictures from YWP. She had a son with her who looked to be about 7 years old. He had a cheeky smile and found the whole thing very amusing. Surprisingly he could count up to 10 in English so spent about 2 hours of the journey doing just that.

5 and a half hours in, She indicated for me to go downstairs to get off for Santa Rosa. I was let off at the side of the road and that was it, I was at huge cross roads in the afternoon heat. I recognised the Bus terminal from a picture on Google but I had no phone and their seemed to be none around who was expecting me to have arrived. I went to the bus ticket booth somehow convinced a guy on the booth to let me borrow his phone. About 2 minutes later my lift had arrived in the form of a Toyota Hilux. Anyone from YWP will understand why I felt strangely at home in this Hilux and despite being driven down 2 hours of dirt and sand track on a weekly basis, it's still in better shape and sounding a lot better than WYP's Hilux on a good day. 

As we ventured down the dirt track toward Laguna Blanca we were flagged down by an old man by the side of the road who wanted a lift and he explained that he would tap on the roof when he wanted to get off. Half hour in we stopped to let a cattle rancher take his steer across the road. We saw burrowing owls sitting along the fences and the sun was setting when we arrived just in time for dinner. 

After meeting the team, I went outside to use the wireless out on the porch and narrowly avoided being hit in the head by a 3inch longhorn beetle. Finally I put up my mosquito net around my bed, brushed my teeth and crapped my pants when I noticed that the moth sitting on the toilet roll was bigger than the toilet roll itself!