Jesuit Ruins

I am sure you will all be glad to hear that I made it back alive from my first solo adventure out of Asunción to Encarnación and the Jesuit Ruins. I left at midnight on Friday and arrived on Saturday morning, and got another bus straight out to the Trinidad ruins where I was completely alone other than a waitress, the guard and the ticket office lady. The ruins were beautiful enough to make up for my fatigue and the bank holiday Monday weather. As I was busy taking artistic photographs and wandering around feeling entrepid, cultural and travelly in the middle of this peaceful countryside, silent apart from bird song, I unwittingly stepped where UNESCO did not wish me to step and WAHWAHWAHWAHWHA, set off a very loud alarm that frightened me out of my skin and got me in trouble with the guard, whoops, who spoke Spanish I did not understand, but I think he let me off because I'd been so keen arriving at 7:15am, 45 minutes before the site actually opened.

Off I then went, brave voyager, to the Jesús ruins, which involved firstly using my go-to phrase: ¿Donde es el bus para los ruinas, por favour?, and then climbing into a tin can bus as the only tourist and foreigner and rumbling into the middle of nowhere, through the drizzling rain, down dirt tracks and crazy-paved roads past incredible tropical-farmland scenery and cows and chickens to the little village of Jesús where the bus driver, who had clearly dealt with foreigners before and emphatically pointed at the clock on his phone and told me he'd be back for me personally at 11am. Got it.

The ruins at Jesús were amazing - far better preserved than at Trinidad, and with a bench at the back overlooking a view that took my breath away. It's easy to see why the Jesuits chose that spot. The only thing that ruined my gloriously Romantic moment was the need to pee, which I seriously considered doing a little way from the ruins (not on them, that would be disrespectful to both the Jesuits and UNESCO, and would probably have set off another of their alarms), but just as I stood up to risk it, thinking I was on my own as I had been in Trinidad, a Paraguayan family stepped onto the verandah overlooking the view and said very loudly 'Aah, how beautiful', or something to that effect. I sat down quickly and smiled and nodded in agreement.

I came back to Encarnación on the bus and had one of those awkward conversations with a young Paraguayan where the first question is 'Casada?' which means, 'Are you married?' What a conversation starter. Unfortunately, I wasn't wearing my fake wedding ring, so I had to endure about ten minutes of him insisting on maintaining the conversation after I had made it very clear that I DID NOT UNDERSTAND HIM. Which I didn't. The accents are odd in the country cos mostly they speak a language called Guarani.

Encarnación as a town had little charms other than a little church, a book fayre in the square and a market where lots of people engaged me in conversation with what I can only assume was: 'Cheap crap, Señorita? Cheap crap for you?' but I haven't yet figured out how to say 'No, no cheap crap for me thanks, I'm looking for post cards.' Which don't exist in Paraguay. I came back to Asunción on Sunday morning and spent about five hours staring at countryside and countryside and more countryside. There is a lot of countryside in Paraguay. On my bus journey I saw: one drove of horses running towards another horse which was very beautiful and Disney-esque, two cowboys, three boys who were allowed on the bus to offer us agua and bread, four American tourists who got on along the way, lots of cows and lots of chickens.

And then I came home and went to church and went out for a burger with young church people and met some German girls doing a gap year with the mennonite church. What are mennonites, I hear you ask? They are a bunch of German Christians who emigrated to Paraguay and live in the middle of the northern desert, the Chaco, and are self sufficient as only Germans can be and have their own generators and water systems and neat and orderly rows of houses in the back end of beyond. I might go and visit next weekend.

And now I am back at school and have found a child in the last year of sixth form who loves Jane Austen and we are going to be best friends forever. She has read her books and watched her films and wants to do a presentation about the role of women in her novels and how there is a Jane Austen figure in all her novels BUT she is doing some form of Chemical Engineering at university and she doesn't want to, she wants to do some form of literature and arts but her parents won't let her and I told her it was HER life, not theirs. But they're paying for her education so looks like she's doing Chemical Engineering!

Granddad, please stop worrying, I couldn't be safer or more secure.

Big kiss.