frolicking all the way to the frontera.

i packed my rucksack and set off for the subway in the mid-afternoon bonairense sun. in true late-sabbath-day fashion, everything was illuminated, traffic was little, the pedestrian presence light. helios was smiling upon the cafe just across the way and a slight southern breeze tickled my hind-side as i made for the avenida san juan. in short, a perfect day to set sail for other shores. your host has given you its blessing, you have its temporal authority to depart.

on roughly an hour's sleep, i'd made the eventual early-to-mid morning transfer from quilmes to yerba mate only hours before setting off. had been another late, though pleasantly un-rambunctious evening in and out of corner dives and bodegas, scribbling on napkins and smoking in the cold, watching the endless sea of cabbies whisk by as you wait for your compañera to show. a few hours' transfer of tales later, we were ambling along the empty city streets, making our way for congress and whatever tales the early morning avenue had to tell. we ducked into a cafe for the latter au lait and a medialuna or two, just as the sun began to lift its wintry head - and squinted in awe as it briskly brightened the haussmannian edifice kitty corner from our groundfloor perch. little is more glorious than the cold and sunny arousal of a sleeping metropolis on a sunday morning. you've no other task but to find a newspaper and carelessly count your blessings.

a 14-peso coffee and several heavy-eyed articles into the freshly minted august edition of le monde diplomatique later, i was aboard my earth-faring beauty, the ever-so-amply noted crucero del norte, amidst who's arms i would reach the calm, ocean-less shores of the paraguayan capital within 20 hours. as i'd both hoped and feared, our lovely butler brought around a tray of chocolates and whiskey within moments of hitting the highway. being in no position to either read my paper or lean over the middle-aged women to my right to hopelessly divine what hugo mortensen was whispering in subtitles on the stunted screen, i peered into the future in a sleep-deprived, tipsifying daze as we sailed down the highway into the outlying ends of the early evening northern sprawl. there is truly no experience like sitting front-row, second-story of a double-decker bus thrusting its way into the horizon. it is the closest thing thing to feel-riding the future i've ever felt - especially when in the middle of the pampa at the crack of dawn. you're at the cusp of the earthly condition, always a mili-second ahead of the rest of humanity - where time and distance furiously make love and you're their first born, peering through the looking-glass of the massive windshield as you pass the world by (and not the other way around). apart, of course, from the conductor directly below you, himself responsible for steering our fabled time-ship.

i awoke bright and early and went below to get a black coffee from one of the sugar-and-caffeine dispensers these 'cama con/servicio' bus routes are known for. minutes later, we happened upon an all-too-recent road block of sorts. paraguay, as i've recently come to learn from tendentious personal experience, is notoriously full of police checks along its principle thoroughfares; that being said, we were still 10km south of the border and couldn't make out any authoritative intervention up ahead - nor did it appear to be an accident. all i could make out was a non-vehicular obstacle and a small congregation of fellow human-folk some 100m ahead. after 15 minutes of inactivity and the mid-morning sun ominously beating upon my stinken and poorly-rested brow, i decided to (pretend to) investigate the cause of our delay. it was already shaping up to be a beautiful day as i walked toward the source of our minor morning troubles. truck drivers and traveling salesmen were leaning against their respective modes of transportation, sipping mate - or terere - depending from which side of the border they hailed, looking generally uninterested in the cause of our collective standstill. something about patience being the father of pragmatism, i suppose - it does help to take such struggles in stride on this side of things.

as i reached the cause of commotion on foot, i neared a group of 20-25 adults huddled together in the middle of the road. to their right, several bedraggled children ground a dirty, empty plastic bottle further into the pebbled dirt with ineffectual blows of the foot. they'd constructed barriers of branch and twig and adorned their humble barricade with a poorly crafted and illegible script of various colors. there were 3-4 maimed and mangled tents awkwardly pitched in the grass along each side of the shoulder, whose temporary inhabitants huddled over thermoses of mate. all in all, they'd managed to blockade a 30 meter stretch of road with nothing more than sticks, stones and the general goodwill of not-passers-by - in addition to their own fiery, if uninspiring, resolution, of course. from what i could tell, they were a landless indigenous group of sorts resorting to moderately more pressing measures after months, if not years and generations, of a condescendingly cold government shoulder. this, at least, was what i picked up from the audio recording played by one of the protesters - a tool he passively played when pressed for information by curious onlookers. apart from this languid display of third-party input, they exerted no further communicative effort; furthermore, it was never even quite clear if they spoke spanish, either. nonetheless, it was an impressive display - however despondent its agents appeared at first (and second) sight: several sadly clad, crestfallen peons and their downtrodden offspring that had managed to peacefully cut off international travel between two repressive, militaristic quasi-republics for three hours on a busy monday morning without the slightest trace of turmoil; a noble tooth and nail attempt, however feeble, not to be swept under the doormat of history's bitter, indifferent breeze.

leaning against a rail that lined the route, a paraguayan chap from my bus approached me to strike up a friendly chat: "and to think that i'll get to tell my friends the state of things in argentina. in paraguay, they'd have pummeled these poor souls into the earth within minutes. you can't block the highway in my country. it's the law," he mused with a shrug. at noon, the protesters peacefully dissembled as previously planned and we all got back into the bus. "what did those bolivians want?!" the woman next to me demanded. "i couldn't quite tell you."