I’m following with some interest the blog written by two young bikers who are pedaling from Paraguay through Argentina to the tip of South America.
I hope they write a book about the trip and call it “The Bicycle Diaries.”
Anyway, Paraguayan TV included them in a report, which I find interesting on several levels:
- I have trouble following the Spanish, even when a gringo is speaking slowly. My Spanish skills are clearly very rusty, like a chain left in the rain with no lube. I may have to take an MMU Spanish class soon. I’ll come back later with a dictionary and see what I can make of this.
- I envy the home-made fender. Francis had a back fender, which I had to remove due to installing a back rack. Fenders on bikes, for some reason, are a bit rare in the U.S.A., mostly, I think, because for Gringos, bikes are toys. Where they are transport, such as in the U.K., they have fenders. In Paraguay, I suppose fenders are necessary just to keep from being caked with red road dust. Anyway, I like how the pretty fender (there, I was able to translate something) features in the TV report.
- I don’t envy the bikers riding on Paraguayan roads. Check out the nature of a Paraguayan “highway” in the TV report. Granted, there are many paved roads—on my own trip to Paraguay this summer, practically everywhere I went was on cobbles or blacktop—but this kind of road is not unusual and many towns cannot be reached by anything other than dirt paths that are impassible in rain.
