Travellers Tales : By Landrover From Pilar
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My travellers tales are rather out of date. I just looked up Pilar, Paraguay on Google Earth, and I can't recognize the place. The streets that used to be deep sand churned up by the bullock-drawn waggons are now surfaced, and there are cars and bicycles parked about the place.
My trip started when there were two motor vehicles in Pilar. My friend (Australian) was taking us for a trip into the country, so he had driven to Pilar from the capital city. His first job was to load up with petrol (gas). Of course, with only two motor vehicles in Pilar, there were no filling stations, so he drove to a private home where they sold him enough to half-fill the back of the Landrover with containers.
The Landrover made short work of ploughing through the deep sand, and the driver started to boast of his vehicle's abilities. Then we forded our first river, and he could continue to boast.
Then we came to where the road was two tracks - no, I don't mean a dual carriage-way. I mean the two tracks left by the wheels of covered wagons. That's when our problems started. The wagon wheels were further apart than the Landrover wheels. There were grass hummocks between the tracks, and dirt thrown up by wheels kept building up round the tufts of grass. So we drove along with the wheels on one side in one track and the other side bumped over the hummocks.
For some reason or other, that trip destroyed the springs. However, we were making better time than we would on horseback, and it wasn't really any more bumpy than riding a horse.
Suddenly we came to a stop with all four wheels spinning. When Landrover claims to be an all-terrain vehicle, they didn't think of this terrain. You see, the farmer had found that the mud in his pigsty was getting too deep for his pigs to wade through it. So he moved the pigsty to the road, and cut new tracks through the grass to point the road through where the pigsty had been.
It wouldn't have bothered the enormous wheels on a wagon, or the team of twelve bullocks pulling it, because their legs were longer than pig legs. But the Landrover was outclassed. About four hours afterwards, smelling of the stuff that the adults had been shovelling, we were on our way again. We children couldn't understand why the adults were grumbling so much. We didn't have to use a shovel.
The only other incident that sticks in my mind was how we crossed a rainwater gully. Our driver was reckless, to say the least, but at least he made us all get out of the Landrover when he saw the bridge over the gully, supported only by two diagonally opposite corners.
He lined the vehicle carefully up with the diagonal line, so as to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, then gunned the engine. It was just like the movies! The structure didn't collapse until at least half a second after the back wheels had cleared the bridge.
To be fair to Landrover, I wouldn't have had any travellers tales to tell if I had been in a normal car. It would probably have bogged down in the streets of Pilar.
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