Welcome aboard the Aquidaban, the floating jungle supermarket
On the wooden gangway in single file, nearly an entire native village crowded onto the foredeck of the Aquidaban. The Tomárahos had taken the boat downriver to vote in Paraguay’s national elections, then slept outside for four days, waiting for the Aquidaban to take them home.
Now more than 200 of them were squatting on overturned buckets, crammed into hammocks and sprawled on the floor. No one knew exactly how many life jackets were on board, but almost everyone was sure that the Tomárahos were outnumbered.
“Ever since I was a kid, there was always the Aquidaban,” says Griselda Vera Velazquez, 33, a craftswoman in the no-road village of Tomáraho. She regularly goes by boat to medical specialists 400 miles away for her daughter with Down syndrome. “We’re isolated,” she said. “We can’t do otherwise.”
Nearby, four ranchers drank beer after beer and dumped empties into the river on their way to months of service in the fields. A mother of six, on vacation after a divorce, balancing on a deck rail, screaming in a video to her Facebook friends. Upstairs, a young Indigenous couple cradled their 17-day-old daughter on the long journey home from the hospital.
For 44 years, the 40-metre white wooden barge has been the only regular ferry service to sail this deep into the Pantanal, a floodplain larger than Greece, traveling 500 miles up and down the Paraguay River from Tuesday to Sunday, taking everything is delivered, from dirt bikes to newborns. The bottom level is a floating supermarket, with 10 vendors selling produce, meat and sweets from the same couches they sleep on. The ship’s canteen is the only place where many communities can get a cold beer.
But as important as the Aquidaban has been for local people, especially the indigenous people, to move more freely through their forest land, it is also a melting pot for the cultural hashish that has long been a trademark of Paraguay. This landlocked nation of seven million people in South America has attracted a steady parade of people for generations fanatics, idealists, utopians and outcasts from abroad. And for decades, the boat was one of the few places where all these groups mixed.
On board are Mormon missionaries and Mennonite farmers, native chiefs and Japanese cooks. Mothers breastfeed toddlers in hammocks, farmers tie chickens to deck rails, and hunters sell headless capybaras.
But now the boat’s travels may come to an end.
Paraguay is carving new roads through the remote north as part of a construction project a transcontinental corridor, from Brazil to Chile, to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Those roads and others have hindered the sale of cargo from the Aquidaban, and the family behind the boat say business is sinking.
“There are so many broken parts and no money to fix them,” said the ship’s co-owner Alan Desvars, 35, standing on the foredeck in a German thrash metal shirt. “This may be the last year.”
The boat
The Aquidaban is loud and nasty. Suspicious food. The crew grumpy. The mosquitoes are hungry. And by day four, the air is thick with the smell of perishable produce, livestock and ranch hands returning from months in the bush.
For the Desvars, a family of shipbuilders, it is their pride and joy.
The Desvars started selling wooden canoes along the river nearly a century ago. Eventually, the younger generation realized that the remote river communities needed more than just canoes. They needed everything.
So they built a ship in the shape of a long shoe, made of wood from the pink Lapacho tree and powered by an old Mercedes truck engine, and named it the Aquidaban, after a nearby tributary.
It was an instant hit. After it was launched in 1979, the crew sometimes had to kick people out of the harbors to keep it from sinking.
Since then, the Aquidaban and his approximately 10 crew and 10 vendors have traveled the river 51 weeks a year – some for over 25 years.
“It’s like a family,” Mr. Desvars said. “There are people you get along with better. And the ones you sometimes want to kill.”
A tour only takes a few minutes. The cavernous storage pit is filled with crates of milk, oil tanks and televisions. Oddly shaped objects – mopeds, a mirror cabinet, a goat – go on the deck. Inside, vendors sell bananas, frozen chicken, and deodorant.
The four toilets discharge directly into the river, while the showers next to them pump in the river water.
Upstairs, eight cabins with bunk beds provide privacy for those who can pay. The boat fare is $19 for the full river cruise; a cabin costs an additional $14. Most passengers sleep in hammocks, on couches or on the floor.
Otherwise they will pack the canteen. The cook, Humberto Panza, usually makes two dishes: rice with chewy beef pieces or pasta with chewy beef pieces. The ample fresh produce downstairs is not on his menu. “I only cook meat,” he said.
The canteen is also probably the most popular bar in the Pantanal.
When the Aquidaban stopped at a village one Friday night, a crowd of young native people pushed through. They walked out of the hallway into the cafeteria, drinking 69-cent cans of Brazilian beer and smoking cigarettes under no-smoking signs. In a village with no electricity, it was the town bar, they said – for a 45-minute stop every Friday night.
The influencers
The Tomárahos were followed.
Nathan and Zach Seastrand were on their way to the group’s village to film what they called the Tomárahos’ “rain dance.”
“It looks like something straight out of Indiana Jones,” Nathan Seastrand said, as he and his brother come from Mr. Polish off Panza’s stew.
The Seastrands arrived in Latin America from Utah years earlier – as Mormon missionaries. Then they were clean-shaven and wore ties and name tags that read “Elder Seastrand.”
Now they were bearded, long-haired and often shirtless social media influencers who had attracted hundreds of thousands of followers like two beer-drinking, Spanish-speaking “gringos” venturing into the jungle.
“Dude, like a lot of people have talent,” said Nathan Seastrand. “But they don’t have the balls or the recklessness or the stupidity.”
As missionaries, they baptized more than 30 people in the Mormon church. Then they came across an online analysis that revealed inconsistencies in Mormon teachings. “It was like an anvil on my head,” said Nathan Seastrand.
They left the church and started posting online. Think shirtless photos with anacondas. Now they were filming a documentary about Indigenous groups that they wanted to submit to the Sundance Film Festival. The Tomárahos were one of their last missing pieces.
The Tomáraho chief who drinks beer on deck, Nestor Rodríguez, said they were the fourth group of foreigners the Aquidaban brought to the village in the past two years. “They’re doing a positive project to support the community,” he said.
The Seastrands said they had been notified that they would have to pay for entry.
At full moon the Aquidaban stopped at the village. For twenty minutes the Tomárahos shouted to each other as they searched for their belongings in the dark.
At the edge of the chaos stood the Seastrands. “We don’t know where we’re going,” Nathan Seastrand said.
The missionaries
Besides transporting flour, live pigs and tractor parts, the Aquidaban has also been used to spread the gospel.
For decades, missionaries have relied on the boat to reach the hard-to-reach indigenous communities along the river.
The northernmost stop, Bahía Negra, is home to arguably the most remote church of the Mormon faith. When the Aquidaban stopped one recent morning, townspeople gathered at the edge of the river, awaiting the weekly arrival of their floating grocery store. Among them were two young men in ties, today’s Mormon missionaries, who had been placed there, they said, by divine intervention.
“One of the apostles looks at our faces, sees our papers, reads some information about us, and looks at a map,” says AJ Carlson, 18, of Fort Worth, Tex. “Then they receive a revelation.”
Ahead, a group of native Chamacoco women were weaving baskets in the backyard of their bungalow. “There was no church for them. Just shamans,” Elizabeth Vera, 64, said of the Mormons. “Then came the Americans.”
She gestured to Mr. Carlson, “He’s a messenger from Christ.”
Back on the Aquidaban, Emilia Santos traveled from her native village to another church. She was the chef at a jungle outpost of the Unification Church, the religious movement founded by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a Korean man who claimed to be a new Christian messiah, attracted millions of followers — and accusations of brainwashing and bankrupt many of his herd.
The settlement, in Puerto Leda, was mostly Japanese missionaries, so Mrs. Santos had learned how to make curries and sushi. She was on her way to start another two-week shift, she said, “always through the Aquidaban.”
The settlers tend to taro root crops and 20 fish ponds. They also converted some native neighbors.
Jamby Balbuena, an indigenous laborer who helps raise the fish, was drinking beer in the canteen of Aquidaban on his way to a service in the settlement, where alcohol is consumed. forbidden. He said he converted two years ago: “I like their religion, following God, all that.”
The police and the prisoner
Derlis Martinez looked nervous. The 25-year-old federal police officer in camouflage reliefs and combat boots was transporting his first prisoner, on the overcrowded boat.
In a tank top and handcuffs, 37-year-old Agustín Coronel looked relaxed. “He’s my bodyguard,” he said, smiling.
The two had been traveling together since Bahía Negra, where Mr. Coronel had been arrested after beating his wife. “It was my fault,” he offered unsolicited. Mr. Martínez had to take him to a court hearing downriver – a journey of almost two days.
“I can’t sleep,” Mr. Martínez said. “I have to guard him.”
Mr Coronel said he would also stay awake to keep his travel partner company.
So the two men talked – about Mr. Coronel’s violence and remorse, about hobbies, about life. Back and forth they passed a dried cattle horn filled with tereré, a cold mate popular in Paraguay, sipping from the same silver straw. And they ate side by side in the canteen, Mr. Martínez using his own money to pay for Mr. Coronel’s dinner.
At 2 a.m., after 8 hours of being together, Mr. Martínez was sitting downstairs on a couch, his bleary eyes focused on Mr. Coronel, spread out on the floor, hands cuffed above his head. They had bonded, the prisoner said.
Mr. Martinez hesitated. “It’s my job,” he replied.
By morning they were back in the canteen and admitted to dozing off side by side outside the engine room. How were they now? “Spectacular”, answered Mr. Coronel.
In the long hours and tight confines of the Aquidaban, Mr. Martinez confessed, “we struck up a friendship.”
Lawrence Blair contributed reporting from aboard the Aquidaban.