I had been living in Paraguay for several years before I finally got round to getting my possessions sent over from England. Until that time they had all been sitting boxed up in a Bedfordshire storage unit.

Accordingly despite having first come to Paraguay as an English teacher in 2002 and then having a home built in 2005 it was 2010 before all my possessions were finally dealt with. Until that time my house had been rather empty as there is a limit to how much can be put into suitcases and carried onto planes.

To rectify this early in 2010 I began to make arrangements to have everything shipped over. As there was paper work to be dealt with and a ship heading in the right direction had to be waited for it was a few months before all my assorted boxes left the storage unit to begin their travels.

Their first stop was the container port at Tilbury. Once there they were loaded onto the Argentine registered ship the Rio Bravo for their voyage across the Atlantic. The Rio Bravo left Tilbury heading out into the English Channel and then the Atlantic on 12th June.

From there the Rio Bravo would have called into other European ports before heading out across the Atlantic. The crossing went without incident and by early August the ship and its cargo had reached Uruguay.

My boxed up goods were unloaded from the ocean going ship at the port of Montevideo. There they sat for a couple of weeks awaiting another ship which would carry them for the rest of their journey up the Rio Parana and onto Paraguay.

This ship was the Anabisetia which once loaded with cargo headed up the great river towards Paraguay. It reached Paraguay on 26th August although it was a few days before the cargo was unloaded.

Rather than using the Port of Asuncion the Anabisetia continued a little further up river to the small private port of Caacupemi in Zeballos Cue on the outskirts of Asuncion.

Once I had been advised that my possessions had indeed arrived I headed to the office of the shipping company Global Services who were my contacts in Asuncion. From there I travelled to the port to inspect everything before customs got down to the business of clearing everything through the port.

I found my cargo inside a large warehouse at the port. It had been packed as two items. Most of the boxes were inside a large wooden crate with the remainder wrapped securely upon a pallet. My paperwork told me there were in total 164 individual items weighing 1000kg.

To quickly check that all was in order I opened the front of the crate and saw that it was filled floor to ceiling with boxes and opened a couple of boxes on the pallet to make sure that it was my possessions they contained. All seemed in order so I headed home leaving customs and the shipping company to do their business.

After that it was only a few days before I was advised that everything had passed customs without any difficulties and I could collect my boxes.

That it was back to Asuncion for me. On 10th September 2010 I visited the shipping company for one last time to pay all the various invoices. Then I was driven back to the port to load everything onto the back of a small flat bed truck whos hire they had arranged for me.

I thanked them for their help and hopped up into the cab of the truck with the driver for the drive back to my house.

It was late afternoon by the time I got home. There I enlisted the help of my neighbours to lift the crate and pallet off the back of the truck and to then ferry all the various boxes and other items that had arrived into the house.

It was dark before everything was indoors. Everything was placed for the moment in the spare bedroom which quickly came to resemble nothing more than a huge pile of cardboard boxes.

Then once that was done all that remained to do over the next few days and weeks was to open all the boxes and find homes for all those things I had not seen for many years.