Nicaragua for Beginners The salubrious southwest, Semana Santa 1999

31/3/99 - Holy Week Mayhem

			On the day of travel I got off to a supremely good start, setting my watch for 4am and waking up at the 5.50am, 10 minutes before the last bus was due to leave San Jose for Nicaragua. A quick call confirmed that yes, it was all full and no, there would be no more and no, there was no refund either.
With a sense of resignation and nothing else to do I climbed aboard my packed-ready-for-adventure bike and pedalled off to the Tica Bus station anyway. As it turned out, they were running just one more bus, but I had to sit and wait for a space. The normally surly hombre behind the counter made a joke which had the queue tittering. A woman translated it to "She missed her bus because she had such nice company in bed this morning". If only.

The 4-hour trip north to the Nicaraguan border was uneventful. I noted the dry, savannah-like environs flanking the Interanericana Highway north of Liberia; this dusty and uninspiring stretch is what I planned to cycle through on my way back froom Nicaragua. Ah well, there's always the bus. The border rigmarole was as the guidebooks warned - no real hassle on the Costa Rican side, but extensive beaurocracy on the Nica side. Luggage was unloaded and we had to wait for an eternity in the grimy heat right beside the unnecessarily revving, smelly bus. Several "helpers" ventured forth offering their services in the hope for a tip, but as far as I could see, their assistance was limited to shifting your things along using their back muscles rather than yours, and didn't get you past the customs officer any faster. Eventually I appealed to the officer that I had to get on the last boat to Isla Ometepe tonight, and he let me go without checking nuttin'. Thus, my illicitly concealed apple, carrot, cucumber and half tin of refried beans crossed the border. Less than an hour later we pulled in at Rivas, and from there it was a short, flat 5km to the ferry at San Jorge.

The first thing I noticed that told me I was in a different country to Costa Rica were the people - poorer, unsmiling, even slightly suspicious of this garishly clad alien zipping along on a weird small-wheeled bike. Having had little interest in politics for most of my life it was only later that I read a sorrowful summary of Nicaragua's past at the boots of the US, which explained why the timid, slow-talkin' Yankee I met from Washing State doubted he'd receive a big wet kiss at the border and decided to skip Nicaragua altogether.

The ferry dock was crowded with locals and Nicas escaping stressy places like Managua, the capital. Looming high and wide before us were the twin cones of Isla Ometepe, a funkily-shaped island formed by two volcanoes joined together by the overflow of lava - the treeless, perfectly symmetrical Volcan Concepcion and the smaller, more verdant Madera.

Directly ahead a small, three-tiered wooden boat was plying the choppy waters towards us, and it took a while to register that this little tugboat was going to ingest the numerous cars, trucks, foot passengers, crates, sacks, bicycles and other squawking cargo crammed on the pier. Stills from the Titanic flashed before my eyes. At 6pm the little boat pulled away and ploughed through the sea-like conditions of the lake towards the darkened cones of the island, silhouetted against  an enormous yellow moon. On the boat I met a blond, willowy Janet Jackson from Georgia, who'd spent all of her life smiling wanly at the obvious jokes about her name. An hour and a dollar-fifty later (12 cordobas to the dollar at the time of writing) we arrived in Moyagalpa, the principal town on the island. Janet and I checked into Pension Aly, a very basic shared room for less than 3 dollars a piece. I think the sheets were clean. We immediately splashed out on an expensive meal in the hotel's restaurant - fresh lake fish baked with vegetables for $US4.50. It was excellent, but slow enough to scare us away from eating in that restaurant again.

1/4/99 -  Mariachis in Moyagalpa

3/4/99 - To Alta Gracia

The guidebooks raved about Senor Castillo as being "an uncappable font of information and one of the island's treasures" etc etc. It's a pity I couldn't take full advantage of his encyclopedic knowledge of Ometepe bacause he directed a well-rehearsed stream of Espanol at me with little heed to my desperate attempts to grasp every fifth word. Just as swiftly as he appeared, he swivelled on a heel to bark orders at his cowering staff. Still, the place was clean and eerily serene, and I quickly downed a plate of comida corriente in the courtyard restaurant. Janet turned up the same day, having taken the one-hour, 70-cent bus, and had even found the excellent tamales at soda Buen Gusto, also 70 cents.

5/4/99 - To Paradise - Santa Domingo Beach

Dear Jungle Boy,
It is so beautiful here. I wake up at 5.30am with the sun rising through the door of my tent and the restless lake breeze on my face. Although after almost a week here I'm convinced it's not a lake at all but the sea. It's now Saturday. Last night was the third night I've spent camped on the beach, eating, sleeping, bathing, writing and hoping you'd stroll up any minute now and kick sand in my tent. I'm eating gallo pinto for the upteenth day in a row, and maybe if I continue the mosquitos will tire of me.... Yesterday I hiked up Volcan Madera with a guide called Douglas from the hotel, 4 hours up to a tranquil laguna shrouded in mist that slowly lifted to reveal a tapestry of different grasses, textures and layers of thick foliage.  Like one of those places you see in your dreams. I sat and munched crackers and tuna and thought of passing the night there, under a tin tarp erected by someone with the same idea. This would no doubt have pleased my guide, a shy 22-year old Nica who seems to have taken a fancy to me. He paid me a surprise visit at my campsite despite my telling him several times that to visit a lone muchacha in her tent after nightfall is to risk being doused with pepper spray. At least, I had instructed him, announce your presence loud and clear. I sent him packing with a definitive "hasta manana!". Earlier, he'd asked me how to say "You're beautiful" in English. I quickly changed the subject. The summit required a feet-and-hands scramble along a ledge for which a rope is recommended. My enchanted guide told me that his 17 year old cousin, Rafael, had portered a ghetto blaster and 2 dozen cervezes (beers) to this spot with a couple of Gringos then carted the empties all the way down again. I had enough trouble portering just the clothes I was wearing as my besotted guide had insisted on carrying my daypack stuffed to Himalayan expedition proportions. The descent convinced me I'm no hard-core walker; I quickly grew bored of the calf-deep mud, rock, damp cloud and more mud, the constant need to stare fixedly at the path the strain such a descent puts on your knees. At 4pm, well beyond my pain and patience threshold we reached the bottom and took a quick sortie to a 400AD petroglyph (stone carving)...

To cope with the heat at night, I decided to take a bold step in reducing the security of my tent by removing the fly. Despite the constant breeze blowing directly ashore I found the air a little sultry in my tent, a single-hoop Macpac Microlite pitched of necessity end-on to the wind. I wandered down to the other hotel to eat with an Aussie from Perth and a Californian who I'd met on the hike. Over a somewhat sub-standard soup seemingly made from Pot Noodles and a few root vegetables thrown in, the Californian gave me a run-down on Guanacaste and Nicoya, the region of Northern Costa Rica where I planned to ride my bike on the way back to Costa Rica. "Full of Americans who make me want to vomit" he said in his strong west coast accent. Whilst visiting the appealingly-named Playa Tamarindo, one of the region's more devleloped beaches, he'd sat in on a council meeting attended exclusively by white Americans, and there was apparently not a Tico in sight. Outside, Tico police stood guard lest a scuffle break out. Inside, strident yankee voices belted out demands like, "How can we make Tamarindo better? We need pavement! We need (etc etc)!!!!"

11/4/99 - A Surprise Visit from Manzanillo

10/4/99 - Close Encounter With My Own Kind

11/4/99 - Last Days in Ometepe

Since Douglas had caught me with Aussie Boy on two occasions I thought he'd cool off a bit, but no, he seemed to like "la muchacha de Australia" and presented me with a stone necklace, as a parting gift, the type his cousin Raphael tried to sell me this morning, despite reprimands about his tall stories. I packed up my tent, loaded up the bike, then got a ride all the way back across the waters to the mainland and halfway to Granada. The road was flat and fast, with little traffic. Just the constant tooting and "Pssst! Chinita!" which is one of the mating calls of the latino male.

12/4/99 - Granada

16/4/99 - To Masaya

17/4/99 - Scaling Volcan Masaya

18/4/99 - To Masatepe

Today I pedalled east to the Cerazo region of pueblos, starting with Catarina, where there was meant to be a spectacular lookout, but I completely missed it. Oh well. Next, Nihicomhomo, distinguished by a display of carved, queen-sized wooden beds sitting on the roadside at the entrance to the village. I resisted the temptation to buy and pedalled on. I shot right past Masatepe, but spotted a woman selling coconuts on the side of the road. Stop, reverse, cross. Sitting in the shade of her stand was, I thought, a gringo - white skin, baseball hat, shorts, running shoes and backpack. Jose was, in fact, a very white Nica, lived in Masatepe all his 47 years. He insisted I come and stay with his family - all 14 of them, including the daughter of his estranged wife.  At his cool, courtyard house I was regarded with the curiosity I always seem to get being a Chinita muchacha on a bicicletita. Masatepe boasts a stately, colonial-looking church in front of a palm-studded park just like most villages in Latin America of reasonable population. In the local Kodak shop with its frigid air conditioning and squeaky clean merchandising I could have been standing in a department store in Sydney. At dusk the spidery palms silhouetted against the pink sky gave the place a bedouin feel. We ate, I paid, he proposed. However, I didn't need another lonely, wounded man in my life. Later he introduced me to his friend Jorge, also divorced and living with his mama in the tiny pulperia around the corner. A slight difference here was that Jorge was the splitting image of Paul Newman in his prime, and had in fact acted in a film about the famous Nicaraguan revolutionary, Sandino, namesake of the Sandinistas.  That night I slept on Jose's sofa and in the morning gave his mama 20 cordobas, which she gladly accepted. For the strange thing was the house was beautiful, the family immaculately and cleanly dressed, but there appeared to be no food. No offer of dinner or breakfast even to pay for. Jorge explained that some Nicaraguans would rather go without food than put on a bad appearance. I wheeled my bike around to his place and where we'd agreed to meet for a ride to his finca (farm). His finca was a half-hour, exhilarating trail ride through banana and coffee plantations, rambling forest and campos, i.e. small, dirt-floor and grass-roofed huts where families eke out a living on a dollar a day. Yet the children were always clean, beautifully dressed with frilly socks and shiny shoes and dresses and bows in their hair. And a calm resiliance in their faces.  Jorge's finca was perched on a rise offering a spectacular vista of Laguna Masaya and the nearby volcanoes. For six months of the year he and his papa cultivated hochotes and cocos, bedding down for several nites in a little dirt floor shack. At this opportune moment with Paul Newman silhouetted against this panorama that few tourists were privy to, my camera decided to pack it in. Drat.  We stopped by to visit his wealthy sister and admire her house. Her husband was a highly paid government economist (though judging by the state of the the country's economy, you'd wonder what people like him actually did apart from draw uneconomical salaries). His sister bore all the traits of that privileged minority, the rich Nica - makeup, coiffed hair, gold jewellery and a generous layer of fat to get one through the hard times. She sat, filling her chair and firing short, sharp get-to-know-your-worth questions at me with one eye on the TV and another on the nail she was filing attentively. Her equally corpulent spouse made a brief entry and exit. Her son regarded me with the indifference bred by a diet of electronic entertainment. Her house was big but perhaps beautiful only to the average Nica earning $2 a day. Heavy, ornate furniture filled every possible space not occupied by replicas of chinese lacquer paintings and other oriental paraphenalia. A source of pride was the western-style bathroom with gold taps, gold lamp fittings, gilt-edged tiles, scallop-shaped handbasins and a flushing toilet you could drop the paper into rather than have to put it in a basket.

20/4/99 - To La Boquita

22/4/99 - Flat out in San Juan Del Sur

29/4/99 - Leaving Nicaragua