What's in a journey?

"Nuestra vida es la comida" Engels tells us. Life is food. Sounds good to me! Engels is our host in Jinotepe, a small town in the department of Carazo. We're his first guests so he was a bit hesitant at first but once we arrived, his family immediately welcomes us, offering us food, shelter, and kindness all around.

So the food. Our introduction into Nicaraguan food began with Miriam, Engels partner, a wonderful and brilliant Austrian gal. She started our day with pinolillo, a drink made of ground cornmeal, water, cacao and spices, and which Engles' family makes from scratch at home. Miriam hands us a plate with soft wheat bread and chunks of cheese and papaya. After that we had some delicious dark coffee from Jinotega, that Engels mom said is the best in the country. Even as good as the coffee was the conversation we had while drinking it with mom, the housecleaner (who is so close with the family I thought she was mom's sister) and Miriam. We talked about how cheap and good food is in Nicaragua and how in the United States the only things that are cheap are things people don't actually need to survive, like electronics and gasoline. Mom shook her head in disbelief when I told her how much people would be willing to pay in the States for an organic papaya. "Here we think canned food is trash," mom says. I agree. We also talked a bit about the privatization of water and how one of the big reasons that Daniel Ortega was elected president in 2006 was precisely this issue and his promise to not privatize it.

Back to the food. After coffee Miriam takes us to get fresh, local fruit sorbet. I obviously can't refuse guanabana, Abby gets mango and Miriam gets a fruit called nispero, which she says is related to the zapote. Wow. And now that the day is starting to get hot, there's really nothing better.

We walk up and down the market while Miriam points here and there at fruits, vegetables and sweets. We try some rosquillas, which are sold everywhere and are basically crunchy baked rings of cheese dough. And then buñuelos, fried yucca and cheese covered with a honey-milk syrup. So slippery and doughy and delicious. I know fried things are unhealthy, but please let me worry about it when I'm older.

We buy a random assortment of vegetables, pretty much all the ones that Abby and I didn't recognize or weren´t used to eating..yucca, tiny ears of corn, extremely long stringy beans, chayote...and later Miriam magically transformed them all into an amazing soup, and although we were standing in the kitchen with her the whole time, we still aren't really sure how that happened.

And, well, besides the food, the best part of our visit to Jinotepe is the conversation with these wonderfully kind, concious, and lovely people. Even the most simple conversations, about a job for example, will be occasionally dotted with statements like, "Well, the outer world isn't even real so actually nothing can be trusted." Engels asks me again and again what our objectives for traveling are and I continue to think about it daily. He tells me "It's all about the journey inward. You can travel to a thousand places and meet a thousand people and do it all without changing yourself at all because you never travel inward to your self." This is a bit difficult when you're already into a trip without much of a plan or much information about where you are or where you're headed, but I am still thinking about it all the time, trying to come up with some clear objectives about why I came to Nicaragua. Now that I'm here and can really see the incredible depth and endlessly fascinating facets of this country, I realize I will have to come back, if only to have clear intentions about my visit.

The wind is fierce in Jinotepe. At night it carries us strange dreams and by morning leaves us covered in a thin layer of polvo, dust, lifted off the dry land that surrounds us. Better than mosquito bites, I guess. Usually the wind will begin as a quick gathering of air, churning itself up into a roar that makes the trees sounds like a sudden, heavy rainfall. And slowly it will wind itself quietly down until the air is still again, but only for a few minutes.

Ah I already miss the constant joking and teasing of our home in Jinotepe. Miriam tells us how she perceives Nicas as looking for one's weakness and then laughing about it and exploiting it until one can laugh at their own weakness. An interesting idea, not for the sensitive, but I kinda like it.

Village life

On our way to Jinotepe, we pass through Masaya, a town known for its artesanry and market. We only plan on spending a couple of hours here so we ask a woman at an internet cafe if we could leave our backpacks there for a bit. "Sure, if you trust me," she said, and I just replied, "Of course!" and we threw our bags down. We walked around the town from the basic goods market to the artesan market, getting a little mixed up after we wound around through the latter. So when we tried to get to the lovely lookout point our very out-dated guidebook mentioned, we ended up walking down some dirt residential streets, soliciting some strange looks and a couple hellos from small children. We did find the lake but had to look at it through our stinging eyes and with smoke that was rising up off the hillside of burning trash. Lovely, eh. On the way back we passed a dance troupe in the streets performing a sort of satirical play and dance that featured politicans, baby dolls and drag queens.

In the late afternoon we find our bus to Jinotepe. It takes much longer than we anticipated because it winds through all of the Pueblos Blancos, the White Towns, before looping back around to Jinotepe. The Pueblos Blancos are a bunch of small towns, clustered near each other, and get their name from the white paint that they all use on their buildings. One of the towns that we passed through, Niquinohomo, was the hometown of Gen. Augusto Sandino and in a letter that we saw in the city government office in Masaya, I read that Sandino was very proud of his small town birth. Nice to know I share such a sentiment with such an admired revolutionary. This country is so beautiful, it's hard for my heart and mind and eyes to take it all in in such a brief period of time. I love how people refer to each other casually and incessantly as "amor", "love", and how everyone teases each other and makes jokes and laughs endlessly. Everyone seems so happy and warm, even with a terrible war so recently behind them. And, for now, I won't even get started on the food.

Laguna de Apoyo

So, we moved from the "Bearded Monkey Hostal" to the "Monkey Hut" (owned by the same folks) at la Laguna de Apoyo, about a half an hour from Granada. Nicaraguans refer to both places as "La Barba del mono." The Laguna is a huge crater lake formed by a volcanic explosion many, many, many years ago and is incredibly blue and beautiful and only slightly salty. But we didn't make it there before I had to make a quick visit to the doctor (nothing serious).

La visita I won't go into details about my symptoms, but I finally decided to go to the doctor after a few days of resisting. I'm used to taking other folks to the doctor (mainly Abigail, in Mexico), but I never really consider going myself no matter how sick I feel or think I am. Still, I thought it would be a good idea and we had about an hour and a half before our transport to la Laguna would leave, so we went to the nearest farmacia for a consulta. It's very common in Mexico for pharmacies to have doctors on hand for quick and cheap visits and I was glad to find out that in Nicaragua this is also the case. At the first pharmacy we stopped at, we sat down in the open patio in beautiful, wooden rocking chairs but then were informed that there would be a bit of a wait because the doctor was doing a surgery (in the pharmacy.) So we walked a few more blocks to an actual doctor's office and began to wait there. After about 20 minutes I asked the secretary how much longer it would be. He said a couple of minutes, I looked at the clock and then at him again, and he said "I'll go check." A couple seconds later he poked his head out of the room the doctors were in and waved me in. First, the woman doctor insisted on giving me an ultrasound (apparently this is what the office was for) and finding nothing, refered me to the other doctor. I stepped into his office and he gave me a quick check-up before essentially repeating the same thing the previous doctor had told me. Behind his desk a picture was hanging of him with his small son on his shoulders. At first I thought, "How cute," until I realized that the doctor was displaying an incredibly lewd t-shirt (and a big grin) in the photograph. Next to the picture, a carved, wooden Virgin Mary prayed above his desk.

The visit cost quite a bit more than the visits to the pharmacies that we made in Mexico. It felt a little silly after going to get a check-up for Abigail in San Cristobal, which even ended in an injection of penicillin, and then only handing the doctor 25 pesos. Imagine giving a doctor back home your pocket change in exchange for a visit- collection agencies would be after you in no time.

La Laguna We missed our transport to the laguna due to all the delays with the doctor and later the pharmacy. But as we were leaving the hostal we saw 3 people also looking for a way to get to the laguna and we all jumped into a taxi, convincing the driver that if we got stopped one of us would get out of the car (only 4 were supposed to be allowed at a time). During the ride we found out the gal was from Canada and the guys from Australia, though they both teased each other back and forth about being from the states or from New Zealand (jokes that made more sense to them I suppose).

But as soon as we started descending on the laguna, it was all we could focus on. It was a lot bigger that I'd thought and sparkling blue, completely surrounded by forest with only a house here and there showing in the trees. It only takes a few minutes in a place like this to forget that cities exist.

We throw our bags in the dorms and head straight for the water. It's warm because of the sun but also because of the thermal waters that flow under the lake. We grab inner tubes and splash around like kids and spend the day cooking, laying around in the sun and breeze and taking some kayaks out as far as the wind and waves would let us. From the middle of the lake we could hear howler monkeys start to make loud, roaring noises as the evening set in. I told Abby, "Ok, this is great but soon we have to see Nicaragua too, you know." It didn't feel real or perhaps it just wasn't what I'd imagined before coming to Nicaragua. Being surrounded almost completly by white folks speaking English greatly added to this sentiment.

After a couple nights in the hostal, my patience was waning with the "backpacker" community. True, I have a backpack too, but I mean this group of folks that travel in countries for the sole reason that the places are cheap, this apparently allowing them to indulge more in drugs and alcohol and guided tours and easy transport. I don't want to generalize but I've seen so many of these folks that they really could be classified as a distinct class of tourist. They want things to be "safe" so they stay in hostals owned by foreigners where everything from movies to food to drinks to internet are available and in essence they never even have to leave the hostal. Usualy around 9 or 10 am, after we'd already been awake a few hours, these folks would stumble out of their beds, groggy and hungover. I can't say I never traveled that way but I just can't imagine doing it now. Travel through Nicaragua without interacting with Nicaraguans? Too strange for me.

So after spending a beautiful day and night at the laguna, where we pretty much kept to ourselves, we jumped on a bus to Masaya to check it out on our way to Jinotepe, where we would be staying with a family through Hospitality Club.

Nicaragua is Hot, pt.1: Granada

Finally, after much talk and much delay, we made it to Nicaragua. Our Tica Bus brought us all the way to Managua, but rather than stay in the huge, uninviting capital, we decided to head for Granada. As luck would have it, we found a nice fellow from El Salvador who was also headed that way and he accompanied us, even loaning us cordobas along the way (we didn't plan our money situation well, obviously). We got to Granada, checked into an overpriced but comfortable hostal, and got some pinto gallo. Our hostal is the typical backpacker, happy hour and cheap vegetarian food, folks from all over the world and everyone speaks english, movie hour and hammock type of place. I haven't stayed in a place like this since Livingston and before that, I can't even remember. Still, it's relatively cheap and eh.

I woke up early and we got out of the hostal to explore this new place. Granada is beautiful and bright in most places and fading and crumbling in others. According to something written on a concrete wall that I saw when we were entering the city, it's the oldest city on the American continent, but I'm sure that's disputable. And most of it had to be rebuilt after William Walker burned the city to the ground when they threw that overly intrusive yanqui out of his self-proclaimed presidential fantasy.

In the morning we found a little cafe where we could eat outside AND where the owner walked up to us carrying the largest guanabana I've ever seen in my life. He was impressed that I knew what it was, but I just couldn't get past why he wasn't offering me a piece yet. Finally I just asked for a little dish of it and ah, it was beautiful and brought me back many memories of one summer in Chiapas.

In the afternoon we got on some rusty bikes and rode all over the city. To our credit (amazement?) we only had one semi-close call with an oncoming vehicle and it really wasn't even that close to get worked up about. We rode to the Lago de Nicaragua (or, Lago Cocibalco), a brown and smelly thing but also an enormous freshwater lake home to many little islands and even sharks (the only freshwater lake sharks, apparently). We rode a couple kilometers along the lake, down a road that was lined with so many rusty and empty playgrounds (why?) and towering, sweet mango trees. Mangos were literally dropping in our path and squishing under our tires! People were laying on the side of the road on big sacks of mangos! This city is just dripping with small green-orange-red mangos, how lovely. There were also trees covered in red-orange flowers, trees that looked like squatting oranguatans, trees with broad, bright green, shining leaves, trees with enormous roots jumping up out of a lily-covered swamp. And all along the way, the birds sang like crazy and the breeze pushed us along.

Later we rode to the old train station, through the wild, narrow-streeted market and on to a fort where Somoza used to interrogate and execute prisoners. Climbing up a wobbly wooden ladder in the fort we could see all across Granada to the lake.

The Pan-American

Leaving San Cristobal was difficult for many reasons, mostly because I'd gotten so used to it so quickly and so comfortable. And well, there are other reasons but they're small, silly things.

Somehow we made it on a night bus to Tapachula and just as our bus was pulling in, the bus next to ours was pulling out for all Central American cities. Without hesitating, we threw our bags on the bus and jumped on. Our first stop was Guatemala City. It was hot and I was slightly delirious from the travel. We stopped in a parking lot outside of a small strip mall, fast food restaurants and car dealerships lined the streets. Breaking with my tradition of not patronizing U.S. companies while in other countries, we found that we were both starving and without cash so I had to swipe my American Express at the Subway, and we got back on the bus.

I spent the next few hours falling in and out of sleep, falling into and bouncing off of the window, watching movies while the sound went in and out, the subtitles making me slightly nauseous. The countryside was beautiful and I felt a little bad for just racing through these lands, my heart set on a distant other land, but "next time," I remind myself.

Our bus stops again as the sun is setting. San Salvador, El Salvador. The bus station is conveniently located inside a cheap hotel so we throw down our bags and prepare to rest. But, that money thing again. We haven't got a dollar, a quetzal, or even a cent in any currency (besides pesos but they don't mean a thing here). I attempt to walk a few blocks looking for a ATM machine in this strange and unfamiliar city. After a couple of blocks of completely dark, completely empty streets, lined only with funerarias (casket stores and funeral services, some with 24 hour service), I am sufficiently creeped out enough to just head back to the hotel. Later one of the hotel employees walks us to a nearby gas station and finally we've got some cash.

I shower in the smallest bathroom I may have ever witnessed in my life and then commence to repack my bag and sleep, though not very well, until we're woken up by a loud knock. "Managua!" they shout and we're up. Back on the bus for a day full of riding, the entire Bourne film series, and endlessly beautiful forests, mountains, volcanoes, rivers and green-yellow grasslands.