Nicaragua Pt. I

I was very counterproductive myself in regards of the healing process of my rib as in not eating well and also adding a few beers to the mix to get past those long beach days. Waiting for it to heal I had maxed out my time in Tamarindo and therefore Costa Rica.

Getting daytime drunk and high was not the solution but it did pass the time. Staying in surf-towns without being able to surf is so boring, I don’t understand people who do it. Once accepted that the ability to surf wouldn’t come back in the next couple of days or probably even weeks it was time to figure out a new plan, the new plan turned out to be the old plan, get the camera back out and look at stuff, work and travel my way around a foreign country visiting the main tourist attractions. The Chilean ladies at the hotel assured me that my first stop in San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua would be just as nice as Tamarindo, they described it as the Nicaraguan version of it, which considering how the two countries differ in general was true in retrospect. The thing missing in San Juan del Sur was a surf-break just out front. There are plenty around up and down the coast, but staying in San Juan and walking to a surf-able wave is not possible.

It is always hard to leave once I get stuck, but one day I managed to got up early and take the bus to Liberia and then switch to a bus going to the boarder at Penas Blancas. l crossed it without any problems and took another bus that dropped me off on the side of the road somewhere close to San Juan del Sur.

I got hustled to take a taxi instead of waiting for the next bus for the last part of the journey to arrive in San Juan del Sur. As I mentioned in the Costa Rica post it is the easy entry to south America, people aren’t that poor and it’s quite safe for the most part, but also very touristy, seldomly if never you’ll be the only tourist on the beach. Nicaragua was quite different, the general population seemed to have even less compared to Costa Rica. The quality of things stepped down a few levels, be it accomodation, transport, food, the smells, but also the prices were a bit lower, but stayed about the same for luxury gringo stuff. I did notice that people were a lot friendlier, not overfed by tourism and tourists as in Costa Rica. They also seemed quite content, living a very simple life heavily involved with family and the community. I especially noticed this on Ometepe, which, to be fair is quite close to a paradise if you just consider location and climate. The question I asked a couple of people was “do you prefer a life with a rented house in hell that comes with a big TV and an iPad, or your own small house in paradise. We could never find an answer as they couldn’t imagine what I referred to as hell and sometimes didn’t know what an iPad was. I couldn’t answer the question either because the definition of a small house in Nicaragua could be anything from something acceptable down to a shed with bare earth as the floor. The lack of perspective (as in doing anything else than living and staying there) would devastate me.

Mark Twain sees Ometepe, Nicaragua, 1866

“Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all decked with shadow and sunshine, whose summits pierce the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil — so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. What a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety and unrest of the bustling, driving world.
These mountains seem to have no level ground at their bases, but rise abruptly from the water. There is nothing rugged about them— they are shapely and symmetrical, and all their outlines are soft, rounded and regular. One is 4,200 and the other 5,400 feet high, though the highest being the furthest removed makes them look like twins. A stranger would take them to be of equal altitude. Some say they are 6,000 feet high, and certainly they look it. When not a cloud is visible elsewhere in the heavens, their tall summits are magnificent: draped with them. They are extinct volcanoes, and consequently their soil (decomposed lava) is wonderfully fertile. They are well stocked with cattle ranches, and with corn, coffee and tobacco farms. The climate is delightful, and is the healthiest on the Isthmus.”

Third world vibes all over the place, a prime example are the buses, old American school buses converted into local or intercity transportation. The main conversion they do is give the bus some sort of crazy airbrush paint-job, put a whole lot of lights on and some Christian motivational sayings in it.

Every bus is more colourful and shiny than the other, but the seats stay the same, fit for American school children age 7-14. (Luckily Americans are quite “big”) They’re called chicken buses because there’ll be a high chance somebody will be transporting a bunch of chickens among a whole lot of other stuff people back in the western world wouldn’t normally take on a bus. Another explanation I’ve heard later is that people in there get stacked like chickens. These buses are the rawest form of bus transportation I’ve come across so far (the 10h Thai minibus comes close) fun for the first time but the lack of comfort, air-conditioning and also speed got to me after a while. Sometimes you have to wait for half an hour in the blistering sun, the bus filled to the last seat, there is nothing you can do but start dripping. Food also needs to be taken with caution in Nicaragua, at least at street level. One day I thought it would be a clever idea to buy a chicken based snack from one of the vendors offering their stuff on the bus, I thought eating a few bits of chicken on the chicken bus sounded great. As a result I got quite sick and had to lay down for 3-4 days. I hadn’t finished the food and I already knew that this wasn’t going to end well, I made it just about to the hotel before I exploded for a couple of days.

When I arrived to San Juan del Sur I booked a place above a cafe on the beach front. A nice colonial style building with a room that had a balcony overlooking the busy street out front and the beach behind, quite basic itself but overall the value/price relation was a bit better compared to Costa Rica.

The two Chilean ladies told me that San Juan del Sur was very nice, they had been a couple of times as it was their go to visa-run destination. Their praise gave me high expectations but they were not quite fulfilled. It was true that San Juan del Sur was somewhat the Nicaraguan version of Tamarindo, even though this so called surftown didn’t have a break right out front but shuttles that went to the surfbeaches nearby instead. I’d call it a backpacker-hostel-party-beach-town, which besides surfing is mostly famous for the Sunday funday pubcrawl and the statue of Jesus Christ overlooking the bay. I passed the time lounging around, drinking coffee and working a bit. The beach wasn’t particularly nice, neither was the town. The cafe below the hotel I stayed in was though, called “la Tostaderia”. I had a bunch of cappuccinos there, whilst looking at the beach and the busy street out front. The whole town seemed a bit dead, there wasn’t much going on, many of the stores and restaurants along the beach were closed and there weren’t many tourists around. I stayed for a couple of nights, did my research on the things to do in Nicaragua and quickly learned that the next place to travel to was Omtepe, an island with two volcanoes in the lake of Nicaragua. The beaches in Nicaragua in general didn’t seem to be the nicest unless surfing is a priority. The more interesting stuff lay inland. Whilst travelling through the country I noticed that it had a lot more culture or more culturally relevant places to offer, old places to look at, churches, colonial towns, forts etc. Costa Rica seemed so culture-less, there weren’t many historical buildings in the cities and except for the “Pura Vida” and casados everybody loved there wasn’t much to it on the historical/cultural side. Another interesting observation that I made was that woman became constantly less beautiful the further I travelled north. The most beautiful ones I found to be in Columbia and most likely Venezuela, Panama still had plenty of pretty ladies, things thinned out in Costa Rica and then Nicaragua didn’t have too many cuties. The same could be said for Guatemala and southern Mexico, I don’t know about Honduras and el Salvador.