Day one: Saturday February 28th
I woke up to the freezing cold. For a moment, I thought I could have back home in Minnesota. But no, it was because I was lying directly beneath a curiously strong A/C unit that seemed to have removed every molecule of warm air from the area directly beneath it: me. I did what most people do to solve problems; I curled up in a ball and went back to sleep.
Fifteen minutes later, I awakened to my father shucktting off the A/C right over my head. Half an hour later, I was raised from what had become a coma-like slumber to “get ready for the day.” I was given half an hour to complete the task. To me this seemed comparable to “Hey Max! Do you mind uniting the Middle East? Before din-dins? Swell.”
About an hour later, I was showered, dressed, and in operation of several of my five senses. I walked to the little breakfast area and loaded my plate with fruit and bacon. At the end of the breakfast buffet there was a little table of green onions, cheese, and more bacon. I reached for the serving spoons. “What do you want on your eggs?” a man I had somehow overlooked behind the little table. I realized then that he was probably wondering why I was helping myself to his condiments. “Uh, no.” I said. He started to crack two eggs. “No no” I said helplessly. But the eggs were already cracked. “You don’t want eggs?” He asked. “No thank you.” I said. The man was obviously wondering what country I was from that I could just come up to his stand, steal his condiments, and waste his eggs. I walked away. He opened the door for me on the way out. I felt fairly guilty, but drowned my feelings with my ill-gotten onions and bacon.
After my lunch debacle, our group of well fed travelers loaded up a giant van with all of our luggage, totaling about twelve bags and six hundred pounds. That is not an exaggeration. We drove for about three hours, but it was not unenjoyable. In fact, it was one of the most interesting parts of our journey so far. We drove through ramshackle towns and villages. When I say villages I mean shacks totaling four pieces of tin stacked like a house of cards. I observed hundreds of barrels stacked on top of one another. I found the life of these humble barrel-stackers quite charming. After a hard day of moving water from one place to another using three wheels and a bit of plywood, I can imagine nothing more relaxing than putting one barrel on top of another, and then doing that a hundred more times.
We stopped to shop at a market. I was first impressed by the size of their produce, but then, somehow, my eyes were drawn away from the hanging tomatoes to the bright red porn shop. It was the color. No really. It was. All the other shops were various shades of brown and off-white. I guess that’s why business was “banging” at the hottest shop in town. Anyway, their vegetables were really something to look at. There were carrots half as long as your arm, and stacks of melons bigger than your head.
My mother and Rachel began feeling up oranges, melons, and various other bits of the local flora at one of the fruit stands. My mother decided we should have some of the oranges. They did look quite good. The man at the stand pointed held up two oranges and pointed to my mother’s proffered dollar. Not a bad deal right? Two oranges one dollar? He took the dollar and put the two oranges in a plastic bag. Then he took three more oranges and put them in the bag. And three more. And three more. And three more. “That’s good” my mother said. And three more. She was slightly desperate now and holding out her hand to stop the man. And three more. We finally got his attention just as he was about to load three more oranges into the already bulging bag. He seemed confused that we wouldn’t want our money’s worth of oranges. The rest of our transactions continued in that fashion: us giving a dollar or two, and them unloading as much as they could into our arms. On our way out Paul pointed over to some men pouring water over cucumbers “That’s why you have to be careful with produce. That water they’re pouring, it probably came from that ditch right over there.” He was right as it turned out, just as I watched I saw a man come out of a vegetable shop with a bucket of water and throw it into the street. The water then ran into a large ditch on the side of the road.
We started up the road to a lovely little house on the mountainside. It was apparently built by rich German coffee plantation owners. We went inside for a lunch of $2 bacon cheeseburgers and cake. The family directly across from us consisted of six people. A mother who wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1950’s, and a father who wouldn’t have stuck out among a rich group of overweight Texas oil CEOs. Their three children, one of which was staring into the distance and listening to his ipod, were sucking down Cokes and wolfing down cheeseburgers. The last member of this group was a stick-thin grandfather gripping his knife like he was still in ‘Nam. He stared, dead eyed out onto the lake while his children laughed and his grandchildren tuned out.
We left the restaurant to hike in the rainforest. We started out by finding our way to an abandoned chapel that seemed to be slowly succumbing to the forces of nature. Its walls were growing moss and ferns and its roof was probably more bio-diverse than the rainforest below it. We found leaves as tall as we were and twice as wide. We saw a strangling vine that grows over a tree, completely covering it and taking its shape as the tree inside dies. What is left is the shape of a tree in giant vines and a desiccated husk of plant matter in the center. It was quite charming really. We saw a group of about ten howler monkeys running around on the tree tops.
The last leg of our journey was back into town. Our hotel was atop a large, steep hill in the middle of town. The road we had to take was a sharp ninety degree turn across the crowded streets. Our truck struggled and stalled trying to get up the edge of the road. A pair of dogs began humping to the noise. Eventually we were able to scrape our way halfway up the incline. The nearly vertical climb was not helped by the six hundred pounds of luggage stuffed in the back which made our journey upwards as tenuous as... well... driving a truck filled with drugs up a steep hill in Nicaragua.
We made it to our hotel which looked like a garden and smelled like a giant pineapple. We moved our luggage into our sparse rooms (they spent all their money on the plants) and began sorting the medical supplies. I won’t bore you with the statistics of how much of whatever we needed where ever because I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the nearly identical bottles of pink pills with latinate names.
Our dinner consisted of dishes that had names like “Tortilla carnes” which means meat and tortillas or “Tortilla res” which also means meat and tortillas. Tortillas and meat seemed to be the theme the menu.
Welcome to Nicaragua: land of Tortillas, cheap fruit, and brightly colored porn shops.
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