Lives of Wander

In the 3+ weeks that we’ve been in Nicaragua, I’ve ridden more school buses than I think I have in the rest of my life combined. You see, I was a car rider when I was in school, so I only hopped aboard school buses for field trips. But in Nicaragua, the good ol’ Blue Bird school bus is the standard mode of transport. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the bright yellow bus of your childhood, well, my friend, it’s been reincarnated in Nicaragua. And it’s seeing things it’s never seen before.

For starters, it’s seeing way more people onboard than it ever thought possible. You think those seats are made for two people in each one? Ha, think again. Three minimum. And that’s three adults. If you’ve got kids, you can fit way more than three. And what was that nonsense about keeping the aisles clear. No, sirree, the aisles aren’t for safe passage. They are for jamming with people. As many as can fit. We’re a friendly people here. Your hand smooshed up against her boob is no problem at all.

The modest school bus is also seeing life as a courier of not just people, but things. Have a bike you need to get to another town? Just throw it up on top. Want to take 50 lb bags of rice to your village? Those go in the back. Smelly fish? A chicken? An entire trunkload of goods you want to sell at market? No problem. Wherever they can fit is just fine.

Oh and about that no drinking and eating rule. That was just a joke. Eat and drink all you want. Eat the corn cakes that the lady hawks to you at the station. Drink the sodas served in plastic bags that the young boy who got on last stop and will get off next stop is shoving in your face. Then when you’re done with your chips and your candies, your plaintains and your refrescoes, just throw the trash out the window. I mean, it’s not like there’s a trash can on the bus and who would even think of holding on to it all the way to your destination.

And while we’re throwing rules (and trash) out the window, the one about walking while the bus is in motion can go. If you can’t walk around while the driver drives, then how can you make sure the entire bus hears your infomercial on protractors or Icy Hot? And don’t bother waiting for the bus to come to a complete stop before exiting or entering. You might not get to get on or off if you do that. The bus has a schedule you know…though maybe you don’t, since the bus has probably never shown up when the schedule said it would.

But hey, just wait…seriously, just wait, it will come. It always comes. Well, okay, almost always. Just not that one time when it broke down in the road only about 2 km from where you were waiting for it for an hour past when it was supposed to come. But hey, like the bus driver said, when you saw him under the hood of the bus as you rode past in the back of the pick-up truck that transported you instead, the bus was still coming. You just needed to wait a little longer. And then, as always, you would have a most excellent experience on the Nicaraguan transport of choice…the good ol’ Blue Bird school bus.

Last Thursday, once class was over and we had consumed one of the always enormous lunches provided by our host family, Jeff and I hopped the bus to Masaya, a nearby town famed for its markets. Jeff had been before but he hadn’t really said much about them except that he’d bought his hammock there. From what the guidebooks said and what others had mentioned in passing, I was under the impression that the old market—the one most highly recommended—was a place where artisans from all over Nicaragua set up shop and sold their goods: handwoven hammocks, carved wooden figurines, ceramic bowls and vases, and much more. I was pretty excited because, even though I wasn’t planning to buy anything—the backpack is full enough as is—I love looking at crafts and talking to the artisans who make them. I was expecting an arts and crafts fair with Central American flavor.

Well, boy was I disappointed. What I found instead was a sterile building with stand after stand selling the same exact things. In fact, they weren’t really stands at all; they were more like little shops. And the people who ran them weren’t artisans, but shopkeepers. They didn’t really know anything about the pieces or have any experience working with the crafts themselves. It wasn’t at all what I expected; instead it was prettily packaged tourism.

So we walked through rather briskly, glancing at variations on the same thing over and over, and then took a walk through the town to a malecon (or boardwalk) extending above the nearby Laguna. Luckily, it was rather scenic, providing a bit of saving grace to an otherwise disappointing trip.

I think I once heard someone say that you can’t win them all. Turns out they were right. But since we seem to win way more than we lose, I guess I can’t really complain. Chalk it up to experience.

Its not too often you can hop a bus into the clouds. But that’s exactly what we did last week as an easy day trip from Granada, riding the bus from the entrance to the Volcan Mombacho Reserve directly to the shrouded top. The top remains semi-permanently in a cloud from the moist air from Lake Nicaragua hitting the steep cliffs of the volcano. This results in what they call a “cloud forest.” I just call it neat and think its fun to walk around in.

They had a lovely path that wound around the main caldera, with vistas looking both ways, into the crater and out across Lake Nicaragua and Granada. If there were no signs to tell you what you were “looking at” however, it wouldn’t matter, since they all looked just like this.

But what all this cloud cover did was make everything look creepy and incredible all at the same time. Even simple trees took on new imagery. It didn’t hurt that the constant cloud cover provided a very moist environment that epiphytes apparently love.

The end point of our hike was a series of “fumadores,” emanations of steam from the earth. Given the conditions, however, these were tough to separate from the rest of the cloud until you were right in its sulfurous path. But from this western edge of the volcano, facing the lake, you could strongly feel the wind pushing up and over the mountain, and any body parts facing the lake collected cloud, like my arm.

All in all, it was a very surreal experience, but fascinating. Here’s a few more pictures to round it out.

Formed (at least in legend) by the explosion of the nearby volcano Mombacho, 365 tiny isletas—one for each day of the year—dot Lake Nicaragua just off the coast of Granada. In the heat of a Tuesday afternoon, we motored past them along with two of our classmates from Casa Xalteva, as well as a guide and a driver. Many of the isletas are too small to be occupied and thus are simply oasis of green as well as the occasional monkey.

Some are home to small communities–and by small I mean two to three houses. Some host restaurants (which allow you to swim as you wait for your meal).

And a final few are privately owned. All are beautiful and made me feel as if I were in the Caribbean, rather than a lake in the middle of Nicaragua.

Our guide, an employee of Casa Xalteva in charge of organizing outings, actually lived on an isleta and gave us some firsthand accounts of life on a tiny piece of land. His description of what they ate reminded me of a popular scene in Forrest Gump—fried fish, baked fish, fish with plantains, fish with yucca, plain fish, fish soup, etc.—and had us all laughing. On the other hand, his comment that you could buy one of these isletas for $40,000 had us all quietly contemplating. After all, who doesn’t want to own an island?

Later in the day, our feet back on solidly dry land, we wandered down the pedestrian lane that stretched from Grananda’s central park to the lake, happening past a travel agency with a help wanted sign in the window: Wanted, Bilingual Assistant. Jeff, though never before having expressed an interest in the field of travel planning, decided that he was plenty qualified. And there we had it—Scheme #1 in what I’m sure will be plenty as we travel the world and contemplate the many opportunities out there. Jeff putting his mad Spanish skills to work planning other people’s vacations, while I sit at home on our own private island and write a novel or two. Not a bad option, I’d say.

Ever since we arrived in Granada, we heard how great the Laguna de Apoyo was. Beautiful, clear, refreshing water inside of a volcanic crater. So we decided to head there on Sunday. Though its a thirty minute drive away, any tour agency in town would take us there for a song (~$10). Here’s the problem: first, that was too easy for us and second, its funny how your concept of cheap and expensive changes.

Instead, we decided to take the shuttle from another hotel for less. Arriving there, we learned there was no shuttle this time of year, but they did inform us that an express bus left for there from the shuttle stand two blocks away. We rushed over as we only had a few minutes (or so we thought), only to find out this also did not exist. Instead, they could drop us off at the turn off of the highway, still an hour long walk away from the laguna. We decided this would not only be fine, it would be a great way to work up to a nice dip in the water. So off we went. We ignored the taxis waiting at the turn off offering to whisk us down to the laguna and started walking. We passed community after community, house after house, church after church, all in services on a Sunday morning. At every fork in the road (of which there were more than the map ever indicated), a handful of highly helpful people loitered, always with a smile and a point in the right direction. Its like they knew where we were headed or something.

But after an hour, we were still climbing and no laguna looked remotely in site. The sun was beating down, we had almost exhausted the water we brought, and we had heard the way down to the laguna was farther than the distance up. At this point, the whole walking thing started to seem like a bad idea.

But right about then, we crested a hill and there it was. A gorgeous vista out over the crater of a volcano, with a shimmering lake waiting for us hundreds of feet below. Granted, we still had a long way down to go, but all my thoughts of how loco we were vanished. We bounded down the hill with a spring in our step and headed to our original destination, having heard the private beaches were the best.

Unfortunately, Crater’s Edge had a small sign outside their hotel indicating they were closed for the entire month. Undeterred, we walked nearby to the Monkey Hut, took one look and decided this hostel was too touristy for our taste. And they wanted $6 for the privilege of hanging out (to be fair, for that you got to use their inner tubes and kayaks). Besides, they had no restaurant where we could get food.

So we walked down to the public beach. We parked ourselves at one of five identical looking beachfront restaurants, passing the afternoon in comfort with the locals. The water was clear and refreshing. Kids came over to take our pictures, we made friends with a group of small children playing in their underwear with floaties made of two liter coke bottles and watched a pair of teens do some serious making out nearby. I’m pretty sure none of this would’ve happened at our friendly hostel.

Our version of taking it easy on the way back was to take the hour late bus back out of the laguna, then hop another bus back to Granada. I don’t know why exactly we have this aversion to the simple way of doing things, but it does always lead to the “interesting” way instead. It would’ve been a much different day if we had just taken a taxi or tourist bus.

I nudge Jeff and utter a question to him that I would like him to translate into Spanish and ask his host family. He looks at me like I’m mental, asks if I’m serious, and then does as I request when he realizes that I really want to know.

“Um, how can you tell whose pig is whose?” Jeff asks.

His host family looks confused for a moment, but their expressions turn to understanding as I gesture out the open front door at a huge pig waddling down the street, sniffing and snuffling around. It’s not the first I’ve seen. In fact, I’ve seen more pigs—big mama pigs, whopper hogs, and tiny piglets—than I can keep track of, and for the most part they’ve all been wandering freely—not penned into a field or yard, not tied to a post, not watched over by anyone. And it’s not just pigs I’ve seen in such a state; it’s also cows, bulls, chickens, and a few horses. They graze on the side of the road, and share the street with motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, buses, and private autos. You’d be wise to watch where you step since they don’t just graze, but also do their other business wherever they feel like it.

This ultimate in free ranging is a testament to the sense of community here in Nicaragua. Nobody is worried that their neighbor is going to steal their livestock or do it any harm. It’s also about the power of home. Apparently no matter where the pigs, cows, and chickens roam during they day, they all come home to sleep. And that, my friends, is how you know whose pig is whose. It’s the one that sleeps in your backyard when the sun goes down.

We wandered up and down the town streets, and the most important memories stayed just out of my grasp. There was the town square where the bullfighting ring was set up. There was the baseball field, exactly as I remembered. We had just passed the school, which had many more buildings than I recalled. There was the beautiful blue and white church who’s plaza served as the bus stop. There was the “soda stand” where we often sat outside and had a coke (or sometimes, a beer … shhh!). It had been ten years and so much looked so familiar, and yet I still couldn’t locate my host family’s house.

We walked up the street I knew they lived on. Most of the way, until I had certified that every house along the way was not there’s and that it was certainly closer to the main road than we ended up. So we started back. There was one house that had potential, but it was quite different than I remembered and completely shuttered. So I asked a neighbor. After a lengthier exchange than necessary on account of my Spanish, I was assured they lived there and I only need knock on the door, they were in.

So with a fair bit of nervousness and hesitation (would they remember me? is it strange that I’m dropping in totally unannounced after ten years?) I chose a door (there were four that all could’ve passed for a front door) and knocked. When it opened, I immediately recognized the faces on the other side. One belonged to my host mother and the other to Kaylee, who was eleven when I last saw her. Though now 21, she had the same face.

Fortunately, they seemed to immediately recognize me and invited us in. Whew, first butterfly removed. And it was quite strange, because we immediately fell into conversation. About who was doing what after ten years. When I had been there, there were five children between 5 and 16. Shockingly, they had all aged ten years, just like I had. One daughter was studying medicine in Rivas, another was married and lived up the street and had two children (one a mere five days old). Another had a one year old son, Lionel, who stumbled around the room and took a particular liking to Theresa. Another son was working in the tobacco fields with his father, but the most startling to me was Franklin. Franklin was five when I left, and we had many a good time playing (it’s always easiest to befriend children in foreign languages … deep conversation is not necessary and they are so open and friendly and fascinated with you). They said Franklin cried and cried when I left. Well, he was now 15, finishing high school.

Soon thereafter, the father of the family, Zacarias, returned, and we had as thorough a conversation as we had ever had. Interestingly, I could feel my Spanish getting better as I talked to them (or else they were exceedingly good at understanding my broken Spanish) and I learned about many things. How this season was unusually rainy (as the rain fell outside). What that meant for his tobacco crops (not good but not a huge problem). Where the tobacco was sent and what became of it (cigars in Esteli). How cell phones and internet worked on the island (great and not so great, respectively). How it was a different world since I’d been there. Not to mention the always inquisitive Theresa had me ask about a bajilion questions, including ones had no idea how to ask. I think she learned a few things too she’ll post about.

But what surprised me most about this reunification was the fluidity and ease in which I fell back into their company. It is as I have always experienced with Ometepenos, hospitality and strong friendship. We parted after a few hours under the understanding that I did not know when I would be back, but that I would and I would let them know ahead of time because “aqui es casa tuya.”