Nicaragua

February 3, 2009
After the adventure of La Moskitia I am ready for some downtime and Granada, Nicaragua has thusly provided. This city seems to be a “Little Spain.” Beautiful and colourful Spanish-colonial style building and cafes line the main street leading down to Lake Nicaragua, where people sit and eat crepes or drink coffee. A great yellow and white fringed church stands in the center and I one day I witness a funeral taking place. A black hearse, drawn by two horses covered in a white crochet blanket wait patiently outside. The mourners do not appear sad however. They are singing uplifting hymns in Spanish and many have smiles on their faces.
The main street in Granada is a furious bustle of women selling fruit and baking, men selling trinkets, and children selling small-handmade bracelets. Everyone calls out as you pass, hoping to entice you with whatever product he or she is selling. Loud hip-hop and American pop blares from many of the stores and skinny horses pulling wooden carts compete with tour buses and cars for a spot on the narrow street. As night falls this city becomes nearly unrecognizable from the daytime hustle. Shops close up and the street vendors disappear. People go home to families or gatherings with friends. Work for the day is done and if you want a late-night snack you will be hard pressed to find any “street-meat” in this town.
A few days later and we make our way to the Laguna de Apoyo and a little-Canadian owned hostel called “Crater’s Edge.” Dry rainforest surrounds the crater-lake, which set in a valley thirty minutes outside of Granada. I spend a day swimming in clear waters and wondering if the tales I’ve heard about crocodiles in the water are really true.
Moving along to Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua’s ecological hotspot, but to get there we must first survive the bus ride to Rivas. It’s in a typical chicken bus (old yellow school bus) and it is packed 3 to a seat and 2 wide down the aisle. It is hot as hell and I have a man’s large rear-end in my face the entire ride. And just when I think it is impossible to fit more people on the bus, the driver stops as his assistant hangs out the door, yelling: “REE-vas, REE-vas” and more people cram onto the bus. On the ferry ride to the island we are followed by an ever growing flock of seagulls that dive-bomb into the water to catch bits of crackers we throw to them. They fly directly beside the ferry, watching intently for handouts and fighting in the air with each other over the scraps.
I catch my first glimpse of the beautiful peaks of Volcan Concepcion in the north and Volcan Maderas in the south, rising out of the water like giants guarding the narrow strip of land which joins them. Concepcion is the larger of the two and its’ top is circled by clouds, its’ sides covered in jungle and fissures where lava once flowed. This island was formed by the lava from the two volcanoes meeting and creating a thin strip of connecting land. It is really a place fit for fairytales: the ecological diversity present on the small island is a natural wonder.
Our second day on Ometepe is a Sunday and there is next to no public transportation, a fact Michelle and I discover the hard way. We decide to move hostels, to one on the other side of the island and set out walking with our packs, assuming we will easily be able to hitch a ride with a “collectivo” pick-up of some sort. Two hours and three rejections later and the heat is absolutely stifling, my shirt has melted to my back, and we are still a long way from our destination. On the upside, we’ve walked through a few villages and small farms and gotten some waves from stunned people. We finally work out a ride for $2 with a tourism office truck. Shortly after the bumpy ride begins (the roads are atrocious here) the driver puts in a CD of 80s pop and “Rains in Africa” blares out of tinny speakers. After that it’s Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” and we laugh and sing along with our driver who obviously enjoys the music.
Later that afternoon, after safely arriving at our destination, I jump off an old concrete dock for a swim in the lake and marvel at the volcanoes in the background. The hostel we have chosen, Hacienda Merida, was a large coffee plantation for the family of the former rulers of Nicaragua, the Somozas. Tracks still run through the property to the concrete loading dock on the lake, where ships would be filled with shipments sent back to the mainland. After the Sandinistas overthrew General Somoza in 1979, the Hacienda was confiscated and in 2002 was revitalized and leased to its present caretaker, Alvaro Molina. I sat down for dinner one night with Alvaro and he told me: “This Hacienda can be compared to the history of Nicaragua: prosperity and wealth (for some) violence, abandonment, decline and then reconstruction, revolution, and a new life.” He describes himself as the caretaker of the Hacienda in more ways than one, explaining to me that “we try to be conscious of the environment here.”
An intelligent and passionate man, Alvaro scoffs at the so-called attempts at “ecotourism” found all over Nicaragua and Costa Rica. He says few establishments have succeeded at a fully ecologically aware business, while all of them claim they are eco-friendly. One of the worst is a very expensive hotel, twenty miles outside of San Juan del Sur in the south. It purports to be an “eco-lodge” but does not pay local taxes or employ local people.
Alvaro runs a bilingual school on the farm grounds, using donated lap tops and volunteers from the hostel. Children who get good grades can work on his other project, a bold idea to educate both the Nica’s (Nicaraguans) and tourists. He is making colourful, yet indestructible fibreglass and wood road signs aimed at raising awareness. He sadly tells me about the decline in sea turtle populations because the eggs are eaten for fertility and the loss of many native bird species in Nicaragua to pet industries overseas. The fanciest hotels in Managua have nearly extinct scarlet macaws in huge cages on their lawns but Alvaro says people need to consider where these birds have come from. Alvaro introduces me to a beautiful ten month old girl and says “I have a daughter now and I have to make sure the future is better for her.”