I opened my eyes in the bottom bunk of a hostel in León and swung my feet to the chipped linoleum floor.
The seven others in the room were sleeping but I don’t know how because the air was so hot and so stale that it felt like an attic in the summer with sweat beading from my scalp to the pads of my feet.
I didn’t brush my teeth, or put on a clean shirt, or lean to the side and stretch. I stood up and walked straight for the door to breathe outside air that would taste better than what was in the room circulating between eight pairs of lungs.
I was walking down the street away from the hostel not really sure where I was going but with sleep still in my eyes and a few Córdobas in my pocket. Cars splashed garbage juice puddles as they shot down the street tooting their horns at shuffling people and slow-trotting street dogs to wake up and look out. Move out of the way!
Good Morning Nicaragua.
I was a few blocks from the hostel when I came into the sounds of hundreds of people barking their wares and squeezing between each other.
It was the central market, artery of the city and meeting point of every bicycle, taxi, vendor, pedestrian, porter, and scrap-begging stray dog in the city.
I passed a man on my right selling freckled bananas as I neared the outer reach of the main street. I stashed him in my head as a landmark to find my way out of the labyrinth when I was coming back. I turned into the main throb of the market and weaseled through the aisles of everything a person needs for sale in tiny booths on either side of the street, crowding all the shoppers into a narrow and competitively-traveled center.
It was more aisle than street and the smell of raw meat was already strong, even in the early morning. The butcher was waving the flies off his table. Nothing was on ice, not even the fish which announced its presence to my nose long before my eyes could see it. I smelled meat cooking on grills and fruit that should have been swept up a few days ago but still found itself rotting unwanted in the grime between pavement cracks.
I still had not said a word that morning. I woke up and (sort of in a trance to get fresh air) walked straight into the market’s chaotic magnetism. It was there that the first sound out of my mouth that day was ‘no thank you’. I didn’t want to buy warm meat with flies on it. I no-thank-you’d my way through the aisle of the market as the vendors barked at me to buy food or junk while I went upstream looking for breakfast.
I bought eggs1 from a woman who taught me the Spanish word for twelve after I keyed the number into her calculator to tell her how many I wanted. I snagged a few star fruits, a pineapple too and some bread for lunch.
On my return, I felt bad for the first guy I saw because I was using him and his freckled bananas as a landmark to find my way back to the hostel. So, I bought some off of his cart and called it even.
Everything happened there and a person could get anything they wanted, especially if they wanted food.
There was hot food, cold food, food that should have been refrigerated, dogs that would steal food when you weren’t paying attention, pans to cook food, soap to clean pans, phones to look at after the dishes were done and accessories to trick the phones out. There were clothes, shoes, hardware, toys, disorganized collections of clutter with no theme whatsoever, and really whatever else tempted a person into spending their Córdobas.
Even when they didn’t have it, vendors would say that they did and then make a phone call to one of their connections who could locate whatever was requested. This happened when I asked a cell phone shop if they had a memory card. The girl said yes and then kept me in her little store while she made a phone call and had a friend bring one over from another booth.
There were services available too. The red Hawaiin shirt I wear everywhere was starting to tear a hole in the back. A gentleman with a foot-powered sewing machine made it look new in a few minute’s time.
There were new clothes for sale but I wasn’t interested because they all looked way too familiar. The clothing coming out of those markets was American, all of it. I saw people wearing t-shirts for colleges, fundraisers, cross country meets, volleyball tournaments, and all sorts of other stuff with words in English and hilariously close to home. The funniest I saw was a guy wearing a Papa John’s shirt and a little league participation trophy around his neck (with others like it) like jewelry. I chased him down to take his picture and, for the price of two cigarettes, he even posed.
Out of the market in Grenada and back at the hostel, I found proof that anyone and anything can survive just fine in the Central American climate. They basically just have to lay on the ground until morning and they will be fine. Her name was Sam Sam from Malaysia and she was doing just that. I went with her and Jess outside of Grenada to climb Telica Volcano, see the sunset, camp overnight, and watch the sunrise before down-climbing the next day.
We tried to arrive at mid day but that wasn’t the way it worked out. We were late to the volcano because we took the wrong chicken bus and had to hitchhike the remaining miles. He picked us up in a white beater pickup and drove us to the junction we needed, letting us out on the side of the highway at a dry wash where we started the dusty trail into the jungle at sunset.
Everything beyond the wash was dry too. We were breathing constant dust and carrying heavy loads of water. I had six liters and still ended up thirsty.
The soil on the walls of the entrenched trail we were walking was so dry that when I touched them, entire clumps of red clay crumbled to the ground, puffed into a cloud, and lay in a pile of dust.
We were about an hour and a half into the route with heavy packs before the two-track road turned to a narrow trail and sloped sharply uphill.
There were spiders and scorpions moving around in the hot night dust. There was no wind so the strong stinging smell of smoke stayed always just in front of my nose.
The mountain beside ours was burning. No one was trying to put it out, so it was doomed to burn black all the way to the peak before the fire ever petered out. A line of red stretched up to the top, black on one side, flames on the other.
Through it all I was spotting red circles in the beam of my headlamp that I discovered were the startled eyes of birds woken up from sleeping in a dusty bed on the ground. I was spooking ground birds out of sleep and into flight. It was a bird that had no nest, no home.
It just sat on the ground and called it good for the night, laziest bird I’ve ever heard of. Most of them just let me pass close enough to snatch them probably for reasons that anything that lazy is made of meat that tastes no good.
I’d never seen any bird like it.
I had joked that anyone can make it in Central America. They wouldn’t be comfortable all the time but they could lay down on the ground in any place and fall asleep and chances were, they will be fine. They would get uncomfortable but they wouldn’t freeze or overheat. They probably wouldn’t float away or catch fire either. There’s usually water someplace nearby and so much fruit is native to the area that they could just survive by dipping their beaks into puddles, in the case of birds, or picking fruit off the trees in the case of the rest of us.
It’s a place created for lazy life to endure. It’s the only place where I’ve seen creatures like sloths and grounded birds so allergic to work as to not build a nest.
Anyway, the bird looked like it was doing just that, enduring a lazy existence. It just sat in the dust and shut its eyes at the end of every day. It was the bird form of Sam Sam. She too traveled Central America with no shelter for the night. She would just lay in the jungle and let the bugs eat her until morning. I was doing some of that too, albeit with a tent. But I couldn’t help but feel that all of us creatures in the heat of Nicaragua were doing the same thing, getting by.
We made a proper camp, with a fire and a tent to discourage the lazy feeling. The camp was a good place, peaceful and quiet but when I was there everything about it felt right.
There was a light calming wind and carried only the faintest whiff of the sulphuric steam slipping out the top of the volcano. Our fire was bright and warmed our meal before we scooped dirt onto the coals and snuffed it out for the night.
We were late and tired making a camp and there wasn’t much time between lying down to sleep and rising again a couple hours later to an alarm. It didn’t matter though, I wanted to climb up there more than I wanted to go back to sleep. I was excited to get up to the top to see dawn come from beyond the smoke of that volcano.
I especially like this part of things, the edges and in-betweens. I like the dawn as it comes between night and morning and its counterpart, the sunset, for the same reason. I like the outskirts of a place like that volcano where we three were the only ones there, pushed right up to the edge of Nicaragua.
I like the life of constant motion because it feels like I’m always in between places as I move from one location to the next. Call it nomadic or gypsy, whatever. I call it living on the road and I love it. I’ve got itchy feet that need to stay moving, not in every moment, but the feeling is never far. The busses scratched my itchy feet all across Central America.
In Nicaragua, the pattern emerged. It was city, to bus, to volcano, to water, and then a rinse and repeat. The city would have all the hustle and foul smell of the street market, vendors, shouting, honking, engines and noise. The bus would be packed full and racing toward the countryside where a hitchhike and long climb ended at the top of another volcano. Each volcano I found uniquely powerful and eerily calm in their own way.
The pattern completed by going down to hop another chicken bus to the water, fresh or salt, where I would find myself sleeping on the beach and scratching sand out of my hair and under my fingernails.
It was a pattern that became a rhythm and then a rhythm I got used to in the time in Nicaragua. The country is dotted with water and boiling with volcanoes. They’re everywhere. Its cities swarm and its busses race all day long. I was fortunate to travel like this and found something special about each place I went.
My travel zig-zagged back to the Pan American Highway and up to a seaside town called Las Peñitas. It was a fishing community with beach sand so hot I had to wear my shoes or sprint from the shade to the sea so I wouldn’t burn my feet.
The stray dogs looked like they were breathing slow to conserve energy. Buildings had no walls and scant roofs were built of palm branches.
Boats left the inlet empty and came back with their gunwales low to the water with the weight of their catch. It was the kind of place where people who don’t like eating fish find themselves going hungry.
It was, of all the water in the country, my favorite. Although it’s not easy to land my finger on a single ‘best’ one, I liked this place for how removed it was from everything. It was on the edge of Nicaragua and looked towards the frontier of the ocean.
It stirred that part of me that likes the edge. The people there stood between land and sea, with one foot in the Pacific fishery and the other on sandy land.
There was a quiet stillness that hung over the town and slowed everything down like a heat wave that stayed for the whole summer.
It receded as the evening cooled when men boated their hopeful nets out to sea.
The bioluminescence stirred bright green as I agitated circles into the Pacific.
The fire burned hot on driftwood and coconut husks while I stared into it and dried the saltwater off my red skin.
I stood, barefooted in the cooling sand.
The sun was gone and twilight held on to the western edge of the Pacific as tiny stars poked holes in the moonless purple above me.
I was at the edge of Nicaragua, the last on the land to be touched by the spell of night as dimming twilight slipped its dimming tail over the horizon and night surrounded me at last.
Eggs are fine to be unrefrigerated as long as they are also unwashed. If the egg is washed, the membrane on the shell called a bloom, is removed and the egg is made vulnerable to bacteria penetrating its shell, thus needing refrigeration. The USA is almost unique in refrigerating eggs.
This is one of your most descriptive articles. The adjectives are just enough to give a mental picture. “Freckled bananas” are something I’ve seen daily, but have never described them as such. “Put My feet down on the chipped linoleum”, again, one sees the neglect and you set the scene for the day of culture you will encounter. The pictures are phenomenal too! Well done!