I crossed the border into Nicaragua on foot. I needed to get to Rivas where I could board a ferry in Nicaragua Lake that would take me to the island of Ometepe.
The bus was only a dollar. Jess was a big help here and other places because she’d traveled on busses in other countries and spoke some Spanish too. I wish my translator app was always adequate but I found that most people don’t want to talk through a phone’s keyboard.
It was dusk when we both heard the sound of a train horn coming from a bus and the driver turning onto the highway. The sound got everyone’s attention and that was the point. The driver was trying to pack the vehicle full of people to maximize his earnings on a northbound run up the Pan American Highway.
He was also minimizing his time. He drove that bus like it was as nimble as a motorcycle, passing and speeding all up the road. It was a fun ride. I got my money’s worth and we made good time.
The bus was pimped to the grills. It was customized to be the driver’s personal beast. It wore a custom paint job and sounded it’s unique roar. It also had two chrome smokestacks shooting black clouds out behind. There was no vehicle it couldn’t overtake.
The horn was modified to sound like a train. Between it and the engine, the machine was a burly monster operating at high volume, shouting a diesel roar into the countryside and making farmers turn their heads up from their fields towards the highway.
Bald as a stone and built like an ox, the driver looked as powerful as the bus he was driving. He was dripping angry sweat from the smooth dome of his head as he shifted the ten-speed transmission and the chrome stacks poured black diesel smoke into the waning light of straight crop rows in the south of Nicaragua’s countryside.
It was almost missing the ride as the door boss hustled everyone out of their seats at the last stop.
There would be plenty more busses just like it. Chicken busses, the people called them. They all had character, but no two were the same, each driver took liberties personalizing his machine.
A bus in Nicaragua was part racer and part earner that took took two men to operate. The driver and door bosses worked as a team and split the profits. They would race, actually race on the street, other teams operating the same route. The first to the bus stop took all the riders and their fares as the prize.
There were alliances between teams, and there were rivalries. The driver honked his horn in rapid succession and held his hand up to oncoming friendlies. At rivals, the driver would swerve to pass while the door boss hung out the side of the vehicle shouting what could only translate to some variant of ‘F— YOU!’ I saw a door boss in Managua throw his coffee cup at a rival operator.
It was common for the drivers to speed while others stopped, overtake other vehicles on blind corners, pass in oncoming traffic and use his horn to speed through uncontrolled intersections or signal others to get the hell out of the way of his bus. The driver weaved up streets and highways like he had nothing to live for and every reason to be the first one there.
While the driver was racing up front, the door boss took care of the business in the back. With riders packed hip to hip, he somehow found a way up and down the aisle to take Córdobas1 and make change for every rider before coming to the next stop.
Bosses would not lose track of who paid and who owed. There was an informal price the locals knew and then a ‘gringo rate’ about double that. There were no tickets, no credit receipts, no fixed fares, and still the guy would keep everything straight in his head while being tossed sideways on his feet.
He would stay up right though, holding Córdobas in folds between his fingers by denomination and making change as the driver swerved all over the road doing his best to knock everyone off their feet. His round in the bus would end at the door before the driver neared the next stop.
As the driver steered into the stop the door boss hung out the door, whistled, called out the name of the city where the bus was headed, and started hustling the riders. This was the part, at the stops, that the teams really proved how well they worked together.
The door boss would jump onto the curb and rush the riders into the bus as it was decelerating. When Jess and I were riding a bus in León, I saw the door boss run up an alley to take a footpath shortcut to the next stop. By the time the driver caught up with him, he had the passengers in a row to pack into the door and keep moving. The really good teams, and there were a lot of them, never had to stop the bus wheels from rolling.
It was a thing to see, bus racing in Nicaragua. The passengers were the prize, the transit routes were the racetracks. Each bus had their two-man team racing rivals and waving to friendlies. It was something that I’d never seen in the United States or in public transportation in general.
I was used to the indifference of operators like those in California. I got on a city bus there one time and the driver was already moving before I paid and rolled through the turn style.
‘How much is it?’ I asked the driver.
‘Lately’, he said with a shrug, ‘everyone's been givin' about a dollar’. And then nodded his head to himself, as if he was accepting what people were paying as the same the city was asking them to pay, which wasn’t true.
I’ll admit that the bum discount I got on a California bus was better than paying Nicaragua’s gringo rate. But there’s something to be said for efficiency and with all their hustle, those teams were the most efficient busses I’ve ever seen.
As fast as the buses between places were, there was no reason to go rush once we got there. It was, for me, a lesson in taking things slow and absorbing the world as it came to me instead of going out and chasing it down.
The first fast bus we took, the one with an oxen driver and tall chrome stacks, dropped us in Rivas, Nicaragua. We walked to the ATM and withdrew Córdobas. I tried to stealth camp at the edge of town but there were too many threats. Private land, idle men, drivers slowing down to look at us as they passed on the street, and stray dogs baring their (possibly rabid) teeth threatened us back from the edge of town. We would catch an early ferry to the island in the morning.
It was a slowed down couple of days. We shared a rented motorcycle and got around the island in no rush at all. Ometepe had more horses than buses and I let all of them pass me. I was stopping at any old place that looked interesting.
We drank iced fruit drinks through straws out of plastic bags. I took pictures of a church that was a shade of yellow I’d never seen before. We hung out near plantains harvested on the side of the road. Jess found a beach on the west end of the island and we sat there for sunset, watching it sink beneath the lake behind a derelict rowboat tied off near the shore.
We hiked up to San Ramón waterfall and spent most of the day just hanging out at the pool beneath. The water had runoff from the lake in the crater on top of Maderas volcano. The falls were down to a trickle as we were in the dry season.
The water too, was a perfect temperature. It was one of the many features on that island that attracted people from all over the world. Others like us, who had come to the strange island of two volcanoes inside of a massive lake. I doubt there is any other place quite like it. It’s that lake that feels as big as a sea, formed by two volcanoes that were still steaming away.
We hiked up the other one, Concepción, which was the taller of the two at 5,282 feet (1,610 meters). We started so early in the morning that it was still night and we were using headlamps. The toads couldn’t see so they weren’t moving out of the way as we hiked up the trail in the dark and I nearly stepped on several of them. Each the size of a grapefruit and still as a lump of dirt.
There was a view from above the tree line but we lost the protection of the trees. The wind was so bad that I put my back against a small rise and considered turning around. It was just light enough that I stashed my headlamp in my pack while I sat there and thought about it.
Thankfully the wind was blowing left to right and the trail was on the right side of the ridge. We were on the leeward side of the ridge and somewhat protected from the gusts coming at the volcano. We were blown around some on the way up but I stayed on my feet for the most part and made it all the way to the top.
The footing didn’t make things easy and the unstable summit was downright dangerous. My feet slipped on melon-sized loose rocks and knocked them down the slope. I had to hold onto the top on the volcano against the wind once I got there. And, it was throwing the nastiest smelling sulfur steam right at us. Getting down was a practice in controlled falling.
At the bottom, island life carried on. The top of the volcano was a tourist attraction but the flat skirt of land around it was for farmers. They were on the volcanoes’ flanks, on the fertile land that the volcanos had made and where the people were growing bananas and plantains.
Life went slow. They did things together and watching it was a window into their community. The Sunday tradition of going down to the river to do laundry was one of these things. The women did the washing and the children jumped off a tree into a deep pocket in the river.
They dared each other to jump from higher and higher branches and no one stopped them. They just let the kids play and carried on with whatever else they were doing. It was a nice change of pace. There was no playground, but they made it a playground.
They worked together and no one was off alone, isolated, on their own, like it is so common to do in the west. There’s a benefit to that kind of bonding, to growing in a community like that and never being further from each other than the island’s bounds will allow.
I appreciated it. I hung out in the river with those guys for a while. I also spent the next few weeks in Central America continuing to learn that lesson, slowing down. The heat helped.
So did traveling with someone who understands that not everything is all about climbing mountains and making miles. Jess knew all about taking things slow and I felt okay to slow down as we went further north to the jungles, volcanoes, and beachside villages further north in Nicaragua.
Nicaragua’s official currency
What a beautiful sunset sky. I've never had a chicken bus experience even though I've been to African countries and Central American countries - putting it on my list as it seems like an experience that I need.
Yikes! Race car buses! What a system to be able to pick up passengers without stopping and then the opposite extreme of slow horse walking. Glad you didn’t feel antsy to keep moving, but we’re content to watch laundry dry and kids be dare devils.