Managua, Nicaragua
Alden caught a taxi to the airport Sunday at 5:30a and I promptly fell back asleep. By the time I woke up, it was 10a and I had missed all direct buses to Managua, Nicaragua. I didn`t want to go to Managua, exactly, but rather the nearby Granada which has a very active volcano.
Thanks to my late date with Queen Mab, I instead had to catch a bus to the border at Peñas Blancas, cross the very strange, large border at night, and then catch a chicken bus onward to Managua. In the end, it was less than half the price that the direct bus would have been. Of course, I arrived here in Managua at 10p, with most shops closed, the streets mostly deserted, and a friendly reminder from one of the bus passengers to be very careful with taxis in Managua as the drivers are thieves who will rob me. Lovely.
I slept at a dive hotel near the bus station the first night. The next day, I called my friend Cecilia. She and I were housemates in San Francisco for a short while and when I sent out the email about this trip, she replied that she'd be in Managua the same time I would. I've spent the last two nights at her sister's house, in their guest room. Her sister, Norma, is a nacatamale maker of some local renown. Nacatamales are tamales 3-5x larger than in the US, stuffed not with a bit of shredded beef or pork or chicken, but with herbs and pork still on the bone and vegetables, with the whole thing wrapped in a banana leaf. In the afternoons, Cecilia has been going over Spanish grammar with me. She speaks English, French, and German, with Spanish as her first language, and has been a Spanish teacher in the US for years.
It's a lucky situation for me.
Managua itself is uninteresting to me. "It lacks personality," Cecilia said, and I agree. It's a sprawling, dusty, dirty, hot Latin American city. There's interesting stuff here, if you dig, like a cinema that plays independent/art-house movies once or twice a week and the university area, but overall it bores me: "If you've seen one, you've seen them all."
Down in the center of town, which was wrecked by an earthquake in 1972 and hasn't been fully restored, there's an area full of statues, monuments, important cultural centers, etc. It has an old cathedral which is crumbling, structurally unstable, and off-limits to the public. Near there, there are two things that were pretty interesting to me.
The first is a huge bronze statue of a man holding a pick-axe and hoisting an AK-47 in the other hand. There's a Sandinista flag flying from the assault rifle and the placard below says, "Workers and peasant farmers onward 'til the end." The other, about 500m away, is in Parque de la Paz, where weapons were collected when the Sandinista/Contra conflict ended. The park has a burnt-out tank "melted" into the concrete below it and hundreds of rifle barrels stick out from the walls.
It's Wednesday the 26th as I write this. This afternoon, I'm going to leave Managua for my original destination: Granada. I want to have a look-see at the volcano near there before heading further north, through the corner of Honduras, to Perquin in El Salvador. From there, I want to move north again to a small town in southern Belize for a few days before my flight back from Guatemala City. ("Guate," as the locals call it.)
Thanks to my late date with Queen Mab, I instead had to catch a bus to the border at Peñas Blancas, cross the very strange, large border at night, and then catch a chicken bus onward to Managua. In the end, it was less than half the price that the direct bus would have been. Of course, I arrived here in Managua at 10p, with most shops closed, the streets mostly deserted, and a friendly reminder from one of the bus passengers to be very careful with taxis in Managua as the drivers are thieves who will rob me. Lovely.
I slept at a dive hotel near the bus station the first night. The next day, I called my friend Cecilia. She and I were housemates in San Francisco for a short while and when I sent out the email about this trip, she replied that she'd be in Managua the same time I would. I've spent the last two nights at her sister's house, in their guest room. Her sister, Norma, is a nacatamale maker of some local renown. Nacatamales are tamales 3-5x larger than in the US, stuffed not with a bit of shredded beef or pork or chicken, but with herbs and pork still on the bone and vegetables, with the whole thing wrapped in a banana leaf. In the afternoons, Cecilia has been going over Spanish grammar with me. She speaks English, French, and German, with Spanish as her first language, and has been a Spanish teacher in the US for years.
It's a lucky situation for me.
Managua itself is uninteresting to me. "It lacks personality," Cecilia said, and I agree. It's a sprawling, dusty, dirty, hot Latin American city. There's interesting stuff here, if you dig, like a cinema that plays independent/art-house movies once or twice a week and the university area, but overall it bores me: "If you've seen one, you've seen them all."
Down in the center of town, which was wrecked by an earthquake in 1972 and hasn't been fully restored, there's an area full of statues, monuments, important cultural centers, etc. It has an old cathedral which is crumbling, structurally unstable, and off-limits to the public. Near there, there are two things that were pretty interesting to me.
The first is a huge bronze statue of a man holding a pick-axe and hoisting an AK-47 in the other hand. There's a Sandinista flag flying from the assault rifle and the placard below says, "Workers and peasant farmers onward 'til the end." The other, about 500m away, is in Parque de la Paz, where weapons were collected when the Sandinista/Contra conflict ended. The park has a burnt-out tank "melted" into the concrete below it and hundreds of rifle barrels stick out from the walls.
It's Wednesday the 26th as I write this. This afternoon, I'm going to leave Managua for my original destination: Granada. I want to have a look-see at the volcano near there before heading further north, through the corner of Honduras, to Perquin in El Salvador. From there, I want to move north again to a small town in southern Belize for a few days before my flight back from Guatemala City. ("Guate," as the locals call it.)
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