Semana Santa on the Atlantic Coast

I have been back from vacation on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua for two weeks but I’ve been exceptionally busy, too busy to write about the trip. When I first started this bog, I had a fear of turning it into a travel log, but I have had the good fortune to see a lot of great sights in this country.  All my visitors have been impressed with the natural beauty of Nicaragua and the visual cacophony that is this country, so that now I can relax and say, “Why not a little travel log?  Y’all come.”

So to begin, there is a tradition in Nicaragua that people go to the water during Semana Santa.  School is on holiday and it’s the hottest time of year.  For that reason my friend Lisa and I, who wanted to see the Atlantic Coast, hesitated briefly before committing to the 10 hour plus bus/boat trip out east.  Would it be crazy crowded?  Would we be able to get back to our sites on Easter Sunday? But we had the same idea.  There are only two week long vacations left before we return to the U.S. and, here in Nicaragua, free time has a habit of filling up.  So we decided to get this trip in. 

We packed light and left at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning from Managua on a bus loaded with people going home to visit their families for the week.  Four other English teacher volunteers were on the same bus, they having a friend in Bluefields, the first stop on the Atlantic Coast.  Bluefields is an interesting little city, the largest on the Atlantic Coast, settled first by the British on land occupied by various indigenous tribes, some of whose communities survive with language intact—the Miskito and the Garufina to name two.  So Bluefieds is a cosmopolitan sort of place, Creole being the main language, but Spanish and English spoken by many and a mix of indigenous tongues as well.  But to get to Bluefields, you have to get off the bus in El Rama because there is no more road.  You load onto a panga, a boat that holds about 12 people, for an hour and a half ride down the Rio Escondido.  We lucked out due to some pushy racing from bus to river port so that we had a panga with a plastic awning.  The ride was screened from the sun.  I have to say that the benches on which we sat, both bottom and back, were the hardest ever.  By the end of the trip I was feeling the pain, on the verge of taking off my life vest so I could sit on it.  Photo attached. Lisa is on the left.

In Bluefields we checked into an amazingly cheap and decent hotel—two beds, fan A/C private bath for $17. per night for the two of us.  We set out to explore the city, looking for something good to eat.  The folks on the Atlantic Coast know about desserts and we sampled our way through cocobread, luscious picos filled with cheese, sugar and, I think cardamom, pito, a spicy ground meat filled pastry, and the and various cakes—all on the first day. People on the Pacific Coast don’t do dessert much.  We have cake (spelled queque) and torta which as far as I can see is the same thing, but those Creoles makes cakes and tarts out of all kinds of fruits and nuts, coconut being the major ingredient.  It makes things moist and rich.

In Bluefields we joined with the other volunteers including my friend Alba who lives close by, for some meals, a trip to a baseball game and a trip to the beach across the lagoon from Bluefields on the Atlantic Ocean.  El Bluff was a great beach destination.  Although not blessed with typical Caribbean aqua water, it has small waves and the warmest water ever.   I stood for a couple of hours just being happy as the little waves splashed on my face and knocked me around a bit, like the gentlest kind of roughhousing.  The baseball game was a great opportunity because baseball is the national sport, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see a professional game here.  The Costeños played a team from Masaya, losing the first battle of the double header but winning the second.  I forgot how nice it is to be a fan, how fun just to sit a give yourself over to something not that important, something for which you have no responsibility. Spectator—unjustly maligned avocation.

After a couple of days in Bluefields, we headed off to Laguna de Perlas, a 45 minute panga ride away on inland waterways to the laguna to the north that gives the town its name.  The other volunteers left on the same day so we were becoming a nice extended group.  We stayed at a couple of places in Lagunas, the first being a little expensive on account of Semana Santa.  Lisa found another place that cut our room cost in half and we moved.  Spent the first day locating a good comedor for gallo pinto (Nica rice and beans staple) but with a costeño addition—cocomilk. Also, naturally, we found the bakery where we made friends with the Creole bakers who were so warm and generous that we ended up using the bakery for the gathering place during our stay.  We met up with another volunteer, Sarah, for whom Laguna de Perlas is a second site, her first having been up near me, and for that reason we are friends. Sarah showed us around and arranged for a tour of the Pearl Cays, famous for being uninhabited and beautiful in the Caribbean way—white sands and clear aqua water.

Unfortunately the tour didn’t materialize.  The day was so windy that the guide called it off. Disappointed, we maybe too hastily hooked up with two Austrian girls who had arranged a tour inside the lagoon to some of the indigenous communities. (A kind of nerdy tour, we joked but what else can you expect from people who read books and volunteer in 3d world countries?) I’ll give you a heads up about how this story ends.  The guide, we later learned, is unscrupulous (details to follow) and should have warned us off because of the weather, but he didn’t, and we headed off expecting a little cultural broadening even if we couldn’t have a glorious beach day.  There were 9 of us in the panga.  It rained hard as soon as we set out and we made the first leg of the trip stooped under a black plastic tarp.  It was still raining at the first stop, a Miskito village where another guide met us to show us  around.  Not much to see but the guide tried to give us some information.  I saw a small sculpture from pre-Comumbian times, of a manatee, a totem figure for the Miskito.  But as we were walking around, feeling pretty obvious, one volunteer said it: “This doesn’t feel right.”  Of course it didn’t.  We are used to being a part of communities not unlike the one we were touring, and it felt bad to be there like a tourist, gawking, even if we politely gawk.

Back to the panga and on to the next stop, this one where  we were told lived a man from “San Francisco”.  The guide said it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him.  We unloaded and walked up a slight hill to behold the biggest, most overdone, monstrous ostentatious house I’ve ever seen in Nicaragua or maybe in the States except for gilded age grotesqueries.  For some reason the guy permited us to use the bathrooms and so I can confirm that the interior of this house was a match for the exteriaor.  We met the man—not as it turned out from San Francisco, but from a town outside L.A., a retired guy who came down to Nicaragua, bought up riverfront land from, he assured us, an unassailable source  (a claim with which his Miskito neighbors begged to differ) and steamed in container loads of stuff from Managua, over Lake Colcibolca down rivers into Pearl Lagoon like some latter day Kurtz where he lives in splendid isolation, not able to leave because of the damage that for some reason happens to his property when he is away.  Why were we here?  “Too get material for blog entries,” we reasoned, no other reason being apparent.  Joe San Francisco’s only connection to the indigenous, it appears, is the wrath he has incurred by building on what he has been told is his land, but the Miskito persist in thinking is theirs. Second possibility:  The tour guide wanted a relationship with a gringo with so much money to throw around.   Third choice:  The guy wanted a relationship with the guide because there was some talk of turning the monstrosity into B and B and anyone who could deliver customers is a valued guy.

By this time, needless to say, people were getting a little disgruntled.  The tour had promised a 30 to 45 minute hike at this point which was not happening because the guide ”forgot his shoes”.  Back in the panga we headed off for the next indigenous community and lunch. The guide told us that some nice lady in a community would make us lunch for about 70 cordobas.  This price had been confirmed repeatedly by the guide, the last time just before we left Joe San Francisco. It rained on us all the way to the next town, a Garifana community, maybe the last in Nicaragua, the Garifana having originated in Honduras to the north. We headed up from the dock and into a hotel where we were seated—maybe the little indigenous lady was cooking in  the hotel kitchen.  I should say that our group was comprised of us volunteers, the 2 Austrian girls and a middle aged couple from Managua, Conny and Mario.  As we waited for lunch seated in a large circle, Conny and Mario broke out red wine and orange Fanta, ordered up, ice, a pitcher and 9 glasses and treated us all to middle-of-the-day sangria (do not mock—try it.) Lunch was delicious, clearly worth more than the 70 cordobas advertized. When the bill came, however, the cost was nearly double.  By this time dissatisfaction with the guide  focused on the bill.  We agreed to pay 100 cordobas each and told the guide he had to supply the rest, some 240 cordobas.

Things were not going well.  The guide was furious.  We had received from him no insight into the different cultures around the Laguna, and so, after a hasty walk to a beach close to the Garifuna town, named Orinoco, we set off for Laguna de Perlas.  The trip was long, maybe an hour and a half, and frankly a little frightening.  The water was choppy, winds high and there was intermittent rain.  The engine cut out from time to time; the boat heeled over in the wind. But we arrived safely back.

That night I was thinking about visiting the guide the next day to explain what he might try in order to keep tourists happy, but I ran into the small business volunteer in town and explained the situation to him, thinking he’d be a better person to talk to the guide.  No way, said our volunteer, he’s the worst guide in the place.  In fact, he said, he “killed” 7 tourists in conditions much like we were in the day before. He went to jail for the deaths.  The volunteer said the guide was only in it for the money.  He wasn’t someone the volunteer cared to work with.  Grim news.

Luckily for dinner our last night Lisa and I tried the famous “rundon”, a Creole dish of fish, lobster, plaintain and yucca in the most incredible coconut milk sauce so subtly flavored I couldn’t tell you what was in it.  Best meal in Nicaragua yet.

This has gone on too long.  But the end of the trip was its own kind of magic.  I ran into Conny and Mario in town and they invited me to drive back to Managua with them in their car the next day.  Lisa and I had been planning to leave on the bus and so when I told her I had the offer, she was elated. The drive back was tough for 4 hours over dirt roads and 4 hours on decent paved roads, but incredibly more pleasant than the bus would have been in the air conditioned car.  Conny and Mario are a first for me, an upper middle class Nica couple who travel and like to talk.  We talked a good deal about language.  We stopped for breakfast (Lisa and I confining ourselves to tortilla and cheese) and they picked up the modest tab. They dropped us at a mall in Managua.  I got their email and received a nice response to my thank you note and an offer to meet up again.

This story will end:  Lisa knows a guy from the Embassy who opens his house to volunteers.  He said we could stay the night. The house is huge—3 bathrooms, a big US style kitchen, a humongous flat screen TV and, best of all, a washer and dryer.  He let us wash our clothes, something I had been day dreaming about—my clothes are so not-really-clean all the time.  The guy ordered take out for us.  The best, though, was the conversation about politics, foreign policy, books.  I hadn’t had one like that in a long time and left the gated, concertina wired, guarded house the next day grateful for the lovely ending to a great trip.  The bus to my site was waiting when I got to the bus station and I got a seat.  Life is pretty sweet.