Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
“No tengo dolares ahorita. Yo solo tengo cordobas. Hay problemo?”
She stared at me through exhausted, melting eyes while she ran through the method of payment one-more-fucking-time. Clearly the earthquake from the night before had had more of an impact on her life than it had mine.
That speaks volumes, which works out, because apparently she thought I was deaf.
“You pay with dolares. We no take cordobas.”
I looked around the hotel lobby, searching for someone else who could share in the absurdity of what was happening. Finding the place empty, my gaze fell once again upon the poor, impatient clerk behind the desk, my head slightly tilting in disbelief.
“But… this is Nicaragua.”
Her arms folded in disapproval, waiting for me to joke about her country.
“And your currency is cordobas.”
She shook her head along with her index finger, the whites of her eyes flashing as her mind tried to wrap itself around this dumb foreigner that had somehow dressed himself this morning but couldn’t realize the very simple principle that she was delivering.
“No! No cordobas! Dolares!”
I looked around again, still nobody else in sight, then did what anyone would have done were they also bipolar and had as much experience with hallucinogens as I had.
I leaned over the desk ever so slightly, tilted my head again, raised one eyebrow in skepticism, and asked with cold deliberation: “Where am I?!”
Ladies and gentlemen, I present:
Esteli was next on the list. The next journey in the series. Horseback riding through tobacco fields laid across sometimes rolling, sometimes sweeping landscapes, all cradled underneath an enveloping sky. And the city itself, shocked with heavy bombing from ‘78-’79, was burgeoning, having already known what it would take to make a city flourish in the first place. The duality of a confident, strong momentum being superimposed over their war-torn past was a subtle, ubiquitous thing.
The sort that reaches at your marrow without you noticing.
The sort that stays with you.
But first, I had to get there.
The cab that took me to an ATM so that I could get “dolares” was the same one that took me to the bus station afterward. I never found out why the hotel would only take American dollars. It was the same with the cabby, who smiled a keyboard and peeled out, a crumbled, green Andrew Jackson in sweaty hand. I knew why he was smiling, though. He'd left me to a sweltering, writhing mass of people weaving in and out of one another like bees at a honeycomb.
This place was raw, colorful, teeming with a sense of thriving immediacy. Bootlegs of movies and video games that hadn’t been released stacked high next to fruit juice sold in bags, while dogs swollen with pregnancy, disease, and a surplus of food, lapped at the dripping spoilage. These mongrels would have their fill or were chased off only to run the gauntlet of legs attached to roving policemen, unsupervised children, elderly couples holding fast to one another, wary, weary women openly breastfeeding, and middle-aged men too busy to notice any of them.
I sat by a chain-link fence for a couple of hours, reading Dune and dodging people hip-deep in a mad rush to wherever, while waiting for the brand of the bus to match my ticket. Once that synched-up with the chorus from the bus driver yelling “Esteli! Esteli! Esteli!,” I knew I was arguably on the correct vehicle, and off I went to experiences unknown.
And those experiences started immediately.
Starting with a kid in his late teens resting his ass on my shoulder, the bus, packed tighter than a summer sausage, was inundated with merchants hopping on and off seemingly at random, peddling peppers, enchiladas, fruit juice (in bags), and water to the passengers far too familiar with the discomfort to complain.
And still, through all of the bustling, the landscape presented a comforting blanket of calm, the beauty of the relationship between verdant, lush foliage and the dry, brown soil in which it was packed, inspired me to a moment of both awe and repose.
Then the guy wiping his ass with my shoulder tossed a water bottle out the window, my anger showing only in the subtle movement of my thumb gently petting the slick black handle of the knife in my pocket.
The knife.
Resting there like change.
Or maybe order.
I was getting carried away...
A couple of quick breathing exercises...
... and I refocused on what the land was offering while it, and I, still could.
It was a huge relief to pull into the bus station in Esteli. The sweat and food and dirt had found its way into my pores and I needed to get that guy’s ass off my shoulder before I got carried away and stabbed him until my arm got tired.
More breathing exercises.
I took two steps off the bus before I was swarmed by children and amputees holding out hands for a dash of generosity or a face on which to put their frustrations later. I gave what loose change I had. Those I couldn’t help, I ignored, hoping their actual hate didn't match the glare in their eyes.
I started walking down the street, a slight limp due to the bug bites on my foot, no aim but to take in the city before getting a cab to the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying. The cultural aspects were obviously pervasive, with a pride in their origins that could be seen in subtle discourse and splayed across walls. They weren’t caught up in the rhetoric of America like they were in Managua. Instead they incorporated only the basic portions of our technology, ingeniously retrofitted to fit their locale.
No McDonald’s, Starbucks, or billboards celebrating iphones, but rather a strength of history and cultural cohesion that seemed both natural and unfamiliar to me.
It wasn’t about keeping up with those around us, but making sure we had what we needed, the rest going to friends, cold beer, and the big sky.
This was reinforced that much more by the reception I received when I arrived at Santa Maria B&B. The woman who greeted me was five-foot-nothing, her role as a grandmother placed over her like a shawl, with arms open to hug the next occupant that walked through the door.
We didn’t speak much. But her effervescent love of life could be felt in every room, including my own. Putting down the book bag, as always, was a tremendous relief, the sweat stains once again leaving dark swaths where the straps had been. From there I went to the balcony, the only place that was allowed for smoking.
The view was nothing special...
...except for a flower that caught my eye, petals curling with time and experience, still adamantly beautiful even beside brick and cement.
Maybe more so.
I stared at that flower, caught up like an insect, wishing I could spread its magnificence like pollen.
Instead, I put out my cigarette and took another walk, looking for places to eat and maybe a venue for tobacco farm tours.
The streets were tight, two lanes exactly, where trucks and taxis would honk and bully their way past one another while young men on motorcycles weaved between them, texting on their phones at breakneck speeds.
Marbling the roads were shops without windows and iron bars for doors, open pharmacies and dive joints, bodegas and restaurants tucked into cubby-holes, almost secreted away to ward off tourists.
I ate a casual dinner at Luna, a coffee shop/bar/hostel that was attached to a co-op focusing on backpacking tourists.
Mid-meal, trumpets sounded in the distance, lit candles held like bouquets, a giant crucifix floating in the center of the ambling crowd. Rosaries in hand, the procession slowly made its way through the street, blocking traffic that humbly looked on with reverence at the passing of a fellow human before tearing off into the evening.
It struck me, how collected these people were. Nothing like the funerals in America, sterile, wandering inexorably toward people just continuing to live their lives. There was the wail of the mourning, laughter of children, and a genuine transcendence that announced them before they’d physically arrived. Of course, when it had almost fully passed, I realized that I could still capture a fraction of it.
This is what I could record.
Afterward, I finished my meal and spoke with the receptionist who told me that the tours were booked for the next two weeks. Not discouraged, I kept walking, eventually finding myself in another tour venue.
Booked.
And the third, booked. Everything was booked due to Easter.
They LOVE Easter.
Disappointed, but open to change, I returned to the B&B to text my girlfriend, set up my trip to Ometepe, and get some reading in before I passed out.
Ometepe was to be my last journey, a volcanic island jutting from Lake Nicaragua, the flora and fauna were both rare and welcoming, tourism cultivating the landscape and giving the animals a hint of potential domestication. Or even better, maybe the humans had learned to live with the animals, but who am I kidding?
We wouldn’t allow that. We’re too busy throwing water bottles out bus windows.
Still, I had to go to this place. The harsh reality of almost killing that man on Big Corn Island, and what I was willing to suffer for it had hit home, replacing eagerness with exhaustion, a hope for peace into preparedness for war.
Ometepe, like Esteli, would raise my spirits, freeing me from all but the most basic of human concerns, so that I could let go of the anger I still felt. And just because I couldn’t find a reservation (given that it was Easter), didn’t mean that I wouldn’t put up a hammock and listen to monkeys serenade me to sleep.
Due time.
Having built up a momentum of fortitude to enjoy the last few days of the trip, I began undressing to go to sleep, starting with the shoes, then the soc-
One of the socks wouldn’t come off.
The one with the bug bite that had been bothering me for days.
With a wince and a yank, the sock came off, along with a scab that had been holding back puss from an infection that covered half of the inside of my foot.
I walked outside to smoke a cigarette and look at the flower that had somehow become more vibrant in the moonlight.
I stared at that flower and spoke to a god that I felt was testing me.
Then I walked inside and went to sleep.