El Paraiso, Saturday 24 June
Crossing from Honduras into Nicaragua takes thirty minutes. I am pestered by a boy who ought to be in school. In exchange for a tip, he wants to help with my documentation. I don’t need help. He does need money. I give him my documents and he pushes them through the window at which I am already standing – much to the amusement of the officials. I ask the Honduran customs officers (two women) for a goodbye kiss. They chase me from their office amidst hoots of laughter. In Nicaragua, third party vehicle insurance is obligatory. Add small fees for an import permit and a temporary permit and various stamps in my passport and the total amounts to twenty-five dollars. This is the first border at which I have been charged anything.
León and Granada compete in Hispanic colonial charm. The Spanish founded both cities in 1524. León was the nation’s capital until the mid-nineteenth century and is my present destination.
Poverty is obvious close to the border. The highway crosses a dry area of rain shadow. The nearer I get to León, the more affluent the farms and houses become in countryside of spiky hills scattered with trees and rich fields. The truck of a very fat Nicaraguan driver parks opposite a comedor on the left side of the road. The driver’s girth is recommendation enough; I pull in for breakfast. A pretty waitress in her mid-teens serves me the standard fare of eggs, beans, avocado and fried bananas, with a big tin mug of fresh orange juice. Coffee comes in a big cup. It is strong, unsweetened and delicious. The fat driver is telling stories at a nearby table. Here is a snap judgement: Nicaraguans are noisy.
The highway is in excellent condition. The sun comes out. I feel great. I speed. I overtake a couple of trucks on a hill. I am pulled over by five cops in a pickup. Three hundred cordobas is the statutory fine for crossing a solid yellow line while overtaking a crawling truck on a hill. A cop shows me the paragraph in a pamphlet on road safety. The fine must be paid at a bank. I plead my age. I plead poverty. The cops settle for one hundred paid in cash – approximately six and a half dollars.
The highway from Honduras to Managua, capital of Nicaragua, is good, as is the highway from Managua to León. I turn right at San Isidro to cut the corner. The road must have been good once. Now the tar is crumbling. Short stretches are dust and gravel. In other places I weave between elephant traps. At a guess this is a land of big ranches and poor villagers, a land where the landowner’s horses are better fed than his workers. That is how it appears. To the left rises a chain of volcanoes. One is a perfect cone. Made of rubber and miniaturised, it would serve as a golf tee.
I park in the city centre and walk five blocks west, five blocks east, five north, five south. The architecture is Spanish colonial: single-storey houses built around a central patio, high ceilings, pan-tiled roofs. Some are grand. Some have been restored. A convent has been transformed into a hotel, of which the central garden is perfectly groomed. No guests are visible. Perhaps they are young lovers indulging in bedroom frolics.
I discover a peculiar hotel. The building is early colonial and at one time must have been splendid. In its present condition I wouldn’t recommend it to a dead dog – although live dogs would enjoy the rats and overgrown patios. To be in character, the woman owner should drink gin out of a Tennessee Williams teacup with a broken handle. I stay for the opportunity to talk with two young Nicaraguan university students. One studies computer sciences. When he qualifies, only those with good eyesight will catch the flash of his departure – his degree will be his passport out of Nicaragua. The other is the youngest of six. His older siblings have marketable qualifications and have already emigrated. His mother insisted that he study law. Nicaraguan law is moderately useless inside Nicaragua. Outside Nicaragua, it is totally useless. He will have to stay home. Clever Mum.
León is a bigger version of Antigua, Guatemala, except that it is short on maintenance and there are few tourists.
No tourists equals no shops – working-class Nicaraguans don’t earn shopping money.
The government has sold Nicaraguan labour cheap to Japanese and US multinationals. The multinationals operate factories within tax-free zones. Seven such zones are the government’s pride. Multinationals repatriate all profit; Nicaragua gains nothing. I am told this by a woman who was administrative secretary to one of the leaders of the Sandinistas. She assures me that she will always be a Sandinista in her heart. She no longer votes Sandinista – the speed with which power corrupted destroyed her faith.
She tells me that workers in the tax-free zones earn a dollar a day. I must check her statistics.
Certainly León suffers from cash shortage. This is Saturday evening. The one café across from the splendid cathedral in the central square is almost empty. The prices are reasonable. Sunday morning I drink juice after attending Mass. Two couples and a single man are the other café customers. The square is superb. Were this Mexico, customers would queue for a table.
BUSH GENOSIDA is written in huge letters on a wall facing the cathedral. Bush is not guilty of genocide. Mostly what he does is make mistakes. We all make mistakes. Being president of the most powerful nation in the world, Bush’s mistakes are on a large scale. Both Bush and Blair distorted intelligence. They lied to their own nations. Colin Powell deceived the United Nations. This is proven fact.
Deception is not genocide.
Although inaccurate, at least the scrawled message is specific in whom it accuses. It doesn’t accuse US citizens or even the United States. Bush is the target.
My personal hate is Halliburton and those in the present US administration who continually award Halliburton contracts that are licences to print money. However, those employed by Halliburton must be average Americans and I have as many close American friends as I have British friends.
I have an American adopted daughter whom I adore and an American ex to whom I am close and who is always generous and supportive. I believe I connect with my daughter’s brother – certainly I had a great time in his company when I was last in Providence. These are a type of American I have heard referred to in the southern states as ‘those Jewish people’ – as is my American agent in California, a kind, gentle, cultured man of absolute integrity.
My friend in Dallas, Don, is perhaps more the image foreigners have of an American. But a day spent driving round his construction sites is both instructive and a delight. He has wisdom and a slow dry sense of humour. He knows his clients and he knows his work. He is wealthy because his workers like and respect and trust him and don’t let him down. His workers are Mexican.
I write this lest readers believe my own views mirror those I report. This is a journey of discovery. I am not in the judgement game. I have insisted to Central Americans again and again the importance of avoiding generalisations, of not labelling people.
I ate a red snapper, fresh and perfectly fried, last night at a fish restaurant to which I was recommended by a portly lady. I was one of three customers. León claims to be a city of intellectuals. It has never been wealthy. Meanwhile, I see from the newspaper that León’s rival city, Granada, is suffering from a glut of tourism. My ex-Sandinista informant of last night claims to prefer penury to being overwhelmed with foreigners.
León, Monday 26 June
I take coffee this morning with an elderly maker of grandfather clocks. He is a fan of big band music. Heavy rain fell all last night. Trapped in my ghastly hotel, I was in bed by seven and reading a history of the Catholic kings. In Guatemala or Honduras, the electricity would have failed at the first clap of thunder. I waited for my fan to stop whirring. I foresaw sweltering through the night and being devoured by mosquitoes. To the contrary, I required a vest and pyjama trousers against the chill.
Today we enjoy a fine sunny morning. The clockmaker and I sip coffee on his patio and listen to a Glen Miller recording. The electricity fails.
Later in the morning I am interviewed for Nicaraguan TV astride my bike outside the cathedral. Directly above me stands a large stone lion. The photographer gestures that I should pull in my belly. I retort that I am pulling in my belly. We finish the shoot and I pump the journalist for facts.
My female informant, the ex-secretary to the Sandinista leader, claimed that workers in the tax-free zones earn a dollar a day. In fact the average wage is 120 dollars a month, sufficiently low not to require exaggeration. All employers pay health insurance and pension contributions. Some supply free housing.
I thank the journalist for having confirmed one of my favourite adages: that the politically committed are seldom committed to accuracy.
Meanwhile I have uncovered a crime committed by the United Nations. UNESCO, a UN agency, funds restoration of World Heritage sites. León competes with Granada and with Antigua, Guatemala and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in Spanish colonial architecture. I am delighted to find UN offices in a restored colonial building.
I enter and recoil with horror. The pillars supporting the patio terrace have been sculpted with cement to resemble the trunks of palm trees. The pillars are painted shit-brown and varnished. A kidney-shaped plunge pool is painted pale shiny chemical blue. The walls of the pool rise nearly a metre above the floor of the patio, thus destroying all sense of space. The conference area to the left is separated from the patio by moulded concrete blocks patterned with holes. The blocks are painted gloss white.
I could continue.
This evening I am trapped by a storm while sipping juice and talking with a Spanish volunteer. The fashion for volunteering commenced in Nicaragua during the romantic period immediately following the fall of the Somoza dictatorship. It continues: mostly young people from Europe helping in schools.
I have a dinner date at the home of an elderly Nicaraguan teacher whom I met in the cathedral square. I dash through the rain, only to discover that the other guests have sent their apologies and the dinner is cancelled. My host is a conservative. The storm intensifies. Rain drums on the tin roof. The teacher seats me in a rocking chair. Imprisoned by the downpour and good manners, I listen to a stream of conservative platitudes.
I have suffered such evenings in the past. Most effective is to refrain from interjecting so much as a cough lest you prolong the lecture. My host takes my silence as evidence of my opposition. No food arrives, not even a nut. I have brought a bottle of rum. The rum stands unopened on a tray. I have brought fresh limes, fresh mint. The tray is within my peripheral vision. Such cruelty.
Las Penitas and on to Granada, Tuesday 27 June
I packed last night. I was eager to leave. I wash one last time in a shower ingrained with grime, leap the pools leaking from beneath the lavatory bowl, slip into sandals to keep my feet dry of the sewage seepage. Did I describe the ceiling of moulting hardboard? The bugs? The odour of wet rot? The terrifying electrical fittings?
The information I gained from the two university students was priceless. Six and a half dollars a night for the room was outrageous overcharging. I deserve a medal for staying the course.
Breakfast at Las Penitas beach will serve as my reward.
I am out of the hellhole just after six and at the beach by seven. The sky is overcast. Beach resorts need people. They require smiling faces and an amplitude of tanned naked flesh. This is midweek, out of season, and rain has been falling much of the night. The dirt road and the beach have been dyed brown by the rain. The broad, rain-weighted leaves of the sea grape trees droop with depression. I turn right and ride one street in from the beach. The uncertainties that typify a Nicaraguan existence are evident in the quantity of buildings abandoned mid-construction. A couple of fibreglass fishing boats are hauled up the creek at the far end of the beach where palm thatch palapas drip.
I meet with a young British couple loading packs onto a bus outside a backpackers’ haven. The kitchen is shut. Everything is shut. I ride in the opposite direction. I have a nose for the French. I believe that I could find a lone Frenchman in the Sahara. Patrick, owner of the Oasis, is easy quarry. He is dozing in a hammock. He prepares coffee that tastes of coffee. The clouds clear while we exchange life experiences. Patrick’s cook produces scrambled eggs and fresh orange juice. The beach dries. Sand is transformed from brown to rich gold. Trees perk up. Abandoned plastic bottles gleam.
The rooms at the Oasis are large. You can ride a wheelchair into the bathrooms. Two bungalows are for rent. Everything is clean and orderly and practical. Surf breaks a hundred metres out from the beach. I take photographs to arouse the jealousy of my sons back home in the English rain.
I slalom potholes on the road back to León. Wet vegetation is brilliant in the sunlight. A bridge divides a small lagoon. Two men fish with a net; two others swim and splash in the muddy water, maybe driving prey. The men are laughing. They wave as I pass. I stop to ask whether they are fishing for fish or prawns.
‘Prawns. Big ones,’ one of the men shouts, spreading his hands.
The men are having a ball.
So am I.
A chain of volcanoes runs the length of Nicaragua. Volcanoes explode. Earthquakes are frequent. You would expect Nicaraguans to be jumpy. They seem very much at ease. Two good roads lead from León to the capital, Managua. The northern road runs beside the smaller of the country’s two vast lakes and is less busy. Wood-fired brick kilns worked by soot-blackened men are as sixteenth-century as the early churches of León – although less beautiful.
I avoid capitals. They are noisy, polluted and often dangerous. Helpful drivers point me onto the road through to Granada. Granada has a reputation as a party town for travellers. The city is perfectly sited on the shores of the largest lake in Central America. The architecture charms aficionados of Hispanic colonial architecture and many foreigners are buying property The central square is magnificent. So is the cathedral. I book into a hotel recommended by Frenchman Patrick. I have a double room with a fan and a good-sized bathroom. The electricity is off in this segment of town. It is on in the centre. Parking in the cathedral square, I find an air-conditioned internet café. A tornado hits the square while I write. Tiles off a hotel roof lie scattered in the gutter and on the roofs of parked cars. The Honda is blown over but is unharmed.
Electricity is back on at the hotel. I shower and chat with the German owner before riding down to the lake, where the hotels are in darkness along the waterfront. Later I find a comedor near the hotel. I have a beer, steak, white rice and black beans, fried bananas, cabbage salad and banana chips. The food is good. Lights go out while I eat, bringing back memories of Cuba. Back at the hotel I chat more with the owner until the electricity returns. This is a daily occurrence – a great boost for tourism – although many of the North American residents are too old and spaced out to know whether the lights are on or off. A front-page scare story in the local English-language newspaper warns: SEX TOURISM IN GRANADA. Even a sexual thought would put these oldies in an ambulance.
I lie in bed and watch a rerun of the France–Spain match. One goal each is the score when I switch off the TV. I learn later that the match ended with two great goals by the French. That’s the way life goes.
Granada, Wednesday 28 June
Granada is a mad house. An elderly North American beckons me onto the terrace of his small house for coffee. He has forgotten to fit his false teeth and is difficult to understand. He is one of twins, so he recounts. His mother and twin brother died in child-birth through the incompetence of his grandfather, a doctor with cataracts.
The American rediscovered his mother on a coffee finca in Costa Rica six years back. She has been reborn as a coffee picker. He shows photographs and relates a series of dates that prove that one of his reincarnated mother’s children is his reincarnated twin brother. The dates and maths confuse me. The American seems confused as to which of two smouldering cigarettes he should smoke. He holds one in each hand and waves them in emphasis of the crucial proofs in his family history. One cigarette is tobacco; the other is herbal.
I escape and sit at a pavement café off the square and sip papaya juice. A threesome occupies the next table: two European women in early middle-age are dressed in expensive casuals; their companion is a handsome Nicaraguan some years younger. One of the women has bought an island. She complains at having overrun her budget in building a house on the island. She is off to London and Sydney to buy two further properties. The property market in London is already high and she has little expectation of a profit. She has high hopes of the Australian investment.
An old lady with badly bowed legs hobbles by and asks for alms. The handsome Nicaraguan man tells the old woman that they have no money. The old woman shuffles on.
I apologise for interrupting. Curiosity impels me to enquire what sort of island the woman owns: eight acres with palms and perfect beaches off Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.
Granada, Thursday 29 June
School students attend a sung High Mass today at the cathedral. The girls parade after Mass, marching back to school to the beat of drums. Stick whirlers lead the parade. Next come marching girls waving red plastic pompoms. The stick whirlers wear gold miniskirts; the pompom girls wear red. A conservative pope reigns in the Vatican. I wonder what his views are regarding miniskirts.
My own views are practical: condoms are a sound investment.
I chat at a pavement café with a Texan my age who lives in Granada. He invites me to his home. The invitation is for tea or perhaps a drink. I have been on the road two months. I need sprucing. A corner beauty parlour displays an impressive pyramid of diplomas. With luck, one of the diplomas is for returning youth to old faces.
The Texan and his British wife have resurrected a dream house near the cathedral, Spanish colonial and two patios deep. They have built a second floor above the centre section that separates the two patios. The raised floor is not visible from the street; nor does it overlook the neighbours. It is supported on earthquake-proof pillars to protect the original adobe walls of the ground floor. One side is open. The view is perfect across ancient pan-tiled roofs to the massive cloud-wrapped volcano that dominates Granada. A vast unglazed window faces the opposite way and collects the breeze in proof that a well-designed space has need for neither air-conditioning nor fans. A pool fills the rear patio; the front patio is jungle garden. The floors are baked clay. Furniture is sparse and simple. Conversation is warm, beer is cold. We dine on a delicious stir-fry. Perfection.
I discover that my host began his adult life as a respectable and successful Texan businessman. A romantic failing made him buy his siblings’ shares of the family ranch. Worse was to come. Aged fifty, he discovered hot-air ballooning. He learnt to pilot balloons, gained a licence, sold up his business and spent ten years living and flying professionally in the heart of Kenya’s Masai reserve. Recently he paddled a canoe down the San Juan River from Lake Nicaragua to the Caribbean.
His property taxes back in Texas have quadrupled. The greatest increase is in schooling for children of illegal Latino immigrants. My host’s objection is to the woeful education rather than the taxes. Educate children successfully and they will be a credit to their communities and to the USA. Educating them badly is both immoral and a sure route to future social problems.
As for politics, he has a deep contempt for the entire Bush family. He has known them all his life.
Granada, Friday 30 June
You have met the toothless American with two cigarettes and a reincarnated mother. Meet another of Granada’s happy hunters. This one I invited out for dinner. Serial killers are hot news on the media. This is a serial non-killer. She has attempted to commit suicide on three occasions and twice tried to murder her lover.
One failure in self-killing, OK. Next try, you climb a few extra floors before jumping out the window or find a taller building. As to murdering her lover, how difficult can that be? They shared a bed. Didn’t she store a baseball bat in the umbrella stand? I would understand if she were a vegetarian and shocked by blood. However, she wolfs down half a barbecued chicken while relating that she has been saved by meditation, alternative medicine and studying the works of Carlos Castenedes.
Carlos Castenedes is the macrobiotic brown-rice sixties, marijuana, peyote, mescaline, LSD and spiritual enlightenment through reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I have the Honda serviced at Honda agencies).
As to meditation, she is messing up on the dose. She is fine and calm and interesting through the chicken course. Then she insists that we walk a few blocks in search of carrot cake. The meditation medication runs low on the walk. She suffers a metamorphosis from church mouse to F this and F that to the accompaniment of a shrill giggle.
Pray God she doesn’t have a baseball bat handy.
Not that I have any intention or desire to share her bed – but we are guests at the same hotel.
Sticking with crazies, did I mention having dinner in a Granada comedor with an Australian tax lawyer, mid-forties? Free biking is his insanity, riding down mountains and over mini-precipices. My youngest son, Jed, would understand. Maybe it’s a cure for boredom. If so, it is a little extreme.
Granada and onward, Saturday 1 July
Saturday morning, I watch the England–Portugal football match at a corner bar with a big-screen TV. The bar is the local hangout for US citizens resident in Nicaragua to drink cheaply and get laid. I sit at the bar. A girl with silver nails and vaguely bleached hair sits at a table beside a North American in his fifties. She looks fifteen. The man comes to the bar. The girl is his trophy and he shows the girl’s ID to the man sitting beside me. The ID records that she is nineteen. The ID may be the girl’s and it may be authentic. He sits back down beside her. She leans a little away from him as he strokes her arm. Later he returns to the bar for a fresh beer. Midday and his eyes are already marginally out of focus. The girl looks around. Anyone can read her thoughts: ‘I’ll be in bed with that drunk soon. Yuk!’
This is one couple. There are others much the same, together with the standard solitary drunks who have failed at AA. North Americans yell for England. The few Latinos identify with Portugal; most are uncertain as to exactly where Portugal is.
A ride along the lake across rich green ranch land studded with big trees is a fine way to clear your head. The turn to San Juan is thirty kilometres short of the Costa Rica frontier on the Pan-American Highway. The approach to the beach town is through country spread with giant green molehills tufted with small trees. Hills ring a small wooden stadium. People stream in off the road. A cop tells me that the town is holding a rodeo. I pay for a shade seat on the upper terrace. A brass-and-drum band blasts a Latin American version of circus yah-yah music. Hawkers shout their wares: ice-cream, sodas, cashews, banana chips, chitterlings, barbecue meat.
A brass-band clarion heralds the launch from a chute of a bull calf with rider. The calf bucks a few times, becomes bored. Granada was an aberration. I am back where I want to be, back in Central America.
I sit in San Juan at an open-air waterfront bar with a retired dealer in truck parts from Pittsburgh. The bar is the least pretentious on the bay. The owner, a woman in her sixties, owned half the hill that forms the right hook of the bay. She and her family sold the hill for a ridiculously small sum some years back. They had no concept of its worth. Now big houses dot the hill.
The American is angered that developers took advantage of a nice woman and her family. He has invested in a couple of fishing launches that her sons run. Fishing has been poor the past weeks. The American is considering opening a furniture store in partnership with the woman. They are not in a relationship. The woman is merely someone the American likes and admires. He is bored being idle and enjoys being part of a community. He drinks Bacardi Breezers; I drink a beer; we eat prawns in chilli. Breeze blows off the sea. The moon does its thing, as do the stars. Nothing special happens – a pleasant evening and so to bed.
I have found an air-conditioned room mid-block back from the beach in an old hotel built of wood and with a tin roof. The room opens off the first-floor terrace. The bathroom works. Sheets are clean. The mattress merely sags a little. I have been away from such places a while and have forgotten coconut rats. San Juan rats are in training for the relay races at the rat Olympics. Morning training commences shortly before five. First the athlete rats sprint up and down the ceiling. Soon the rat coaches get in on the act with their shrieks and chittering.
Better get out of bed, shower and head for Costa Rica.