Planet Kapow 32 : Masaya to San Juan del Sur

TENSIONS RISE: and drop away constantly within the group; we’re only four, after all, and we’ve been traveling a long time together – seven months, now, for Adam and I, five for the girls. And while traveling alongside three of your best friends can be one of the richest and most rewarding experiences in life, it can also be a bit like trying to run down the street with a plastic bag over your head. So there are sunken veins of frustration and hostility constantly swerving, bubbling, disappearing. And, on a handful of occasions, they bleed to the surface. None of us are known for our exaggerated sense of drama – there are no all-day shouted feuds here, no punches thrown, no tedious bathroom lock-ins. Just a quick blast of words (not yelled, but flung like knives) and then we scatter to our corner of the bus, to read or listen to music or – my favoured tactic – to stare vacantly out the window with a big stupid grin on my face to try to demonstrate to the others that I’m having a much more enjoyable day than they are.

It’s in just such a silent, slightly ridiculous tableau that we travel back west through the jungles and plains of central Nicaragua, the trip back from Bluefields proving to be more than we could take. But not even such determined sulking could withstand a town like Masaya.

It’s Sunday and the plaza is full of life; there is a fundraiser for a local hospital for children with disabilities, one man tells Erin (he signals “intellectual disabilities” by sticking out his tongue, contorting his arms and grunting). A little ways south of the concrete horror show of Managua, Masaya isn’t bursting with attractions but it compensates by emanating good vibes from every orifice. Over beers at barn-style bars thrumming with conversation and laughter and romantic ranchero tunes, we’re forced to kiss and make up.

Paul Theroux, in his 1979 book The Old Patagonian Express, relates the “commonly held view” that “Nicaragua is the worst eyesore in the world: the hottest, the poorest, the most savagely governed, with a murderous landscape and medieval laws and disgusting food.” But with a month’s stay in the country we saw nothing of the sort; on the contrary, Nicaragua was the most exceptional of the central American nations. The people were wide-eyed, friendly, curious, funny; the landscape unspeakably beautiful. And the cities – Managua aside – were alive. Granada, Leon, San Juan del Sur: they breathed and pulsed and laughed and sighed. Masaya was no exception. Except, ironically, for its major attraction, its markets – a sad, uninspiring arrangement of tourist bric-a-brac, with a chorus of shopkeepers urging “¡Pasen, adelante!” as we pass their stalls attempting to look interested.

It is admittedly easier to inspire awe as a city when you have a gargantuan volcano looming on your outskirts. From a distance Volcan Masaya appeared squat and unprepossessing, but upon driving to the crater’s edge we find it to be truly enormous – a car driving on the opposite lip is a distant speck – buzzards using the billowing sulfurous gases for updrafts. We climb to the cross erected by the Spanish to rid the volcano of evil spirits caused by human sacrifices, where bumblebees whirr noisily and the volcano and its surroundings spread out in their jagged, formless glory. Signs in the parking lot advise visitors to park their car facing the exit in case of eruption and, if the volcano expels rocks, to hide under your car. A faint rumble from the volcano’s depths sends us scrambling for cover.

We head south to Ometepe Island, two impressive volcanic cones linked by a narrow isthmus in the middle of a massive lake. Walking the black sand beaches, large blue birds with long tails and floppy combs upon their heads fly over us awkwardly and ward us off with a dozen distinct cries. An eagle circles overhead. A vulture sits menacingly on a branch. Waves of crickets pierce the air with their buzz. In one tree, twenty feet off the ground, a troop of monkeys stretch themselves lazily, their tails wrapped tightly around the branch that supports them. As the late afternoon light drapes Volcan Concepcion in a warm glow, a great deluge of bugs descends on us and we quickly flee to bed.

Over lunch the next day we practice our Spanish. The Nicaraguan waiter overhears us and passes us a book full of Spanish phrases translated into English. We thank him and paw eagerly through the book, only to find it full of phrases like “Do you know where the Pope lives?” and “Turpentine is good for sprains”, “America has a large navy, but the British Navy is larger and more powerful”, and “My brother’s horse is prettier than mine”. Useful stuff indeed.

In the morning with the great white fans of a wind farm hazily visible across the lake, we catch a rattling bus around the island to the small village of Merida. I sit on rice sacks at the back. Adam sits next to a clearly drunken man with messed hair and glazed eyes framing a chubby face.
“Americano?” he asks Adam.
“No, we’re Australian.”
“Australia! Another world,” he says dreamily. “Where are you going? Santo Domingo?”
“No, we’re going to Merida.”
“Oh. And you’re American?”
“No,” says Adam patiently, “As I said before, we’re Australian.”
“Ah, Australia. A different world.”
The man is silent for a moment.
“Are you on your way to Santo Domingo?”
This continues for half an hour – same questions, same answers. All the while the man has his arm around Adam’s shoulders and occasionally strokes his cheek tenderly, leans his head on his shoulder, and drinks greedily from Adam’s water bottle. He offers it back – “Ah, no, you keep it,” says Adam. The man guzzles more than a litre in under a minute. Then he slyly eyes about for a place to spew it back up, but his mouth has barely opened when the conductor grabs him by the shirtneck and ejects him from the bus, his half-full plastic bottle of moonshine still sitting by the window.

Jumping off the pier at Merida into a fiery orange sunset we fall quickly in with some new companions – Max and Bec, a bronzed, constantly grinning couple from Bondi on an incredibly thorough round-the-world trip, and Rob, a disheveled and charming Brit who, despite being one of the most clearly intelligent people we’ve spoken to on the trip, seems to have very little idea of how he has come to be in Central America or what he’s planning to do here. We spend the next week with the three of them, chatting and drinking and fooling about; they add a much-appreciated burst of life into our journey.

Together with a few other backpackers we hit El Ojo de Agua, a beautiful waterhole set amidst banana plantations, where we swim and drink sickly-sweet rum from plastic cups and stage elaborate Busby Berkeley choreography for the camera. As afternoon wears on and the late light makes Volcan Concepción fiery and dramatic behind us, we load into the tray of a fruit truck for the ride on to Santo Domingo, where we buy a round of superfluous beers. A three-year old in a red singlet approaches us, hissing “A photo, a photo!” and grabbing for Danielle’s camera. We ask him his name, his age.
“A photo, a photo!” he hisses back.
We hand him the camera and show him the button; he squeezes off twenty-odd photos of us. We try to show him how to look at his work, but he’s not interested; he only wants to marvel at the light of the flash.

It’s a sleepless night, hot and buggy. My throat screams out for water but there’s none available. Adam has fallen asleep in the room next door but left some French music playing; three times there are blackouts and as the sad whirr of the fan dies, the haunting strains float through the paper-thin walls. In the bed across the room Erin tosses and mumbles in her sleep.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m purr-fect,” she says, still fast asleep, “like a cat.”
At 2am I give up on sleep and start playing solitaire; it’s only at 5am that I fall into some Lewis Carroll fever dreams. I wake late, almost missing the bus, and shower quickly in the grim prison bathroom of our hospedaje.

A brutal road in a jolting bus stuffed with sacks of rice and bananas; a ferry that makes a lot of noise but goes nowhere fast; a taxi driven by a man so eager to impress us that he plays “Ghostbusters” and “Down Under” on repeat. And then we are in San Juan del Sur.

San Juan is the last stop for us in Nicaragua, and a sign of what’s to come in Costa Rica – American surfers, American accents, American brands, American food. We go for a drink with Max and Bec at a terrace bar overlooking the wide bay pocked with yachts and overlooked itself by a Christ statue on a hill. Rob stumbles upon us and we all eat fish and chips and hamburgers.
“Wow, the waiter just spoke Spanish to us,” I say, “How exotic.”
During the night we stand ankle deep in the littered sand, where a concert is in progress, five singers in purple churning out the big radio hits. Sleazily grinning Nicaraguan boys with turned baseball caps try to engage some Californian girls in a grind, with no success. An extremely short American man is making out furiously with a large, ogrish Danish woman on the sand, standing in front of us. She looks as though she is trying to eat his face.

San Juan could be a charming place, but usually not after dark.

After months of procrastination, Adam and I make arrangements to do surf lessons the following day. Alfredo, our instructor, is Brazilian but speaks with a thick French-sounding accent. He’s older, late forties perhaps, with a deeply wrinkled face, scraggly blonde hair and a damaged smile. He talks enthusiastically but only semi-coherently, repeating pieces of information three or four times.

“I know you probably teenk that soft-top boards are sheet,” he says defensively, but we don’t even know what soft-top boards are, wouldn’t have a clue, “but these, these are not real soft-tops. They are better! Look, here, thees ees, I swear to God, thees ees my own board, that I use. See? The same.”
He rants on, shows us photos of himself and tells us how good he looks. We are excited.

In the morning we gather supplies from the markets – tomatoes, avocados, tortillas – and jump in the back of the truck to Playa Hermosa, bumping along through the dry buzzing wilderness, clumps of howler monkeys collected on trees in great black masses.

The beach is long and empty with the hammocks and showers of the surf camp scattered loosely in the middle. Alfredo gathers us onto the beach – besides Adam and myself there are a handful of blonde, tanned girls with bodies that seem made of pure, undiluted sunlight, and a pasty, chubby thirteen-year old boy from Canada. We are in a group with the Canadian.

Alfredo pelts us with useless facts as we melt in the brutal sun – “Dees ees eemportant – to go from being a beeginner to an intermeediate surfer they did a study and eet takes an average three to five years eef you spend eleven days surfing per year” – again, he repeats information over and over, begging for time between sentences – “Just geeve me ten more meenutes to say…” – then we are practicing in the sand and his hands are all over the girls.
“Hold your stomach in – like thees.”
“Steeck out your bum until it touches my palm.”
“I should be able to feel your pelvic bone there.”

We hit the water, guiding our huge boards over the roiling whitewater. When we are about waist-deep, Alfredo goes down the line, helping each person onto their first wave – I manage to stand for a brief half-second before falling onto my face; Adam gets into a crouch and rolls off. But after a couple of attempts we both start to find our feet, riding the whitewash in. It’s tiring but thrilling, and the rare occasions of getting it right more than compensate for the periods of frustration between them. Out along the water everyone is standing, falling, paddling. Alfredo is barking orders, making ridiculous hand gestures that are completely ambiguous in meaning. After a couple of hours we decide to go in for lunch, but on my last wave I slip from my board and land on my chest, cracking a rib.

For the rest of the day it hurts me to lie on the board, but we head back out anyway. Adam is now catching waves with regularity, but I, tired out and hampered by the rib, only manage one really convincing ride. Max glides past occasionally, the only experienced surfer in the group, and Rob floats past once or twice. Afternoon light falls; mosquitos start to bite as we hit the sand. Hermit crabs rush the beach in great waves, taking minor casualties from the girls picking them up to exclaim “Adorable!”. The truck turns up late, the rude driver roughly loads our boards in the encroaching darkness, and we are away.

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This week we start out with Armando Hernandez’s “La Zenaida”, followed by an unknown Nicaraguan cumbia – if anyone recognizes the track, please send us the details! We finish the track with the pummelling “King of the Beach” by Wavves, from his excellent album of the same name.

We’d also like to take the opportunity to congratulate Max and Bec on their recent engagement! Wherever you guys are now, we wish you all the best.

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