Welcome to Central America

Group Email: 07/07/07

My Dear Friends,

How time flies when you´re having fun! How time flies when you are moving too fast to notice it passing. Because I only have half a day left here in Leon (and have only just raced through two of the fifteen churches, and one of the innumerable museums) I will get right to it:

I usually write these group emails in my head. On the bus or walking down the street, or trying to sleep while the geckos chirp at each other from some dark hidden place overhead-- a phrase will pop into my head, or I´ll think Ï must remember to mention this...¨. This time though, I am coming in cold. It´s not that there´s nothing to say, oh no, I´m not just sure how to narrow it down. Which story is the most interesting or revealing of the life I have here, what details will make it real to you?

Let´s start with the heat. I thought it was hot in San Jose, admittedly it was not as hot as I had expected (especially since the sun rarely made an appearance), but even so the air felt heavy and damp, and the feel of it followed you everywhere; indoors as well as out. La Fortuna was not a bad temperature at all, though my clothes were always wet so I guess that makes it harder to judge. Monte Verde (don´t worry, I´ll get there!) was chilly by comparison (long-sleeves-at-night chilly) and also damp. That made the next transition (12 hours in transit, crossing the CR-Nica border) cruel and unusual. Since then the heat has been unreal, and increasing brutally with each place we go. It has been 3 days now since we have had rain (though the clouds roll in and out at lightening speed) and I actually miss it. It is not considered winter here because of the temperature, but because of the rain, and without it...

Monte Verde is a small town surrounded by cloud forest (imagine large wisps of cloud floating down ¨¨main street¨), about four hours from La Fortuna. We were staying at a hotel called Dan Tacos, peppered with atrocious white porcelain lamps, shaped like naked little boys. Like San Jose, (and indeed La Fortuna) the attraction here is not the town itself, but the imposing jungle and the ultra-hyped ¨zip lining¨ it contains. Zip lining, to give a brief description (I had never heard of it) is when they strap you into a harness attacked to a wire and you go zipping across the wire through the forest canopy. When we got up that morning the guide said how lucky we were to be there on a day it wasn´t raining (it rained later, but the sun was shining as we drove out). As it turned out a little rain might not have been such a bad thing, as the moisture keeps the wires slick and fast moving; without it three members of the group ended up getting stuck mid-zip and requiring one of the operators to slide out and pull them back in. I´ll tell you right now, I had no intention of doing this (I am saving my money for a caving trip in Belize) but I went along for the canopy tour, walking on long suspended bridges over the treetops, taking too many pictures as always, and trying hard to spot the birds L. insisted she could see.

Speaking of L, one of the highlights (and I don´t think she would mind me calling it that) of the time in Monte Verde was L discovering cockroaches in our room. Not that I am a big fan of cockroaches, but my hellish night in the hotel closet in Thailand did wonders for my stamina (did I ever tell that story? possibly you don´t want to know) and my strategy would have been to ignore them completely. L´s strategy was to search every inch of the room (including the ceiling and curtains) and whack anything that moved with her shoe. I do wonder what the people upstairs must have thought as she squealed and smacked and left brown smears all over the walls. We have become excellent friends she and I, so I was allowed to laugh and take pictures, while she laughed right back, called me Brat (as she usually does), and took the wads of kleenex I handed her to collect the bodies. Adventures come in all shapes and sizes.

The next day we had a long and rather disheartening journey into Nicaragua. We took the bus from Dan Tacos to the border, unloading our stuff on the dirt road by the Costa Rica office, already reeling from the heat and the crowd and the shouts of the shady looking money changers and women selling frozen brown liquid in clear plastic bags. Everything here is loud, one voice drowning out another and another overpowering it, all of them speaking words I don´t understand. Culture shock is not the result of a different place or a different language, it is the feeling you get when you look around and nothing looks familiar, sounds familiar, smells familiar; I would be the first to tell you there is something incredible about that feeling-- but not just now. Not with the sun bearing down and settling like a stone on your shoulders until your head aches and you´re sure you will lose your mind if you hear one more cry of ¨Cambio Cambio, Change Dollars!¨.

We get through the border, walk for 20 minutes through a dusty machine-gun ridden No Man´s Land (this must be the most impractical border I have ever gone through), only to find out that one of the Canadian girls (who now go by Team Canada --which apparently does not include me) realized the officer had forgotten to stamp her passport, so she and J. had to go back and get that dealt with while one of the British girls had her pictures taken with two of the guards, who obviously thought they´d died and gone to heaven. The passports were checked and rechecked, and finally we arrived at a small door which was the entry point to Nicaragua (literally, pay your $8 and walk through the door into a new country). Beyond that there was more chaos, as we maneuvered our way --after prying both arms away from two taxi drivers intent on taking me somewhere or other-- between buses and bicycles and the odd horse and cart. I´m not sure if it was the dust or the heat or the fumes (or my heavy backpack) but I was having trouble breathing, and so kept getting shoved farther away from the group and the bus we were walking towards. When I finally did get there, and felt the driver taking my bag away (tossing it up to a man on the roof), one of the teachers who was dawdling by the bus asked me if I was alright, and I found I couldn´t answer her.

My memory is a little hazy, but I remember many hands being offered, pulling me up off the road and into the shade by one of the coca-cola stalls. J. was summoned off the bus, and all of the vendors were asking him what was wrong with me while he made some gesture which I interpreted as ¨bad lungs¨ and one the men said Öh asthma!¨, grinned at me and thumped his chest enthusiastically. This cheered me up considerably and I got onto the bus, which was mercifully uncrowded and hide wide windows which blew gusts of sweet air in my face for the next 4 hours of the journey. After that there was a ferry ride and another bus, before we finally arrived (about 6 PM) on a flower-strewn hotel on the island of Ometepe. ¨Welcome to Central America,¨ J. says, ¨Costa Rica doesn´t count.¨ And I cannot help but agree with him.

This is growing far too long, (as a side note someone is setting off fireworks in the street outside the internet cafe) and I still have three places to describe before I am caught up, but I had better close this off now. I have something like 30 hours in transit ahead, beginning at 5:30 AM tonight/tomorrow, and no internet in the next place I am going. Still, I will write and close the gap as soon as I can; in the meantime do check out my blog for additional writing (and photos!). The next time I write I will be in Honduras. Hope you are all well, and keeping cool!

Love lots,

N.

P.S. I am feeling much better now: in excellent spirits, and finally growing accustomed to the heat. So don´t worry! Ciao.