Quest to See the World

Before i start venting about Costa Rica I´m going to update on what i´ve done the last few days.

On Saturday, May 5th (as in Cinco de Mayo), I got a bus to Masaya and connected with another bus to the very small town of Catarina up in the hills about 20 minutes outside of Masaya. Wow, what a great little town! i absolutely loved it. I really didn´t go up in elevation that much from Masaya, but whatever the change in altitude, it makes a huge difference. It was still hot, but bearable. There was also a nice breeze. I walked all the way through town to a lookout point (I had to pay a whooping $.07 entrance fee) that overlooks Laguna de Apoyo-a serene, lush valley with a few buildings scattered around a blue lagoon. i sat there for a few minutes, then took some pics of the scenery and of myself with the scenery behind me using the timer on the camera. I started talking to a woman who works for the U.S. embassy in Managua and chatted for about a half and hour. It was really a spectacular view up there!!

After i finished talking with the woman i walked around looking at the stuff for sale, and it started…i began to shop, but i only got a few small things. I walked back down through the town toward the bus stop and looked at some more stuff, but didn´t buy anything else. When i was almost back to the bus stop i saw a sign on the outside of a house that advertised ¨helados¨ which usually refers to ice cream. i asked the lady how much and she said 1 córdoba ($.07) and i was thinking, ¨wow, that´s way too cheap???!!!¨ and asked for one. she brought out a clear plastic bag that was tied at the top, about the size of a sandwich bag, and it had a large ice cube in it surrounded by orange colored water. hmmm??? i took my ¨helado¨, gave her the córdoba and continued walking. it was very tempting with the heat and all, but i thought that whatever this was, i was sure it wasn´t made with purified water and that would cause a problem later. I continued walking and about a block and a half later i saw another sign that read ¨Hay nacatamal¨. I´ve heard about this food and wanted to try it. From the description i got, it sounded like a mexican tamale, but for some reason people only eat them on the weekends???? I was excited to try it. Before i inquired about the nacatamal i wanted to rid myself of the ¨helado¨ so i asked a man walking with a small boy if the kid wanted it and explained why i couldn´t drink it, but he said that it makes him sick. A lady came out of the house where the nacatamal sign was and i asked her if they were cooked already or just prepared for people to take home and cook themselves. she said, ¨no, no, they´re prepared, come on in.¨ I asked how much it was for one and she said 12 córdobas ($.67) and i was like, cool. I went into this lady´s house and she told me to have a seat in a rocking chair in the living room. now, keep in mind that it´s hot here so they had the front door open and the back door open to a large courtyard. there was another woman there and 3 kids: a girl around 8, another girl around the same age and a boy around 12, all sitting there staring at me. so there i was, sitting in a stranger´s living room, rocking on a rocking chair, answering questions about where i´m from and what i do and how long i´ll be in nicaragua, waiting for the mysterious nacatamal. there was an altar set up in the living room with a large picture of the virgin of guadalupe, next to that, about 4 ft. away was a small stove/oven, and on the other side of the alter was a unit of shelves with random stuff including some old u.s. looking toys on the bottom.

as i was waiting there, the one lady hands me a cd case and says ¨here´s a cd with christian music so that you can listen to music in Spanish¨ and i was like ¨oh, thank you¨, but was thinking ¨wow, just what i wanted!¨-can you hear the sarcasm? So out came the nacatamal. the boy went and got a plastic chair and put it next to the table. so there i am, eating this nacatamal at a stranger´s table, in a stranger´s house, with 2 kids staring at me- funny. It wasn´t quite like a mexican tamal. It was made with corn masa (like dough kind of , but not as dense) and had onion, rice, tomato, pork and i´m not sure what else inside. i ate most of it, but left the pork and said that i´m vegetarian so that i wouldn´t offend them. it was ok, but not as good as i had expected, but a good lunch anyway. I paid the 12 córdobas with 15 and told them to keep the change and was on my way again. (oh, one of the kids took the ¨helado¨.) I walked around the corner, bought a fruit punch gatorade and waited on the bus.

When i got back to Masaya I found the handicraft section of the market and couldn´t believe all of the beautiful stuff. one of their specialties is leather, but they also had handmade skirts, shirts, paintings, purses…oh so much stuff, and cheap! there were soooooooo many different types of shoes, and really good quality ones. i bought myself a pair of sandals and couple of souvenirs for a few people, but i couldn´t get very much because i´d have to carry it for a while still. i also got a skirt, finally, but i couldn´t find a black on and the other colors wouldn´t match anything, so i had to get a white one. i don´t think that it will last very long staying white, but i´m going to try my best. oh yeah, i also got a sun hat made of straw for when i got to the beach next week. it crunches into my pack. i´m not worried about it getting messed up because it was only $1.50, but it´s pretty darn nice. i take it out of my bag at each stop and push it back into shape. well, the afternoon was getting late and i forced myself out of the market with only a few things and headed back to granada for my last night.

This is horrible, but when i was on the bus going back to granada there were a bunch of people in the middle of the highway and a fire truck and a minibus stopped. people were all crowded around something-i thought there was a car accident, but it turned out that a pedestrian was hit by a minibus and was killed. the bus was dented in the front and the windshield was broken. it was horrible. there were a bunch of people crying on the road. i´m sure they all knew him because it was just a small community there along the road with small humble houses. i´m here on an adventure, but it brought me back to reality-we can go at any time, you just never know.

When i got back to Granada i stopped at the supermarket and got some snacks and then hand washed my laundry and hung it up to dry.

On Sunday I woke up 19 minutes later than i wanted, at 6:19am, got ready, packed my stuff up, went to the atm, paid my tab at the hostel and got on the bus headed for Rivas. I waited for about an hour for the bus to fill up and made it there. Once I arrived i took a taxi for $2 to the the small town of San Jorge where the ferry leaves from to go to ometepe island on lake nicaragua. outside of a restaurant there they had 2 monkeys chained in a tree on really short chains. i felt so bad for these things. they looked so miserable. i had to wait an hour and a half for the boat to leave. i arrived on the island around 2pm, got the chicken bus and went to Hotel Charco Verde which i read a recommendation for online. it was $10 a night for a private room with private bath and super nice. It has a lot of lush vegetation and is right on the water. there´s a place in st. croix that kind of reminds me of it named Carambola, but that place is around $150 a night. after reading about costa rica and trying to decide where to make my first stop in that country while relaxing on a hammock in front of the lake drinking a cold beer, i decided to get some info about finding monkeys the next day-there are a lot of them on the island. the kid at the front desk told me that they don´t have guides, so i walked 100m down the beach to Hotel Finca Playa Venecia which looks a lot like where i stayed, but not as nice.  I had dinner there and found out that i could get a guide for the next day for $5. After dinner I headed back to my hotel and was asking someone else who worked there about the monkeys and as he was explaining to me that in the morning they hang out in some trees behind my room, we heard one roar. i walked back and saw about 6 of them in the trees right behind my room, just as he said. there were even 2 babies! ah, they were so cute. i stayed there looking at them for about an hour, as long as i could until it was too dark to really see them. they´re not afraid of people at all. i was so happy to see them and so close-i didn´t have to hike anywhere. While i was there looking at them some other tourists arrived, a couple, and i excitedly told them to check out the monkeys. they looked, but weren´t nearly as amused by them as i was. after that i was so tired and i crashed at around 8:30pm.  

the next morning, yesterday morning, i woke up at 4:24am to sound of roaring monkeys RIGHT BEHIND MY ROOM. i can see those trees from my window, but it was still dark and i didn´t have my glasses on. it was too early and too dark, so i went back to bed. those monkeys are really small, but they make a scary, deep roaring sound. now i know why they call them howler monkeys. At 7:30 i got up and went to eat at the other hotel and then left with my guide to the base of volcan concepcion. we went to look for the white faced monkeys since i saw the howler monkeys the night before. we walked on a dirt road, then through a dirt path that looked like it was cut out of the earth because there were dirt walls on both sides for a while. we had to stand to the side on several occasions for herds of cattle and some horsed to go by. it was kind of strange because we would see random horses and cows just taking strolls on their own. after we got through that part we walked up on volcanic rocks to get closer to the volcano and then cut over into the woods and headed back down. there were a lot of howler monkeys, but we were having trouble spotting the white faced ones. finally, we found ONE-only one. it was a nice little hike though, 4 hours. that sure was a great lemonade when i got back! i´m getting used to walking around with a soaking wet shirt. it´s so dry on that side of the island that when we were walking up, the dirt was powder, a few inches deep. i was so dirty by the time we got back. what a great shower.

on the other side of the island where maderas volcano is, there are a lot more monkeys, but it was kind of a pain to get there and we could just walk to concepción from where i was staying, besides, i saw those monkeys the night before. i will go back someday though to go up on maderas. probably next summer. i still have a ton of things to see in nica. ometepe is such a peaceful place and they don´t have the problems of crime that some other places have. you can rent bikes there too, which is what i will do next time also.

Today i woke up at 6:30, packed up and got ready to go. i hopped on yet another chicken bus back to town to get the ferry. when i got back on the mainland and into the town of Rivas, the bus to the border was not at the terminal and i had to wait about 15 minutes for it to show up. holy heck was that thing crowded when it did show up! i don´t know where it stopped to fill up, but when i got on, there was about 6 inches of standing room left and they squeezed about 5 more people on. the money collector guy kept saying ¨keep moving back everyone¨, but there was really nowhere to go and no one paid attention. after about 20 minutes i lucked out and a high school girl who was sitting on the motor cover beside the driver got off and i took her place.

i heard dreadful stories about this nica/costa rica crossing, about it taking 2 or more hours and if there´s a ticabus when you get there forget it because they have priority since they´re paying more for their bus tickets. so i made it to the border and couldn´t even tell where to go and had to ask someone where to go to get to costa rica. i paid $1 to the municipality and went through a gate. then i paid $2 to the nicaraguan government to leave and then i had to walk about, oh, i don´t know, the length of 8 blocks maybe, to the costa rican immigration office. of course i had my passport checked again in between by some nicaraguan official which was a pain because i had it back in my secret stash pocket down my pants and i had my large pack on my back and my small my on my chest.

so i got to the costa rican side and what do i see…A TICABUS…NO! thankfully they were finishing up and somehow i got through pretty quickly. next was the bus. well, costa rican transit stinks from what i can tell so far. they may think they´re fancy with their big buses (haven´t seen any chicken buses), but when the bus showed up a half an hour later there were like 3x the amount of people waiting than the amount that would fit on the bus. there was somewhat of a line, but at one point people just started getting out of line and running toward the bus and then, they told them to get back in line and i was just waiting for people to start getting angry and agitated because i know that i was already agitated. remember that i had these bags on me and the sun was beating down (12:30pm) and i was bright red from the heat and sun by this point. the thing with people in and out of line went on a few times. i decided that if i didn´t get on that bus to liberia, i was just going to get the bus that was coming in a half an hour, one you buy tickets for BEFORE getting on, and go to san jose, even if it meant arriving after dark to a capital city. i was fed up and i wasn´t going to fight with these people to get on the bus. somehow, the last guy they let on the bus was the guy behind me. this bus was even more packed than the previous one and i was in the front standing like a sardine. to explain how very packed the bus was, 3 guys got off the bus because it was too ridiculously crowded for them, and they weren´t tourists either. we left. i lucked out again. a lady was getting off of the bus about 10 minutes after we left and said to me ¨muchacha, siéntate aquí¨ (girl, sit here) and the men moved to the side and let me squeeze by to get into her seat which was back a row from where i was standing. when i sat down beside another woman (almost all of the people on the bus were men) i asked if it´s always like this and she said yes. they need to get more buses to that border! the buses in other countries might be older and be school buses, but i never once saw a bus leave people behind because there wasn´t room for them. it was really a ridiculous scene. we were on our way again and we got stopped by the national police. everyone who was standing had to get off of the bus and then a cop came through and checked each person´s id which meant that i had to uncomfortably dig into my undercover sweaty pouch again for my passport. after about 15 minutes we left. about a half an hour down the road it happened again. i was so agitated and just wanted to get to somewhere.

this is what i see so far about costa rica. most of the girls wear pants instead of a skirt for the school uniform, people are very friendly, people try to speak to me in english all the time, some stores have prices in dollars and not the local currency - colones, when i went into one store there was a radio station in english on the radio. i don´t like for people to speak to me in english and i always answer in spanish and they eventually change to spanish. this didn´t happen in other countries-just spanish-except a little in antigua and major tourist zones of guate, but not even usually there. i went into a store here today and bought a sarong so that i´d have a towel, but not anything bulky, for the beach. the price was $8. i don´t pay with dollars when the currency of the country isn´t U.S. dollars. i asked how much it was in colones and she used a really high exchange rate for the conversion, not the rate i got at the bank. i expressed my displeasure with #1-the fact that we are in costa rica and the store has all the prices in u.s. dollars and #2-the fact that she was trying to rip me off with an unrealistic exchange rate. now it´s understandable if one wants to pay for something in u.s. dollars when that´s not the currency of the country for them to charge you at a high exchange rate because they have to take extra time to go to the bank and exchange the money and besides, the person isn´t shopping with the local currency, but to do it the opposite way around just ticked me off.

after i changed some traveler´s checks i committed a sin and ate at pizza hut. yes, pizza hut. it was 4pm and i hadn´t eaten all day, was hot, tired and agitated and didn´t feel like searching for a reasonably priced place. besides, pizza is my favorite. i got a personal sized thin crust vegetarian pizza minus the mushrooms, an order of garlic bread and a ginger ale. it was $6 and it was air conditioned with very friendly staff.

oh, one thing that i never mentioned, or at least i don´t think i did, was about the bathrooms in central america. they are very nice and almost all of them have toilet paper and soap-in cities, small towns and rural villages. it´s very surprising considering that puerto rico is part of the u.s. and they have some of the worst bathrooms i´ve ever seen.

i´m headed to san jose for one night tomorrow to make some arrangements and hopefully get some of my pics put on cds. i´m going to another hostel with a pool. maybe i´ll have a better opinion of costa rica after tomorrow-let´s hope.

map has been updated for your pleasure. 

 

Tags: Central America 2007, costa rica, masaya, Nicaragua, ometepe

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Central America 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.