Quest to See the World

ok, i´m determined to get this thing updated by the time i leave this town on thursday morning.

I´m going back to Tuesday,  April 24th, a week ago. Ok. so Ingrid and I woke up at 6:24am to the sound of very loud music. I went outside to so that i could ask someone to turn it down, but i then realized that it was coming from loud speakers in town. i read in the guide book that there´s an air raid siren at 6am back from war days, but instead of being a siren, they now play loud music.  Eventually it went off and i went back to dreamy land.

Ingrid and I went to the Miraflor Nature Reserve office in the town of Esteli. We could go up just for the day, but it would be really rushed so our other options were to either stay in a cabin or stay with a family. we decided on the family. It was $11 for the lodging, dinner and breakfast in some random family´s house in the middle of nowhere in Nicaragua, cool! We got the 12pm chicken bus and rode for 1hr 40 minutes to ´La Rampla´.  It was a bumpy dirt road with a very dry landscape, almost desert-like, but with these strange trees that had stuff handing down all over them that looked like cobwebs. it was kind of freaky. I took pics that i´ll upload someday.

The guy in the office in town told us that we´d have to walk 25 minutes to the house. It turned out to be 1hr-4km, and we had our heavy packs with us. It was really hot too, but the scenery was nice. It´s a farming community where they produce organic goods and show tourists the area so that they can make money in a way other than cutting down the forest. Along the way we kept asking people where ´la casa de Luis Romero´ was, that´s all we knew. We finally made it there and they were very welcoming. I´m not really sure how it works, i guess strangers can show up at their house anytime and they just invite them in because they don´t have a phone so i know that the guy in town didn´t call to let them know we were coming. We got separate rooms and there was a latrine out back and a shower,  kind of like the one i used in palenque in mexico-4 wooden posts with plastic attached for the walls. i really like those ones because they´re outside and they always have nice tropical vegetation growing all around. the music on the bus today was a lot better than the last bus, this time it was still older music, but devo and the beatles. they  really love older music in english around here!

There was a laminated newspaper article on the wall with a picture of the family with which we were staying. A  British journalist went there in 2005 and stayed with the same family and taught in one of the local schools.  It´s pretty cool that they made it into the newspaper. even a picture of the shower made it in.

Shortly after arriving we went for a walk for a few hours and then went back to get showers before dinner. It was cool up there in the hills, i even had to use my fleece that night. The shower was a bit cold with the cool water and cool mountain air, so shaving was out of the question that day. We had a nice dinner, but not with the family,  just us, and at 8pm all of the females gathered round the tele to watch the soap opera  ´Marimar´ . No there´s not electricity up there, but they somehow had lights and  could use the tv by connecting some wires to a car battery.  As soon as the show was over, off went the t.v.

My room was a simple room with cement walls and a cement/dirt floor. As I was preparing for bed I noticed 2 rather large spiders, although not as large as ones i´d seen previously, so i sprayed them with my roach spray and ingrid smacked them with her shoe. i went out back to use the latrine and could hear something very large moving in the brush behind it and got scared. i backed away, stood silently, and listened in the dark with my headlamp lit, and heard it again. it sounded like something really huge and it was very close to the back of the latrine. i quickly went inside and told the mom and the oldest daughter what i had heard and asked if it was a person or what???  they began to laugh and said that it was a horse, thank God!!!

 the next morning the oldest daughter, dora, who is certified guide, took us around the area on horses. now i have never really ridden a horse on my own before without having someone there holding the rope leading the way. i was a bit apprehensive about it, but was  up for it. of course ingrid used to own a horse and even competed in jumping it and stuff. before we started i asked dora if the horse wouldn´t start run at all and she told me ´no´. we went to a coffee plantation and for a walk through the forest. there was this tree there that she cut a piece of the bark from and inside there was a red liquid that looked exactly like blood and it began to run out of the tree as if it were bleeding. apparently, it´s used for mosquito bites.  if you take a little bit of the red liquid and rub it into your skin it turns into a white cream that stops the bite from itching. it was amazing stuff! i didn´t have any bites, but i rubbed it on my skin.

after that we went to a lookout area and then to a waterfall. when i got off of the horse my knees hurt very badly, but after walking down to the waterfall they were fine.  up until that point i had done really well with the horse even though it was pretty slow. Ingrid and i wanted to catch the 11am bus and we had fallen behind a bit so dora said that we´d have to speed it up a little, which meant me on a galloping horse. first we started out just slightly running, like jogging and i was unsure of the thing. then the other 2 horses that the other girls were on started to GALLOP and there i was, bouncing up and down, scared as hell, but laughing because it was fun too. we made it back to house to quickly get our things and get back on the horses with our packs to go for the bus. now it was really difficult to ride a running, not galloping, but running horse with a 35 pound or more, bag on my back. we made it in time for the bus though.

We got back to town early and got the next minibus to the town of leon, which is were i still am.

The next day, which would´ve been thursday, april 26th, last thursday, i wondered around the town of leon all day and went to every single language school to find the best one. I settled on leon spanish school.  in preparation for my classes, i also went to the university bookstore and got a mini dictionary, a notebook and a small book of short stories by ruben dario, who is like a god here.  later that day i also got a hold of Sister Joan and planned on meeting her at her house at 7:30pm. At that time i went the house and had a nice little chat with her, but was disappointed to find out that i wouldn´t really be able to help out much because there weren´t any groups going to the peace house. i stayed the night and went to my first spanish class in the morning.

more to come… right now i´m going on a bike ride around the town and to the surrounding area. should be fun. for tomorrow i decided to scrap the volcano and go to the beach 30 minutes away and get surf lessons. how exciting!

Tags: Central America 2007, leon, Nicaragua

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 3:53 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.