Long travels to not very far; Last stop in Nicaragua
After a few days of relaxing on Ometepe, I decided to head on to my final destinations in Nicaragua and off to Costa Rica. There are two ways to cross the border into Costa Rica. The easy way and the hard way. I chose the hard, more scenic route, with a stop off on the way. On the day I started traveling, I picked up the bus from Merida back to Altagracia, the town where I was woken up by the marching band. Waiting for the hellish bus ride ahead, I met Wass, a Belgian woman that I had met on a bus on the way into Nicaragua. Two hours and a sore ass later, we were in Altagracia, where we hooked up a taxi to take us to the port, just as it started to pour. The whole time in Altagracia, all I wanted was not to run into Jonas. Well, we got in the taxi, and guess who was sitting in there. Yep, it was him. Damnit. We went to the port, stood in the slowest ticket line ever, and sat under some shelter waiting for the ferry to arrive, enjoying some nice warm homemade beverage that was like porridge with cinnamon. Mmm. The ferry was coming from Granada, and would take us to the town of San Carlos, the whole ride being at night, arriving in San Carlos early in the morning.
Jonas tried to talk to me some more, asking when I would be coming back to Ometepe. I don’t know…maybe never. At least not for a few years. At first he said he couldn’t wait for me that long, but then he changed his mind and thought maybe he could wait for me to come back. I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of this, telling him he didn’t have to wait for me. Well, apparently he didn’t like my laugh. “Why you laugh at me, girl?” I once again tried to tell him that he really didn’t have to wait for me to return, and he just stormed off. This happened in front of all the locals waiting for the ferry, and another woman assured me that he was a little loose in the head; I retold the story of our entire acquaintance, and we all had a good laugh…it was a little joke between us all, about my “boyfriend”.
The ferry finally arrived and we all got on, trying to find a seat. Wass and I had bought the 2nd class tickets, so we entered the 2nd class cabin and tried to find a seat. There were people sprawled on the floor, on the benches, in self-slung hammocks, and no one was willing to make room for anyone. Mass amounts of bugs were swarming around the flourescent lights, and it was hot, sweaty, and musty. Nice. 2nd class. We wandered a little bit about the boat, trying to assess the situation. Finally, we just camped out on the deck upstairs, just outside of the 1st class cabin, which really wasn’t all that fabulous. There were some booths and a TV, and it was supposedly air conditioned, but the people (mostly tourists) looked nearly as uncomfortable as those downstairs. So, yeah, we camped outside, on the ground. It had stopped raining at this point, and the weather was fresh, not too cool. This was a great setup, we agreed, as long as it didn’t start raining.
We slept for maybe an hour and it started raining. We moved toward the back, under a canopy, where I slept for another hour. At this point, the floor started getting pretty soaked, along with my backpack, and there was no more sleeping. Wass had found herself a hammock to sleep in. I stood up and stared at other people, sometimes striking up a conversation. I stood for a few hours, until it stopped raining, where I staked out a dry piece of floor, sat down, and slept with my head in my propped up knees on an off for maybe 2 hours. Wass offered me her hammock, and I slept nicely in that for another hour, when we arrived in San Carlos, at about 6 in the morning.
We got some breakfast and got the next boat down the Río San Juan to El Castillo, a town with an old Spanish fort that was used to protect their conquests from pirates coming from the Caribbean, trying to get at the important city of Granada. The boat ride was amazing…a long, narrow low-rider going down a very swelled river loaded with dozens of different types of birds, though I was beyond exhausted and did fall asleep a bit, against my will. We finally got to El Castillo at about 11 AM, a good 20 hours after I first left Mérida on Ometepe, and a total distance of maybe 100 miles.
Without a thought, I went to the most expensive hotel for the night, at a whopping $15, but of course without hot water. It was a cute little town; the locals were all super nice and talkative, telling me about the history of the town and the dangers of the river (it was over the banks in some places, and had flooded a playground I saw; the houses are all on stilts, and seemed rather precarious to me with the river current swirling just below; there are also the world’s only fresh-water sharks living in the river and in Lake Nicaragua, though there hasn’t been any record of attacks for over 40 years). I sleep amazingly well that night and spent the morning watching some huge fish jumping around in the river before taking the boat back to San Carlos for the border to Costa Rica.
Tags: Nicaragua, Tag Index
Tania
November 25th, 2005 at 10:57 am
Tania and Jonas sittin in a tree!
Tania says “get the hell away from me!”