Aimee and I have been in Nicaragua for almost a week now and I'm already in love with the country: three weeks is not nearly enough. After flying close to an awesome orange lightning storm over Central America, we started our time in Nicaragua with a pretty sketchy night. Our plane arrived late, so we didn't arrive in Managua (the capital and only seriously peligroso place in Nica) until around 9:00 PM. We splurged on a private taxi from the airport to the budget hotel area of the city since it was night, and we were zoomed to the neighborhood of Barrio Martha Quezada. The first 6 hotels in my Lonely Planet guide were completely full, as were all the other small hotels in the area, because Managua was having a holiday that week. Luckily, a few young teenage boys helped us finally find one "hotel" with a room available. Ai! The room was terrible - the sheets hadn't been changed, the mattress was made of a fibrous material, and the bathroom, well, just picture the worst - but it was vacant and secure and that's what we needed (although no windows, and it was caliente in there!.) We pulled out our sleeping bag liners to lay over the bed and tried our best not to catch bed bugs while sleeping there. We laughed ourselves to sleep over the ridiculous situation we were in during the first night. First thing in the morning, we caught a bus out of the city to the beach town of San Juan del Sur.
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| From Nicaragua Sisters Trip August 2008 |
The bus in itself was an adventure. The public buses here are old U.S. hand-me-down Bluebird school buses painted bright colors, and of course, stuffed to the gills with passengers. Cute. The Cobrador (money collector/bus promoter guy) was a sleazy older man and kept leaning over our seat talking about how much we looked alike, and what hermanas bonitas we were, etc. etc. looking at us with his creepy eyes. I had to ask him for my fare change six times until I received my change in four separate payments... He did give us a free tamale later, so I guess he wasn't all bad.
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| From Nicaragua Sisters Trip August 2008 |
San Juan del Sur is a very beautiful town nestled in a bay fringed by golden sand on the south Pacific coast of Nicaragua (near the Costa Rican border). Although a bit touristy, the vibe in town is great - a surf and beach culture. Aimee was interested in getting SCUBA certified, so we looked into that for her at the local "SCUBA and Surf Shack" owned by a tan yoga-master surfer dude from Santa Monica, CA. After much deliberation Aimee decided she just wanted to relax at the beach the next day, so I booked a couple morning dives for myself. We made our way to the most affordable (and turned out to be the best) restaurant on the beach, 'Coquito', and grabbed ourselves a couple cervezas of 'Toña' and partook in a delicious dinner of arroz con camarones y coco. Muy delicisoso! The next morning, I was greeted at the SCUBA shack by Christian, an energetic divemaster from Chile, and Geronimo, a curly-haired Nicaraguan divemaster. I met the other divers heading out and buddied up with an Australian guy named Stuart whose wife was out surfing while he dove. After loading into a medium-sized panga, we took off south down the coast past gorgeous volcanic cliffs to the dive site. Although the visibility wasn't the greatest (15-20 feet) the temperature was a perfect 84 degrees. Throughout the two dives, I saw a good number of fish - from schools of hundreds of silvery jacks to four different species of pufferfish. I also spotted a large octopus camouflaged under a rock, several sting rays, as well as two moray eels. During our surface interval, we shared pieces of pineapple and my new favorite fruit: pitahaya! Pitahaya looks like a bright magenta artichoke, but the flesh is like a sweet fuscia kiwi with edible black seeds. I cannot get enough of this fruit! On top of all the sweet juicy goodness, the pitahaya stains your lips and fingertips bright pink - pretty cool I think. After diving, I took Aimee directly to the local market to buy pitahayas, and we spent the evening in town with some of my new SCUBA friends, enjoying great conversation and the local rum.
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| From Nicaragua Sisters Trip August 2008 |
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