I'm a freelance journalist based in León, Nicaragua. This
website is part travel log, part photo collection and part compilation
of my work as a daily newspaper reporter and freelancer.
The
lake itself is a national park—and a volcanic crater—yet
homes and hotels that are either illegal or were grandfathered in
when the area became government property dot the shoreline. The Dutch
house is magnificent: tiled floors, gypsum walls, a guesthouse, a
large lake-facing patio, a well-manicured rainforest for a backyard.
The man who owns the the home next door is a wealthy Nicaraguan who
drops by a handful of times a year (after flying in from Miami). While
away, the house remains empty and locked, but is tended by an old
gardener, a man who whose raspy voice is even less discernible than
your average s-dropping Nicaraguan.
Adjacent to the Miami Nica is an Argentine-run hostel that, during
the weekends, hosts large groups of foreign travelers and students
who spend their nights playing drinking games and their days floating
around the lake in inflatable tubes while nursing bottles of Victoria
and Tona.
On the other side of the Dutch house is a poor, large Nica family.
They spend their days chopping wood, washing dishes and clothes in
the lake and blasting reggaeton, dancehall and romantica. They spend
their nights fighting. Not just arguing, but shrieking and crying
and smacking and punching and throwing. The patriarch of the house,
a fomer policeman, came by after one such episode the other night.
Shirtless and drunk, he told us not to call the police because he
had a gun. His wife, who was gripping his hand and gently urging him
to zip it, smiled an embarassed smile, her several gold teeth glistening
in the early-morning sun, and popped the question: Could she make
a phone call? They don't have a phone, nor do they have the fifty
cents needed to make a phone call at the bodega down the street. And
one of their children—whose screaming had begun shortly after
the first rooster crow—was very, very sick.
I looked at my cell phone: Not a single bar of reception.
The
Border Crossing between San Carlos, El Salvador and El Amatillo, Honduras,
by the numbers.
The number of computers on the Honduran side of the border
used to process those crossing with a vehicle: 1
The number of hours it took to complete that side of the border crossing:
4
The price, in US dollars: $52
The price, in US dollars, that Honduran border officials wanted to
charge us for accidently switching "make" with "model"
on our vehicle permit: $42
The number of "guides" who offered their services to help
complete this part of the border crossing: too many to count.
The number of "guides" on the Salvadoran side: 0.
On
the Road from León to Esteli.
It's not a long drive—maybe 70 miles or so. But Nicaragua's
roads are perhaps the worst I've come across outside of Baja. This
difference, I suppose, is that in Baja there's no pretense of pavement:
There's gravel, washboard and rocks the size of earthmovers. If you
don't have a seriously modified vehicle, your chances of arrival are
unlikely. But this is the cliche about Baja, right? The Baja 1000,
the endless magazine stories about dudes and their motorbikes,
the desert peninsula that swallowed a thousand gringos. Yawn.
Try
Nicaragua. It's not as bad as, say, some roads in Equatorial Africa.
Those aren't roads. They're mudslides. They're seven layers of hell
masquerading as daily routine. Watching a truck driver dig himself
out is like watching Sysiphus roll the rock up the mountain.
We
were on our way to Esteli, about an hour from the Honduran border,
because Freda was reporting a story on the American fair trade coffee
movement, and Esteli—one of the country's main agricultural
cities—is right around the corner from where it all began. At
first, the bus seemed plausible. But the van—always more comfortable
than a chicken bus—won out.
The
road was fine until about 20 miles in. First the pavement disappeared.
And like Baja, things the size of industrial machinery began to appear
in the middle of the road. Only they were craters instead of boulders.
Then the pavement reappeared for half a mile or so. Again, the potholes,
the speedbumps, the rocks, the gravel, the washboard, the ditches,
the ravines, the tractor trailers weaving between obstacles as if
the road was a drivers ed. course. Persist we did, and a quarter tank
and three-and-a-half hours later we arrived in Esteli. Our only casualty
was the rear right tire.
Why, exactly, Nicaragua's roads are in such poor condition is something
I have not yet pursued. It is curious, however: It's been 20 years
since the Contras and the Sandinistas laid down their weapons and
Nicaraguans could actually begin the business of governing. It's been
20 years since the US stopped meddling in Nicaragua's affairs and
the country held a presidential election that resembled a democracratic
process. And yet a major road that connects two major cities still
resembles a minefield.
On Mexican Hot Dogs
Occasionally, they come with the usual fare—ketchup and mustard,
maybe an onion or two if you're lucky. But by and large, they are
artery-stopping, gut-churning masterpieces, available from any street
vendor in any small, medium or large city for a buck or two: The sausage
is wrapped in bacon, which is adorned with ham stuffed with cheese,
gobs of onions, tomatoes, chilies and fistfuls of condoments: relish,
ketchup, mustard, salsa and mayonnaise.
Oh Mexican hot dog gods, would you please visit the northern North
Americans? They have let their creation drift into the doldrums...
On
the Geography of Gringos in Mexico
In San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, they are young, some
with EZLN
backpacks, many with ponytails, dreadlocks, clothing suitable for
yoga, sandals, piercings, unkempt beards and tribal tattoos.
In
Oaxaca City, they are also young, but a tad more studious, perhaps
attending a language school or working on a study-abroad program and
hanging around Zapotec farmers in the mountains outside Oaxaca City.
In
Tepotzlan, they are young and old, with feathers in their hats and
pointy shoes. They look at the mountains and the sky for clues.
In
Mexico City, they drink mescal by the bottle, kiss strangers and look
startled if you're American. Or they are urbane professionals, living
in large apartments and houses in one of the city's many, many "leafy"
neighborhoods, as the guide books put it.
On
the Pacific Coast, they smoke pot. And they surf. And they smoke some
more pot.
In
Baja, they are old. And they think they're in Florida.
On
Walking into Large Metal Objects Dangling in the Middle of the Sidewalk
in Mexico City.
Avoid them. Or suffer the consequences.
On Sex Motels in Morelia
Cinco
de Mayo festivities in Morelia's old downtown had just begun, so we
should have known better. The streets were packed with horn-blaring
Volkswagon colectivos, with horse-drawn parade floats, with black-clad
police officers occasionally directing the onslaught. We knew searching
for a hotel at night was a bad idea, but I had gotten a nasty stomach
bug, so camping on a quiet street in our van wasn't really an option.
The
holiday not only meant extra congestion, but inflated prices
and booked hotels. We knew this, too, but hit the road anyway.
I was, after all, getting dangerously close to losing two days of
chile rellenos, chicken soup and alfalfa juice.
After
numerous near accidents, a few rejections and about 45 minutes,
we discovered Hotel Faro in the far reaches of Morelia. It was past
the Wal-Mart, past the Home Depot, past the pastel stucco townhouse
developments, on the other side of a gas station and the Mexican
equivalent of 7-11.
It
was late by then, but a jolly man who seemed to be in his late 20s
greeted us at a flimsy gate and waved us through. We opted for the
12-hour deal--$20 for two people--and rumbled into a
tunnel-like parking lot lined with condo-style apartments on either
side.
We
suspected Hotel Faro was not your typical place of lodging.
This was confirmed as we made our way from that front gate into our
room: The entire complex was surrounded by a wall as tall as Andre
the
Giant, and each condo had its own electric garage. Each room
had room service that provided condoms as well as microwave pizzas
and sodas. A large television attached to the far wall was equipped
with about 10 channels, among them a hardcore porn station.
The
room itself was one of the cleanest, most modern we had experienced
in Mexico. It had a massive, king-size bed, an equally substantial
shower, adjustable track lighting, an air conditioner, etc.
For
Americans, a fancy hotel in the suburbs is not what comes to mind
when we think of cheap, hourly sex motels. We think flophouse. We
think red-light district. We think Tenderloin. At least this is what
I think of.
Perhaps discretion and comfort are a little more important in Mexico.
On
Pacific Coast stoners
They first appeared in San Blas, on the Nayarit Coast. It
was late, and several of us who were staying at Stoners Surf Camp—a
friendly, cheap campground run by the German wife of the Mexican longboard
champion—were gathered around a large plastic table chatting.
First came the smell. As always, when unexpected, it was arresting.
Then came the site of a gringo sucking on a joint a few yards away.
I wasn't too surprised, given the name of our digs. Still, I was a
little taken aback. As a foreigner in a country that is not only in
the middle of a protracted, violent campaign against the country's
drug cartels, but also happens to laws have that would make the most
fanatical American anti-drug zelots beam, my impulse is to be very,
very cautious. That is, I wouldn't dare put a joint between my lips
in Mexico.
Perhaps this is a bit paranoid. But the alternative—a heafty
bribe, a stint in jail or, God help you, a face-off with that labrynthine
organism known as the Mexican judicial system—seems far worse.When
we arrived on the Michoacan coast, two states south of Nayarit, the
one guy in San Blas smoking a joint late at night by himself seemed
quaint. This shouldn't have been surprising either. Michoacan is,
after all, the capital of pot production in Mexico.
Upon crossing the state border, the men at the Colima-Michoacan military
checkpoint flagged us down for a search and began firing off questions.
These soldiers, usually no older than your younger brother, are on
the front lines of the country's drug war, though many consider these
checkpoints as useful as the beefed up security at US airports.
"De donde vas? La Ticla?" mumbled one.
"La Tigre?" I replied, straining to decipher the last part
of his sentence.
"La
Ticla," he repeated, making no effort to annunciate.
After
a minute of back and forth, we had made no progress. So another soldier
stepped in.
"You have marijuana?" he asked, a smile slithering across
his face. He pulled up the blankets atop a thin foam mattress in the
back of our van, then the mattress, then two blow-up air pads.
I
told him we did not. He poked and prodded in our bins and crates for
another 30 seconds, then sent us on our way.
On the face of it, this was a perfectly civil exchange. But it was
also a bit startling. Not one of the soldiers at the 15 or so military
checkpoints we had crossed since Baja had asked us about pot. Nor
had they pre-empted the "where are you going" question,
which they all ask.
It was shortly after we pulled into a beach just south of the checkpoint
that the light bulb went on.
Playa La Ticla sits at the end of a long, cobblestone street at the
west end of a small nahua town—a village that appears to have
prospered from gringos like us. There are two Internet cafes, a pristine
central plaza and a small school with a giant flat screen television
in the gymnasium.
At the beach, there are a handful of palapas, a few kitchens, guys
selling hammocks and serapes. The bitter, potent smell hits you immediately:
Surfers smoking pot. Guys renting palapas smoking pot. Nahua kids
on BMX bikes asking if you want buy pot.
The local scene appeared to revolve around the gentleman we rented
a palapa from—a gregarious, affable mestizo with a wispy mustache,
a goatee and long, unkempt hair stuffed under a baseball cap. He had
won our business by doing what none of the other palapa renters had
done: he chatted us up.
His routine was the same nearly every day. He would do the day's chores
early, then lay in a hammock while puffing on a large joint and staring
into a television. He would watch surfer videos, American movies like
Anaconda and the classic: Fantasia. Kids from town would gather around
the television, passing a joint, chuckling and gawking at whatever
they happened to be watching. They looked like burnt-out skaters,
with baseball caps pulled low over their eyes, unlaced skate shoes
and baggy shorts.
When a large military truck packed with soldiers rumbled onto La Ticla's
shores one day, our host told us not to worry; it was routine along
this stretch of coast. By all measures he was correct. The soldiers
did little more than guard the truck, machine guns in hand, while
several others examined serapes and hammocks and t-shirts adorned
with the beach's name.
The gringo surfers at La Ticla—who were from Spain, the US,
Australia, Canada—were on par with the locals. When they weren't
surfing, they were passing giant spliffs.
One surfer told us he had a pound of weed stuffed in his pants when
he drove through the Michoacan-Colima border, and that the soldiers
had hassled him and his girlfriend because the console of their truck
still reeked of what it once contained.
The incident had made him a bit nervous, he said.
At dinner one night, an American surfer assuaged the Austrailian's
concerns, telling him not to worry about the army or the military
checkpoints—that the searches are simply a formality; that this
is a well known point of fact.
He illustrated with an anecdote about a man he knew who was late to
pick up a relative at the airport. The man sped through the checkpoint,
he said, barely pausing to explain the situation to the soldiers.
They let him pass without so much as raising their machine guns.
Being the paranoid square that I apparently am, I countered with a
story I had recently been told by a former border agent and Tepic
resident named Gene.
A family was approaching a checkpoint near Tepic. The father, who
was driving, had dozed off behind the wheel, and didn't notice the
soldiers waving him down. So the car kept rolling, and the soldier
opened fire. Everyone inside the car was killed.
On casually passing on blind corners and hills at very high
speeds
The accident looked like the result of one these manuevers.
Strapped to the back of a flat-bed truck, the smaller of the two vehicles
involved hardly resembled its former self. It was flat as a box spring.
Shards of its hood, of its front doors, of its roof blew in the wind
like crumpled paper as the truck barrelled past a traffic jam of onlookers.
A few hundred feet away, the other vehicle—a bus—sat nearly
unscathed. It lost only its grill and front bumper.
One of the many dangerous curves on Mexico's highways. Beyond
the sign, an alter for someone who died there.
An hour of waiting was finally over. The men who had trudged up Highway
200 to bare witness were jogging back to their vehicles—back
to pick-up trucks packed with day laborers and farm workers; back
to 18-wheelers overflowing with vegetables; back to shiny new sedans
and SUVs. The spectacle was over. Somebody was dead.
As this freight train of cars and trucks rumbled through inland
Colima on a shoulderless, two-lane highway, I thought about the accident—about
why Mexican truckers and bus drivers don't do what (most) American
truckers and bus drivers do on narrow, shoulderless roads, about how
many near collisions I had seen in the last month-and-a-half, about
how I, too, was guilty of my fair share of impetous driving.
As I pondered all this, I putted along, hardly breaking 45 miles per
hour. Everyone else was agitated; they wanted to pass the massive
truck I was tailing. They would shoot into oncoming traffic, gunning
the engine over cinder block speed bumps. They would swerve back into
the right lane, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision. They would
pass on blind hills. They would pass on blind corners. They would
pass in villages as children hightailed it across the street.
It was just another day on the Mexican roads.
On Ceviche
It's equivalent is what's missing from the American diet:
Something that's at once cheap—most ceviche tostadas go for
$1 U.S. from your typical street vendor—unprocessed, filling
and full of flavor. There's nothing worth comparing in the States.
Enjoying a ceviche tostada in Ensanda.
On the teenagers of La Paz
They're the jolliest kids I've ever seen. It's like a Mentos
commercial. They dance, they sing, they play spin the bottle—or
whatever its Mexican equivalent is. Among group after group of teenagers
who visited Playa Tecalote, a beach on La Paz's northern coast where
we camped for several days, not one seemed to have the pretensions,
pomp or insecurities of your average American adolescent. Even the
thugged-out dudes didn't act tough. They just drank Tecate, laughed
wildly and danced to banda.
On
American tourists in Puerto Vallarta
The
men swagger through town, shirtless, swilling beer; the women stumble
through quiet streets, explaining how drunk they are and wondering
where the nearest far-mac-ia is where they might purchase
some aderol. When they realize it's Sunday, and most everything is
closed on Sunday, they wander into the nearest gringo bar and ask
a guy if he might give her a ride to find that aderol. He agrees,
and off they go.
