Upon arriving in Granada, most people will head straight for The Bearded Monkey to find a bed. I’m sure it’s a fantastic hostel — at least, it is surely the most popular, something along the tradition of Big Foot in León or The Black Cat in Guatemala. But if you’re looking for something cheaper and more offbeat, which isn’t even listed in the guidebooks yet, there’s Hostal Nicarao, very near el Parque Central.

It’s on the same street as Hostal San Angel, which is listed in most guidebooks, and which is also slightly more expensive than Hostal Nicarao, though still cheap, all things considered. In all honesty, I probably would have checked into San Angel if I’d found it first, but Nicarao was a cheap and cheerful alternative nonetheless. There is a big open courtyard right smack in the middle which keeps the place mostly bright and sunny, something which is a consideration for me since in a bid to save electricity, most places in Nicaragua don’t turn on the light in the day. So if there’s no natural light coming through it can be very dim. In fact, most restaurants and businesses often look like they are closed in the day, because it’s so dark you can’t see the inside from the sidewalks.

It’s easy to get to Hostal Nicarao. From the southeast corner of the Parque Central, walk south to the end of the first block. On the way you’ll see San Angel, and then a few doors down, Nicarao, which sits on the corner. It’s got a very colourful wall to advertise its presence. You can’t possibly miss it. And you can probably walk right in and find a bed to settle in for a few nights. There’s no website or online booking system for the hostal, and anyway if it’s full there are an abundance of other options.

It’s manned by some local guys who I suspect have a penchant for porn (but what guy doesn’t, I suppose). They close the doors after 1 a.m. but that doesn’t mean there’s a curfew. All you have to do is knock and they’ll open it for you. Knock loudly though, and be patient and wait a little bit. They have to switch the channel to football before greeting you, you see. It’s only appropriate

There are dorms and private rooms, beds are clean and bug-free, fans to save you from the heat, a communal kitchen, and I think, laundry services. They also have a resident computer, but they charge you for using the internet. I don’t remember them having hot showers, however, so if that’s a problem for you, I guess you’ll have to go somewhere else. But the weather in Nicaragua, especially in Granada, is sweltering. I had no need or desire for hot showers except when I was in the highlands like Estelí or Jinotega. You’ll probably love cold showers in Granada. Taking one in the middle of the afternoon is absolute bliss!

I was searching for photos of Nicaragua on Flickr in hopes that they would jolt the deepest recesses of my memory of that indefinable country (I have no photographs of it because I didn’t have a camera with me while I was traveling there), and I stumbled upon this collection of the revolution (and also some photos of the proceeding years leading up to the Contra War) by Marcelo Montecino. This first one in particular, which immortalizes a soldier who had just returned from the front, is my favourite because of the juxtaposition of violence and innocence: the baby, and then the rifle; and the smile on the father’s face. The rest of the selected photos will show you that the revolution wasn’t just the story of men, but of their women and children, too.

However, history has clearly proven that revolutions tend to go wrong along the way, and the Nicaraguan revolution was hardly an exception, as was Cuba’s, no matter how many people go touting Che Guevara with his beret on their chests. As a reminder, I’ve got a t-shirt of the Che wearing Bart Simpson on his chest, a cartoon strip by Matthew Diffee for The New Yorker (you can buy your own here). I don’t have to tell you, I love the irony.

When all is said and done, there is a certain dangerous romance in the idea of revolution, the possibilities of change it induces you to want to believe in, which is obviously why so many people sign up to it in the first place. And well, I guess that’s what these following photos illustrate: the romance, the idealism and the camaraderie… but also the more inhumane parts of it, like putting rifles into the hands of children.

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When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent (Central America) upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common – not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel.

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Revolution and romance have always been inextricably linked, and there is no better example of this than Nicaragua, the underpopulated isthmus (“it was the emptiest of the countries of Central America”, and still is) that forms part of the slender waist of America. The mere whispers of its syllables is poetry, and despite — or because of — its poverty one needs only to delve into its recent history to find romance and ideals and hope, which luckily, isn’t very difficult. Her history echoes at you wherever within her borders you travel: through the bullet-holed walls of the fading buildings, the colourful revolutionary murals, the young men you meet who were even younger when they fought in the revolution… As the Indian-British author Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Versus, Midnight’s Children) wrote in The Jaguar Smile, a firsthand account of his three-week visit to Nicaragua in the July of 1986 for the seventh anniversary of the triumph of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN):

In Nicaragua ‘at seven years’ the walls still spoke to the dead: Carlos¹, we’re getting there, the graffiti said; or, Julio², we have not forgotten.

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1. Carlos Fonseca was the founder of the FSLN in 1956, and who died in November 1976, two and a half years before the Sandinista victory. [↩]
2. In his memoir, Salman Rushdie also relates the story of Julio Buitrago, who had been surrounded in a ’safe house’ in Managua along with some others. “Finally he was he only one left alive, resisting the might of Somoza’s tanks and heavy artillery hour after hour, while the whole country watched him on live television, because Somoza thought he’d captured a whole FSLN cell and wanted their destruction to be a lesson to the people: a terrible miscalculation, because when the people saw Buitrago come out shooting and die at last, when they saw that just one man had held off a tyrant for so long, they learned the wrong lessons: that resistance was possible.” [↩]

If you want to have a package sent over to Nicaragua, you need to know a few things. As a tourist, if you’re completely clueless, you might have a hard time tracking your package. It’s a rather tedious process, and one in which your things might easily get lost amidst all the bureaucracy.

The circumstances: I was waiting for a package to arrive from the United States and tracking it online, I learnt that it left the States December 5 and arrived at the Nicaraguan customs office December 10. But by December 17 my package still had not been dispatched to my friend’s address in the capital city of Managua, which I’d designate it to be posted to.

Increasingly frustrated and anxious because I was supposed to have left Nicaragua 3 days ago, I decided to look up the customs office and request for my package in person.

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Bluefields to Managua (1 hour)
7:10 a.m., 8:40 a.m., 11:20 a.m., and 4:10 p.m.

Managua to Bluefields
6:00 a.m., 6:30 a.m., 2:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.

Bluefields to Puerta Cabezas (50 mins)
12:10 p.m. only

Puerta Cabezas to Bluefields
11:10 a.m. only

Bluefields to Corn Island (20 mins)
7:40 a.m. and 3:10 p.m.

Corn Island to Bluefields
8:10 a.m. and 3:40 p.m.

La Costeña airlines doesn’t have a website, but you can reach them through:

• email at jcaballero@lacostena.com.ni
• their head office in Managua by dialing (505) 263 1228 or 2632142/44

And here are the telephone numbers of their respective branches:

Bluefields: (505) 572 2500
Puerta Cabezas: (505) 7922282
Corn Island: (505) 575 5131/32
San Carlos: (505) 583 0271
Siuna: (505) 794 2017
Bonanza: (505) 794 0023
Rosita: (505) 794 1015

From Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey:

In Bluefields it was often difficult to remember I was still in Nicaragua. The west coast was, for the most part, racially homogenous, but here, as well as mestizos, there were Creoles, three different Amerindian tribes, and even a small community of Garifonos who shouldn’t have been there at all, according to the textbooks, but up in Belize. And that wasn’t the only difference. The majority of the inhabitants here were not Catholic, but belonged to the Moravian church. And a large proportion of them were English-speaking, to boot.

The culture of Bluefields felt distinctly West Indian, but it was more or less totally cut off from contact with the rest of the Caribbean - excepting Cuba. It wasn’t very closely in touch with the Pacific coast of Nicaragua itself, come to that. In Bluefields you couldn’t receive Nicaragua’s ‘Sandinista Television’, so you watched Costa Rican programmes instead. It could take all day to get a phone connection to Managua, and even then you might not manage it. There was no road link between the coasts. The few air flights filled up weeks in advance, and the only other route involved travelling 100 kilometres by slow ferry down the Río Escondido (the ‘Hidden River’ that used to shelter pirate ships in the Days of Yore) as far as the township of Rama, where the 400-kilometre road from Managua came to an abrupt halt. The ferries had been frequent targets for the Contra. About a month before my visit they had burned the penultimate boat. The banks of the river were thickly jungled, and the ferries were sitting ducks; but the people, having no option, continued to use the route.

What would happen when the Contra burned the last boat? The only answer I ever got to this question was a fatalistic shrug. To live in Bluefields was to accept remoteness, just as it was also to accept rain. It was one of the wettest places I had ever been in.

The second paragraph doesn’t ring quite as true today, but it’s still as wet.

© David’s Unusual Destinations - It’s always raining in Bluefields

© Czyczy - The Río Escondido, Bluefields

I thought I’d better put up this blog entry quick.

I was perusing my blog statistics and realized somebody had found their way here by googling ‘current bus managua to el rama’. No doubt she or he had been looking to make their way to Bluefields, as most people hardly spend time in El Rama itself; the town usually serves only as a connecting point to the capital of the South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS) of Nicaragua.

First, just let me say that Bluefields is a must-do-trip while you’re in Nicaragua. Too many people give it a miss, choosing to stay only on the Pacific side of the country, understandable since the Caribbean side is purportedly more remote and both coasts are separated by a huge amount of inaccessible land. But Bluefields is worth going to for a peek at how completely different it is from the Pacific side of Nicaragua; and if nothing else… the journey itself is very enjoyable, possibly my best transportation experience in Central America thus far.

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All the guidebooks seem to give you the idea that you won’t miss much if you skip out on the capital of Nicaragua entirely, but I disagree. At least, it warrants about two days of your time.

Sure, there is nothing singularly exciting about it, and it’s not exactly a ‘city’ by your first-world standards. It’s an everyday sort of place devoid of anything to romanticize… in fact, it is exceeding hot and impossible to navigate solely on foot or public bus, but it’s a place where you can spend your day roaming around shopping malls, perusing the shelves of La Colonia supermarket to decide what to cook for dinner, watch plays and listen to live music, visit art galleries and poetry readings… you can even go and have a very decent haircut for $8 at Galería Santo Domingo, have your left-too-long-unshaved legs waxed, see the doctor if you have to, extend your visa at the foreign office (direct your taxi driver to Direccion de Migración y Extranjera), buy a ‘Joy Sport’ (a bastardization of ‘Jan Sport’) backpack for 50 Cordobas (about $3!) at Mercado Ivan Montenegro which looks perfectly good and seemingly hardy (we will see about the latter), chase down your long-overdue package from overseas from post office customs (Los Correos, near El Malecon)… you get the idea. It’s a place you can comfortably run your errands, so long as you know where to look. People fly in from the Corn Islands to see the dentist, that kind of thing.

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I’ve forgotten to ask the Nicaraguans I’ve met about the weight poetry holds for them in their lives.

Apparently, in Nicaragua, everybody - the politician, the farmer, the revolutionary - “is a poet until they are proven otherwise”… so said Daniel Ortega in the mid-1980s to Salman Rushdie when the author visited his country (The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey).

But if it is true, I would have liked to get under the skin of some of the country’s poets. Yet at the same time, as one of Nicaragua’s modern poets (I can’t now remember his name) said, translation equals assassination. And I wholly agree. No matter how acclaimed a work is, I would rather not read it if I can’t read it in its original language.

However, I came across a poem by female poet and revolutionary Giocondo Belli (read an interview), a poem which seems to be the most ubiquitously translated:

Rivers run through me
mountains bear into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines,
earth for sowing love
opening like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to set it free, beautiful
full of smiles…
i want to explode with love

Discounting my (probably uneducated) disdain for translated works, this translated poem works for me. Nothing describes the landscape of Nicaragua so well, its burgeoning quality.

1. Purified water - I don’t do it anymore now but when I first entered Guatemala, I’d started following Lonely Planet’s overzealous advice and brushed my teeth with drinking water when one of my fellow homestay mates told me he was doing that. Lonely Planet also tells you to wash all your food with drinking water and that you shouldn’t eat uncooked vegetables but I’ve been doing all that in blatant defiance of their advice. It is impossible to escape the salads in Central America: one, because it’s so ubiquitous; and two, because it’s so good. I’ve been eating plenty of market/street food (actually it’s my favourite) and I’ve been okay. Maybe Bel is right, maybe Malaysians have got stronger constitutions. Our tummies have been trained well by the not-so-distinctive-as-we’d-like-to-think Malaysian feature: the pasar malam (night market).
2. Hot water - This commodity much taken for granted at home in Malaysia and in London is scarce and only available in some houses (you have to install a waterheater which obviously requires extra money) and even if it is available it is usually inadequately provided. Either the water only remains hot at low volume, or it is too hot you run the danger of scalding yourself, or too cold - there seems to be no way to have anything in between. Water pressure is also generally dismal. I always feel like I have soap suds stuck in my hair after I shower. In Guatemala when I couldn’t access hot water I didn’t shower at night because it was too cold. In Nicaragua, where I’ve been traveling for a month now, I’ve only had hot showers for a few days when I was in the highlands of Estelí and Jinotega. But in Nicaragua, the lowest country in Central America, it’s almost welcome because it’s so hot.
3. Toilets that flush - Not all toilets flush, and even if they do, they might not if you clog it with tissue paper. In Guatemala and Nicaragua you don’t flush anything down the toilet, not even toilet paper that you’d think is supposed to go down the toilet bowl. Instead, you throw everything into a wastepaper basket that is provided, whether or not your tissues are filled with urine or faeces or that monthly inconvenience women go through. Very nice.

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