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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I remember my first ride on a chicken bus through Nicaragua because of something I saw.

I was on my way to Granada, having boarded a bus from Masaya in the thick dust that blew from the dirt road, encrusting the sidewalks and the streets. I liked to have my hair wrapped up in a bandanna when when it got too dusty; the particles lodge into your hair like glue.

While I was bumbling along on the bus, I looked out the window and saw a stuffed man dangling from a tree, hanging by his neck. He was wearing what looked like a grey suit.

Then I thought it was a scarecrow, and didn’t think much else of it. But recently I picked up Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, a slim volume of reportage he wrote while he visited Nicaragua in the mid-1980’s when the current President Daniel Ortega had first come into power.

In his novel, he’d described stuffed men exactly like the one I saw hung by the neck from trees, and he’d explained that they were the campesinos’ way of decrying Ronald Reagan, who had led the effort back in his presidency to crush ‘the communists’ of Nicaragua, defying international law.

Years later, I guess still nobody sees the need to take the Reagan doll off the tree. Or maybe somebody’s holding a very strong grudge.

So I went volcano boarding today.
It’s like toboganning, except it’s on very fine black volcanic sand.

The place to do it in Nicaragua is at the Cerro Negro (Black Mountain), about an hour-or-so drive away from the city of León. All you have to do really is book a place at Big Foot Hostel and they will transport you there and back in an open-back truck. Jailbird jumpsuits to ensure minimal injuries and masks to keep the stones out of your face and boards are also provided. It costs $19 USD per person and an additional entry fee of $3.50 USD into Cerro Negro.

The only catch is you have to carry your board up the cone of Cerro Negro, but it isn’t a difficult climb. An hour and a half perhaps, with rest stops along the way. Heck, if as unfit as I was I survived it, then anyone can.

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© Michael Hrncir

So. I don’t understand why all the guidebooks wax lyrical about Granada.

Yes, it is purported to be the oldest city on the American continent, and I guess it has got some kind of colonial charm, but the future of Nicaragua tourism it isn’t. At least, not for me, nor it seems, to the multitude of tourists passing through. I haven’t spoken to a single traveler on the road who has found Granada charming or romantic or befitting any of the purple passages dedicated to it in the guidebooks.

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If you:

• want to travel dirt cheap
• don’t mind being squashed like a sardine
• don’t mind making several connections
• don’t mind waiting for the connections, for what could potentially be hours (breakdowns aren’t rare to hear of)
• speak enough basic Spanish to take you through what could be unpredictable schedules and bus-stops not obviously signposted
• don’t mind missing out on sleep
• don’t mind taking a longer journey

… then by all means, take what tourists have dubbed ‘chicken buses’ (because according to Lonely Planet you will sometimes have to share your seat with sqawking chickens; however, I’ve yet to actually experience that to justify the nickname) all the way across borders in Latin America.

Of course, the local chicken buses don’t traverse national borders so you’d have to get off at borders, cross them, then take another bus onward.

I met a German guy recently who caught six chicken buses from Copan, Honduras to San Salvador, El Salvador for all of $5 USD; so you know, if you have the nerve and the patience for it, it’s entirely possible.

I’d recommend traveling light though. If you have a fat backpack with you it might be difficult to squeeze into the bus if it’s full. You can leave it on the roof of the bus of course, but I prefer to have my things with me at all times. I’ve been on buses where luggages have fallen off making a noise like a gun shot.

On the other hand, if you are adamantly opposed to or are unable to afford any of the cheap thrills mentioned above, you can opt to travel with Ticabus or King Quality, the latter with in-bus café serving food and drinks for a couple more extra bucks, so I hear.

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