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 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.

Recently, I traveled from Guatemala to Nicaragua by bus via El Salvador, and was surprised that the immigration officers didn’t stamp my passport. I didn’t think of it immediately at the time, but no stamps could mean a little inconvenience for me. However, right then I was more dismayed at how there would be no evidence of my footprints through Latin America in my passport. Talk about priorities.

Anyway, the problem: I’d been in Guatemala for a month and was planning to go back for another month after visiting Nicaragua, and as far as I knew from the guidebooks, I could only be in the country for a month without a visa. So if I had no stamps in my passport to prove that I’d gone out of Guatemala… you see what I mean?

So today I went to the Nicaraguan Ministry of Foreign Relations in Managua, armed only with my amateur Spanish (I couldn’t find an English speaker but as it was I got by perfectly alright), and I was told that with a Malaysian passport I could move freely around Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua freely for 90 days without a visa (a month’s extension costs 210 Cordobas, about $USD 12). Otherwise I would have to cross over to Mexico or Costa Rica and turn around again before the 90 day-period expired.

Yes, the latest news is that they’ve amalgated the four countries - Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. I think it’s due to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

© 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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The most conspicuous is DHL, located on 6a Avenida Sur 16 but there is another one before that on the same street called International Bounded Couriers (IBC) which is cheaper and allows you the option of not purchasing insurance (which costs about $USD 20) on your package. For a package of 5 kg to Malaysia, DHL charges $USD 280 but I asked for a discount and without much effort, got it down to $USD 210, insurance included (there is no option to exclude insurance). IBC charges $USD 170 for a package of the same weight without insurance.

I’m an enthusiastic amateur photographer and you would think that Guatemala offers a plethora of opportunities for documentary photography. But just yesterday I sent my gigantic Canon 10D SLR camera and similarly big lenses back home to Malaysia because it got too stressful worrying about being a potential target for armed robbers while I carried them conspicuously around town. I haven’t felt free to use them on the streets for the same reason so it’s actually been restricting me from taking as many photos as I would otherwise.

But the main reason isn’t my fear of being robbed. The other thing is that it affects my conscience when I take photos of the local people here. The children tend to ask you for a buck when you take a photo (anything for a buck here, seems to be the mentality) and I don’t like the idea of having to pay to take a photo, or the idea that I’m intruding. I don’t want to be taking pictures of people if people don’t welcome it. So I’ve bought myself a disposable camera instead to document my travels - it will do for now. I still have my writing.

So, unless you’re a very serious photographer, think long and hard about whether you want to bring all your photography equipment along. It’s a pain to carry and to worry about, and sure as hell it burns a hole in your pocket when you have to pay $200 to send it home!

© Emily Ding - Central Park, Antigua, where the volcanoes are omnipresent

The small colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, is the mecca of the package Spanish school, combining both study and travel and so-called immersion social activities and accommodation with a Guatemalan host family. However, having studied at Ixchel School for a week I can tell you that you won’t get much of a genuine immersion experience in Antigua - at least, not for the short term.

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