© Emily Ding - Stansted Airport, London

John Mayer - Wheel

An excerpt from Starting Points and Destinations, an honours research paper by Marlaina Read:

The airport is a place where journeys begin and end. These are the places that I start feeling like a traveller. In the airport I feel a sense of dislocation, it comes, I think, from knowing that there are hundreds of airports just like this one all around the world. I cannot be intimate with a location that is constantly repeated because it does not exist as an individual place. The structure of the airport does not require individuality in order to function. Its production of repetition and homogeneity is the basis for its efficiency worldwide because it creates an order through which people’s movements can be controlled smoothly. Any intimacy I could want to feel in this space would, therefore, be swallowed in the airport’s overwhelming sameness. This is a space that serves to move people on their way, it does not exist of and for itself, but instead only as a means of delivering people to their destination. The airport is a place of transition; it does not need to describe history or culture because no one is coming to the airport to be at the airport. They come to the airport in order to leave. The airport is what Marc Auge calls a non-place.

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The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute… being allowed to be a coward, and not be executed for it, is his torture.

— War photographer Robert Capa,
killed by a landmine in French Indo-China, 1954

Click here for the book’s official website

I don’t have any aspirations of being a war reporter per se, but since it’s an offshoot - or perhaps the seed - of global journalism (which I’m interested in), I guess that’s why I’ve always tried to follow the whereabouts and stories of a number of conflict journalists. And with all of them, what amazes me is how they seem not to comprehend the reality of their own mortality - or maybe it’s exactly the opposite, maybe it’s because they do that they take chances with their lives. So when I came across Chris Ayres‘ memoir, so intriguingly titled, I had to pick it up. It was a great read, but I must say, however, that it wasn’t what the book cover set it up to be. I was only anticipating a laugh-out-loud, omg-that’s-so-stupid-this-guy-is-a-joke kind of read. But it wasn’t. For all his professions of being a coward, Chris Ayres really isn’t one at all.

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“You can be just as faithful to a place or thing as you can to a person. A place can really make your heart skip a beat, especially if you have to take a plane to get there.”

– Andy Warhol,
from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

© 2007 Emily Ding - Bumbling along the dirt tracks of Masaya, Nicaragua

Metric - Love Is A Place

“If every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

[…] And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”

– travel writer Pico Ayer,
from ‘Why We Travel’

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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