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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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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It’s more exciting not to have anything planned, to have only one ticket in and one ticket out and know that in between anything is possible. That way, things never quite turn out the way you expect them to.

I now find myself in Antigua (the quaint little town in Guatemala, not the Caribbean Island by the same name, mind you) despite the fact that I never intended to spend any time here, or Guatemala, at all. I’d thought that from San Francisco I’d work my way immediately to Nicaragua, but that just didn’t happen.

People who know me can testify that I can - frustratingly - be a very last-minute person. I prefer to be described as ’spontaneous’ and I like to think that that makes me better able to deal with challenging situations under pressure, but I know my parents prefer the use of the unflattering adjective ‘haphazard’. Admittedly my last-minuteness hasn’t always proved to be a good thing, but more often than not I’ve found it to be quite useful, and it’s landed me in plenty of interesting spots I’d never have found my way to otherwise.

Basically, what happened was this:

I had a flight booked to Guatemala from San Francisco on October 16 at 8:05 p.m. and by 5:30 p.m. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to take the flight. You see, I’d fallen a little bit in love with San Francisco and wanted to stay longer, thought that perhaps later I could make my way down to Nicaragua by land via Mexico and Guatemala. But in the end, for fear of invalidating my return ticket home if I missed this segment, I decided to board my plane.

However, I had no onward ticket to Nicaragua and no accommodation booked in Guatemala. I thought that upon my arrival in Guatemala I would buy the next ticket out to Nicaragua, if there was one, or take a bus. Or maybe I would stay a night and make a little tour of Guatemala before moving on to Nicaragua, since I was already in the area. But honestly I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So I waited till I arrived to survey what my options were.

In the end, what happened came completely out of the blue: two elderly women from Hong Kong adopted me for a little while and gave me a place to stay.

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Bjork - Aeroplane

we catch aero planes and ascend the sky while never moving, we learn the brace position as clouds are sucked into engines and the lights that will light our way in the event of an emergency seem to glow with the promise of disaster. but only if you pray hard enough. I look out my window which has rounded edges, because corners catch and cause crashes, and two layers of fibre plastic glass which have tiny spider webbed splinter like cracks which seem to emerge somewhere between 15,000 and 35,000 feet. I watch with dull interest as the cracks seem to grow outwards, and I wonder if falling through clouds would hurt. as I raise my eyes over the chair that sits uncomfortably close to me and I can see rows and rows of heads shifting and turning like flotsam bobbing between waves. I feel confused, as it seems I am going nowhere, each time on a plane is either two things, going to something amazing, or leaving something amazing, and the slice through the sky is dead time in between that is filled with snack boxes and traveltainment. I am not sure when it happened, as I was watching the whole time, but the sky has become darker and the clouds thicker, they look like waves, thick soggy waves, foam, there is no sky between them, we skim along their surface. You cannot comprehend the speed of the plane, but you can feel it, in the pit of your tummy, sucking up hard into your throat as the plane lowers, dropping height even though space holds no value, and the dizzy feeling in your tummy is like the promise of an orgasm in mid air. I watch as we plough through the clouds, they seem like hair perhaps, strands coating the wings of the plane, the clouds shake their crowning glory as the plane explores their folds. out the window now I can see the twinkling lights of your city, I can see your roads and houses as formations of light, light of my life, glowing and pulsing. The blackness in between seems to go on forever, the city floats in the air much like the clouds, I am sure the solidity of life has dispersed quickly in all directions of the universe. I am the only matter. there is no time to think as a twinkle of your eye produces the city and I knock my elbow against the double plane window, I take off my seatbelt despite the lit sign, I swivel in my chair and anchor my back against the armrest, I grit my teeth and bang bang my feet against the window, cracking the plastic, splintering it, and whoosh, here it comes, the air sucks me into your urban nothingness. first my arms emerge from the hole, then my head, and I pull my body long and lean, then my legs eager and heavy and there I am crouching on the wing, the lights in your buildings thrusting to me, your outstretched arms are sky scrapers and my heart explodes. Oh and the spring in my step as I run fast along the wing of the plane, there is no movement but me and the yawning smile of your highways, arms outstretched, eyes wide I jump from the metal wing to the promise of you. down down I fall, and your lights bloom yellow, red and glorious white, the white is the most pure of all, it does not twinkle, it simply ebbs from small to huge as my body falls down to your outstretched arms, your skyscraping fingers, your soft mouth of rivers and the streets that pump your blood and I am only in darkness for a second and I am only whole for a second before the light of your city pierces me through and I sigh with the pleasure of your touch.

About the author:
Marlaina Read has a degree in Visual Arts from the Sydney College of Arts, and during her student years she also spent half of 2004 in Berlin. Photographically, she is interested in the sublime and nothingness, in cinema, in children, in everyday rituals, in places and spaces and memory. She wants to be a teacher and an artist. You can find her online at invisiblecity.org.