Double-Dip Vacation Part III: Escape From Chontales

On Monday morning, Allison read to me from her guidebook about a lovely little nature reserve in Chontales, which is the Department (state) next to Boaco. It was supposed to offer nature trails, a butterfly reserve, lots of animals to see, and best of all: horseback rides. A running joke between me and Allison concerns how jealous I am of her getting to ride horses in her site whenever she wants to, whereas I have not been able to in mine. This, after I expected to have a horse of my own (and be able to name him Sancho) after finding out that Jalapa was my site in training. So I said ¨That sounds great!¨ After a little more reading (I was engrossed in Dry by Augusten Burroughs at the time), she said ¨Ooh! There´s also a Panadería Allison (Allison´s Café/bread store) in Juigalpa! And a Casa de Queso (House of Cheese)!¨ It was immediately and unanimously decided that we stop to see these landmarks on our way to the nature reserve, as we´d have to get a bus out of Juigalpa to get to it.

So bright and early that Tuesday morning, we hop on a bus and pick up Jenny, one of the English teachers Allison had worked with in another town. Jenny is super-nice, and leads us in singing ¨Baby¨ by Justin Beiber, which is blaring out of the bus speakers that morning. Allison wonders aloud what rapper disgraced himself by appearing on a song with Justin Bieber; I wonder internally about how much more vacuous pop music can possibly get, and how much longer it´ll be before the choruses are just ´ooooohs´ and ´ahhhhs´, and we don´t even get any ´Baby´s, or other real words, to sing.

We get off in Juigalpa, and find the Panadería Allison (which turns out to be spelled ´Allisson,´ but hey, close enough). We have a nice Nica breakfast of coffee and bread, buying a little bit more bread to take on our adventure into nature. We then go looking for the Casa de Queso, and find that it is in fact not a restaurant, but a fridge within a restaurant that is billed on various signs as either being open ¨7/24¨, or ¨724.¨

We surmise that this means they have cheese either 724 hours a year, or 7 days out of every 24. In either case, we get there on one of the ones when there is in fact no queso in the casa de queso. We are mocked by the menu outside the fridge, advertising all different types of exotic cheeses (Cheddar! Swiss! Mozzarella!). We snap some pictures of us with our hands up in a ¨What gives?¨ gesture outside the empty fridge, and take off.

Undeterred, we make our way toward the bus station in town to try and find a bus to take us to nature. This is where we probably first should have started to suspect Chontales of being a trap that we were walking into. The people we asked for directions knew nothing of the bus schedule, the location of a tourism office, or whether that office was open due to an extension of Revolution Day. This causes Jenny to joke ¨Nadie en Juigalpa sabe nada de Juigalpa (no one in Juigalpa knows anything about Juigalpa).¨ When we finally got to the bus station, we heard ¨fijate que no hay buses¨ (wouldn´tcha know? There are no busses). We try to get a taxi out, but find that most cabbies are trying to charge us the suck-the-white-people-dry price of 600 cords (30 bucks); we don´t want to pay much more than 200. Dejected, we walked to a park overlooking the gorgeous valleys and mountains around Juigalpa filled with nature we thought we might no longer be able to see up close. We were somewhat cheered that the park had a fountain that had a ceramic ear of corn carved into the top of it. We took pictures, and paused to weigh our options.

If only we´d decided to go to the zoo rumoured to exist near Juigalpa to see animals instead of pushing on. But it was early, and we were determined to see real nature, so push on we did. We eventually found a Taxista willing to cart us out to the reserve for 250 cords, which was more than we wanted to pay, but a not completely unreasonable price.

The Taxista takes us down a long dirt road away from Juigalpa, crossing several bridges that are inundated with excess water from the rainy season that he navigates carefully. We turn onto an even more remote dirt road when we see a sign that says ¨Reserva Ecoturìstica <- 11km.¨ We travel what certainly feels like close to 11km, crossing more bridges with water cascading over rather than under them, and passing lots of watery rice paddies but not much else, before encountering what I now remember as The Lake of Despair. The Lake of Despair is a 2-foot deep pond covering a football-field span of road between two rice paddies, which the Taxista says he can´t ford (¨Ya no hay paso¨). But, not to worry, he says; the reserve is just on the other side, past the house we can see in the distance. We make the split-decision to accept this as truth, and get out of the taxi. He drives away. We shrug, take off our shoes, and slowly make our way across the rocky-bottomed Lake of Despair. Allison and Jenny seem unperterbed by this; every step I take is painful, and freshly brings to mind images of water-borne parasites sticking out of distended-bellied African children´s skin (Guinea worm, I believe, which I know has been eradicated in all but the most horrifically poor areas in Africa, but which I can nevertheless not help but imagine slowly being extracted, over a period of days, from my calf after growing its way up there from my foot). Still, in my mind, if we get to ride horses, it will all be worth it.

This is where stuff goes all Twilight-Zone on us. We cheer that we´ve managed to make it across the The Lake of Despair, the good feeling from which lasts until we make it to the house the Taxista pointed at, the people at which inform us that the nature reserve is a two-hour walk down the road, which because of the rainy season has been rendered a muddy, impassable mess. I think the word in Spanish for muddy, ¨lodoso,¨ manages to capture a lot of the heaviness of mud, but not necessarily the muckiness that the word implies in English. We ask if the people have horses or bikes or boots or anything they could possibly lend us to make the road easier for us, but they tell us they do not. We decide to forge on anyways, hoping to meet people with a different story up the road (which happens a lot in Nicaragua).

The next house we get to is a nice-looking farmhouse. We call out ¨Buenas! (good afternoon!)¨ to the homeowners, and hear an older woman answer ¨Buenas¨ in return. We wait for her to appear in front of us, as usually happens when people shout ¨buenas¨ at people´s doors in Nicaragua, or for her to say ¨adelante,¨ which would be our cue to step forward. Instead, we each exchange buenases 3 more times before it becomes clear to us that this woman is not moving, and we should proceed to her. She is indeed older, with greying hair and milky eyes, and is rocking back and forth ominously by herself on the porch of the farmhouse. We ask about the nature reserve, and she tells us it´s two and a half hours by foot. We ask if they could lend us any transportation (seeing that they have horses in their yard), and like the other family, she says ´no´ in a way that conveys to us that she thinks this is a rather unreasonable request. Her farmhand who comes up to us from the field is slightly nicer, and tells us at least that the patrón is coming in that day from Juigalpa, and would be willing to give us a ride back to town... in four hours.

We push on further yet, passing shoeless children who stop running after each other to stare at us as though we are aliens and more families who have horses and bikes in plain sight but claim not to when we ask if they can help us get to the nature reserve. We push on until the ´road´ ahead of us becomes little more than a giant mudpuddle filled with animal excrement bordered on both sides by an electric fence, that Jenny proves is on by leaning her hand on it and shocking herself. We are forced to turn back, confused and dispirited by the conflicting stories and general lack of goodwill felt from everybody we´ve come across so far in Chontales, which is a marked difference from everywhere else we´ve traveled so far in Nicaragua, where goodwill tends to be overflowing. Allison and Jenny confirm that this is especially the case in Boaco, where everyone and their neighbor would be willing to lend a horse to you for a few hours if you were just going up the road and coming back.

And so we walk. We re-cross The Lake of Despair, and I am too frustrated to deal with taking off my shoes and stepping on the uncomfortable gravel on the bottom. So I take off my socks, but leave my shoes on, and cross pain-free, which makes me feel that at least I can triumph over the stupid rocks on the bottom of the lake. Later the wetness of my shoes and lack of socks contributes to the enormous blisters that tear across my feet on the way back, which force me to wear sandals for the next two days, lest they cause me constant pain.

We keep our spirits up as we walk through the endless rice paddies punctuated by houses full of people sitting still, looking as though they have never moved from the spots they are currently at. We sing that Justin Bieber song, and Waka Waka, and Waving Flag. Allison talks about how she wants to get an English Karaoke competition to happen in her school, and goes through the details of it with Jenny. But mostly we walk. When we come to a new house, we invariably ask the people if they can help us, and they invariably tell us no. At one point, we come to a house with three bikes sitting outside of it. The people there swear that the bikes are borrowed, and thus they can neither lend them to us, nor chinear us (ride them with us over the handlebars/in their laps, a common practice in Nicaragua that sometimes results in entire families being transported on one bicycle) to the main road. Allison and Jenny, exasperated, ask if at least the family can lend them their latrine for them to relieve themselves in, which the family grudgingly concedes to them. I ask if I may sit on one of the chairs scattered around the dirt that is their porch, and they allow me to do so. I try to talk to the six children that had been just sitting around, but can get none of them to even tell me their names, or ages, or what they grow on their farm, or what they like to do. By the time the ladies are done in the latrine, all of the shoeless children have run away from me, behind the pink flower-printed sheet separating the outside of the house from the inside of their house, to their parents.

We talked a bit as we continued walking about how the people must not talk to many other people, being all the way out here. We wondered what they did all day, and imagined that for most of them it wasn´t much more than work... and sit, and eat when there´s food. They seemed to have little use for language. It was depressing, and more than a little creepy, that that seemed to be all they had to look forward to in their lives. Day after day of sitting, punctuated by work, and occasionally eating. Never leaving. It was around this point that Allison and I began to refer to Chontales as something we needed desperately to escape from. As we continued to trudge, we split the last of the bread from panadería Allisson, the peanut butter sandwiches we´d packed, and the last of the peanut butter and crackers I´d brought with me.

We walked for almost two hours before we made it to the oasis of the rest-stop with the sign that said Reserva Ecoturìstica <-11km. in front of it. Overjoyed, we sat, and greedily sucked down orange juice, pop, and the lone lata de Toña they had in stock. We passed the time teaching Jenny how to play Uno and Stop until an empty cow-truck finally stopped to pick up some scrap metal from the rest-stop, and allowed us to climb onto the back with some other people hitching a ride into Juigalpa.

Being in the back of the truck, bouncing along as it sped along the dirt road, I felt like I was on top of the world. I stuck my head out the top of the wooden slats and watched the pretty countryside roll by, and ducked just in time to avoid oncoming tree branches (usually). Allison inexplicably got Blink 182´s All the Small Things in her head (after thinking ´it really is the little things, like getting to ride on the back of a truck through a beautiful countryside, that can make your day´), which banished Justin Bieber from mine for the day. We rolled right through Juigalpa, and into a rainstorm, at which point in a stunning act of generosity, the people in the front of the cab passed us a sheet of black plastic for us and the other hitchhikers to stand under. We didn´t get wet, and the storm ended just as we were getting to Jenny´s town in Boaco, where the truck stopped to let us out.

Allison and I caught the last bus of the day back to her town, and got to rehash the whole crazy day with Denis, her counterpart, and his family over Toña and Tostones con Queso (fried plantains with fried cheese) at the big restaurant in her town, before descending the mountain to her house, and finally sliding wearily into bed, happy to have escaped Chontales, and vowing to never go back.



Postscript: Several weeks later, while watching a muted old western on a bar television, I realized that a significant amount of the drama inherent to the Western genre comes from how far away people `on the frontier` are from civilization. This is something I didn`t understand how to feel previously, because I` ve almost never been separated from civilization against my will, nor been very far away from it. It made me retroactively freaked out by all the movies I`d seen that take place before 1900 or so.