Well, some of you may have noticed that there hasn’t been as many stories this time around. One reason for that is that there really hasn’t been all that much going on around here on account of all the rain and the crappy wind that’s made it so there hasn’t been any surf available anywhere. And I won’t lie to you, the other reason is that I’ve just been sorta lazy about it. We had one day of retarded optimism last sunday when we thought, even though the wind was crap, that there might be surf down south. Well, um, there wasn’t. Got some good paddling around in the water, though.

Around mid-day yesterday, we decided to take a trip out to an area just north of SJDS called Mahajual. It was the first time I’d been on any of the back roads during this trip, and the drive over was lovely, the brown and mostly dead-looking forests around San Juan now replaced with a lush jungle, resplendent in saturated greens with red and yellow accents sprinkled throughout. Every 50-100 yards or so, we would drive through a dense grouping of bright yellow or bright green butterflies resting on the side of the road. Just before passing them, they would scatter and flutter around in front of us, and Ian and I (standing in the back of the truck, as the 2 extra seats in the cab were taken up by the dogs) would have to duck and dodge in order to keep from getting smacked in the forehead by an errant butterfly. I managed to avoid any butterfly collisions, but they must’ve like Ian, as he was hit 2 or 3 times. Apparently it’s much more painful to get hit by a butterfly than one might imagine.

It took between 20 and 30 minutes to cover the 4 miles of rutted dirt roads until we finally arrived at Ezra’s friends Sandra and Salomon’s house, which sat on an open hillside with a view of mostly jungle but also a couple of bays within walking distance. We spent a short time looking over the recently built house, as Ezra and Ian are constantly gathering ideas for houses that they hope to start building in the next few months. When we walked back out to the truck to head down to the beach, we discovered that Ezra had, for about the 4th time since being here, managed to run over a nail that had inconveniently inserted itself into his tire. We decided to deal with this later and began the mile or so walk to the beach, through the remaining mosquito-infested jungle.

The beach is beautiful and quiet, the sort that would look right at home in your basic castaway type movie. That is, aside from the small hotel/bar tucked into the trees, a popular spot for surfers who want to spend a lot of time surfing Maderas, a busy break just 2 bays south. We immediately stashed our belongings underneath a shady spot and headed for the warm waters for some bodysurfing, which the waves weren’t great for, but that didn’t matter so much, it was still fun. After a while, we walked to the next bay south where Ezra thought the waves were a bit better for that sort of activity, which they were. Finally around 5:30 we began walking back to the truck. When we got there, Sandra brought out a compressor so that we could air up the tire enough to drive the truck down to flat ground which would facilitate the changing of the tire, as being parked in softish ground on a hillside generally makes such things rather difficult.

We finally arrived back at the house around 7pm, which I’ve now dubbed “Casa Facil”. It came out that Ezra actually doesn’t really care for either “Casa blanca” (soooo been done already) or “Casa de Gringos” (you can probably imagine why), so while they are trying to come up with a better moniker, I’m using this one, meaning, basically, “Easy House” (as in Ez’s name. E-z. Get it? I know, super dorky.) Anyway, we got back, feeling a bit fried and a bit overly salty, just in time to shower up and head down to Ricardo’s for movie night. “Hotel Rowanda” was playing, and it was pretty good, if a bit more Hollywood-ized than I’d really expected. We hung out there afterwards for another drink or so, but I was just about falling asleep in my chair, so we didn’t stay very late.

Today seems to be another perpetually-raining sort of day. Nicole and her friend Haley left early this morning for a day trip to Managua. It’s sort of the equivalent of taking a day trip to Seattle, except that Seattle is less horribly humid, smoggy and dirty. As I understand it, though, Seattle has worse traffic.

Next: Home again home again lickety-split