It seems to warn unwary passers by of a mysterious and pointy downward force known as “DEATH”. Now, as far as I’m aware, this DEATH thing can take many different forms, but apparently the most ubiquitous and sinister form in this area of London resembles a reflected “N”. I have no idea why. Of course, this leads me to imagine other similar dangers, although possibly not quite as dire, but nonetheless dangers to be on the lookout for, such as:

Corporate Dangers

Disco Dangers

And, of course, Dangers of the UNKNOWN

My favorite road sign that I came across while in Nicaragua was one that was meant to warn the driver of an upcoming speed bump. (Speed bumps are ubiquitous in Nicaragua; I’m guessing that without them, folks would be barreling down city streets as fast as possible, running down pedestrians, bicyclists and ox-carts willy-nilly, Grand Theft Auto style.) This is what the sign looked like:

This sign amuses me to no end, but I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the size ratio of the bump compared to the car, or the angle that the car is put at in order to get over said bump, or even that it has to be illustrated at all, instead of just the word “BUMP” like you’d see in the states. But mostly it makes me think of the potential versions of the sign that didn’t make the cut, or what I like to think of as “How Not to Go Over a Speed Bump”:

DO NOT attempt summersault

DO NOT attempt headstand

DO NOT use as a “Sweet Jump”

NO low-riders (thanks, Sloan!)

The idea for the trip started out simple enough. The idea was for Mom, myself and Douglas to come to Nicaragua to visit Ezra for Christmas. It was borne the last time Ez was in town, back in May. He had flown back to Portland in order to attend a friend’s wedding, and also to visit other friends whom he hadn’t seen since moving down south. Rather foolishly, he’d only planned for a week-long stay, ending up completely exhausted from social activities by the time he and I boarded the plane bound for Phoenix AZ, then San Jose, Costa Rica. He was returning home, I was accompanying him there for my own 2 week visit. I had more or less forgotten about the Christmas idea, until one or two months later when Mom and Doug called me on the phone to discuss plans and nail down the dates around Christmas-time that we would be traveling. They were very excited. Having just returned from my second trip to Nicaragua, this one much rainier, mildewy-er, muggier, buggier and all-around damper than my first trip, I was a bit less than enthusiastic about it. I’d had my fill of the tropics for awhile. However, I figured that 6 months was probably enough time to rekindle my desire for another visit.

~~~~~

The Portland weather picked a great time to go from crappy to utter shit. It was Sunday, the 18th of December, and the freezing-rain storm that was supposed to hit around 8pm decided that it was not rude enough to simply be an unwanted guest, it also had to arrive 5 hours early. We needed to be at the airport around 4:30 the next morning, and the weather had us wondering if we should be leaving much, much earlier. Like, say, 9pm the night before. Fortunately by the time 4am rolled around, the freezing rain had started to melt, and the roads weren’t too horrible. We learned later that shortly after we got in the air, everything had started to freeze again. So I guess we escaped just in time.

Mom was terribly excited to be on the plane. In fact, she was terribly excited and intrigued by almost every facet of our travel experience, mainly due to the fact that she hadn’t ever been on an international flight, and the last time she actually left the country was in 1968, when she drove to Mexico with her parents. I have to say though, I think she got over Houston pretty quickly. On our way between connecting flights, we passed the statue of George Bush Senior, the airport’s namesake. He is portrayed at a much younger and jauntier age, in an action pose that has him walking into a light breeze, presumably on his way from one very important place to another. His business jacket is gayily slung over his right shoulder, his tie dramatically flapping in the wind. His shirt sleaves are rolled up. You can tell this man is about to get right down to the important work of running whatever very important thing it is that he is running. And yet he looks like something out of a Sears ad. The sculptor had captured the over-used but still somehow effective budget clothing store model pose, perfectly. I was in awe. Of course I had to get a picture. I refrained, however, from having my mother get in on the fun by prostrating at the sculpture’s feet. It was somewhere between this shrine and Terminal E, where we were to catch our connecting flight into Liberia, that I suspected mom had seen just about as much of Houston airport as she cared to. And we still had 3 and a half hours of layover ahead of us. It was time to get some lunch. Fortunately, I knew this time to stay away from the Sky Box sports bar, where even though you can get a shot for only a dollar extra when you order a beer, it’s not worth the trauma of having your hamburger taste exactly like a hot dog.

Traveling by plane between two very different climates can be tricky. You find yourself trudging into the airport lobby from the cold icy weather, wearing your heavy parka with multiple layers underneath, thinking how lovely it will be to arrive 8 hours later to a warm, tropical climate. What you don’t necessarily think about is the fact that by the time you get there, you will have removed so many layers of clothing in your personal quest for temperature regulation, that your carry-on bag will resemble one of those enormous piles of discarded clothes you see in the dressing rooms at Meier & Frank during one of their 20-times-yearly special anniversary sales. So it was that we exited the plane in Liberia with our respective huge bundles of winter clothing in tow, waddling down the outdoor gangway into the large open-air shed that housed immigration, baggage claim and customs. Mom immediately whipped out her camera and started snapping photos while we were standing in line for immigration. This made me a bit nervous. Even though sub-5-foot-tall, 60-ish white women aren’t typically profiled for terrorism, you never know the ideas people might get, especially in our current political climate. I let her take a few pictures before sharing my concerns. She agreed and put her camera away for a few minutes. My anxiety was obviously misplaced, as we made it through immigration, recieving nothing more than a cursory glance at our forms, and proceeded to the baggage claim area, all of about 20 feet away, to collect our checked items.

We located our two suitcases fairly easily after a quick scan of the tiny baggage claim area. The empty dog crate we’d brought for Ezra, though, was conspicuously missing. After waiting around for a bit, I decided that it wasn’t about to magically appear and went over to the baggage counter to see what could be done about it. The conversation with the guy at the baggage counter went something like this:

Me: Hello! Er… hola!
Guy at baggage counter: Good evening, sir. May I help you?
Me: Oh, yes, um… it seems that some of my baggage went missing.
Guy at baggage counter: Ok, first please identify your item from this luggage sheet.
Me: Well, uh… (looking at catalog-style sheet showing various sorts of luggage) that might be kinda hard because you see, it’s not a bag—oh, wait, you do have dog crates on here. It’s this one here (pointing at photo of dog crate. Apparently this sort of thing happens all the time).
Guy: Ok, now please fill out this form with your name, phone number and address.
Me: Do you want me to put our address at the hotel tonight, or my brother’s address in Nicaragua where we’ll be staying?
Guy: So you aren’t staying in Costa Rica?
Me: No, we’re staying with my brother who lives in San Juan Del Sur, in Nicaragua. Do you want me to put his phone number and address there?
Guy: Yeah, I guess so. But I’m not sure what we can do about it. If your luggage shows up, we can bring it to the border, but we can’t bring it any further.
Me: Well, can you call my brother if it shows up?
Guy: Yes, but it would be better if he called the office from time to time to check to see if it came in.
Me: Of course it would. Well, thanks for your help.
Guy: You’re welcome. Good luck.

He was a nice guy, but ultimately not very helpful. The crate never showed up. The other amusing part of this exchange was that I had to keep running back and forth from the baggage desk inside to where Ezra and mom were waiting outside to get the address and phone number information and such. Of course, this sort of thing would never happen in the States without a full body cavity search upon every re-entrance into the facility. But that’s Liberia for you. Pretty laid back.

Finally, the three of us were all together outside the airport and ready to move on to our quarters for the evening. After a few mandatory “reunited family” style group photographs, we piled into Ezra’s truck and headed for town.

Downtown Liberia, teeming metropolis that it’s not, consists of roughly a 10 x 10 block area of small businesses—clothing shops, restaurants, bakeries and small groceries-interspersed with a few larger chains such as Gallo Mas Gallo, which translates literally into “Rooster More Rooster”, or “The Most Rooster Rooster”. I’m not sure why this is a good name for what is essentially a miniature Sears, but when you think about it, it’s not like we don’t have our share of oddly named businesses in the states. Safeway comes to mind, and to me, has always begged the question, If this is the Safeway, what exactly is the not-so-Safeway? Would the produce there be more expensive and of poorer quality? Would the floors be dangerously waxed and have no warning signs, and the meat case temperature just slightly above FDA regulations?

We drove into town and quickly found our rooms at the hotel Ez had booked for us. It was a charming little place, having the standard colonial configuration of a plain entrance into a building with no obvious signage, leading down a dim hallway and opening up into a small open-air courtyard with rooms surrounding it. I was a little concerned about mom’s room, as the quality of it was more than a few notches below what you might charitably call “rustic”, but she was just thrilled by all of it and couldn’t really be bothered to care as long as her two boys were nearby. So, after a few minutes spent getting situated, we set off again in search of dinner-type food and drinks.

After walking a few blocks in the balmy evening air, with a zig here and a zag there, we settled on a corner restaurant, located on the second level above some retail shops that Ez and I had visited on my first trip down south. The restaurant had a nice balcony where we could sit outside and watch the goings-ons down on the street, of which there were actually very few. It seems that middle of the week Liberia night-life is essentially non-existent. Mom was still thrilled with everything, of course. We started out with some tasty ceviche and moved on to platos con queso fritos, small cakes of mashed and then fried plantains, served with little chunks of fried cheese on top. Accompanied with ketchup. It seems that everything in Central America is accompanied with ketchup. Entrees consisted of typical local fare–steak, chicken, or pork, covered with some sort of hot or not-so-hot sauce, with rice and beans and shredded cabbage on the side. Or, a whole fried fish, served with the creepy glazed eyeballs staring you in the face. Ezra had that. He likes the creepy foods. After dinner and some drinks (mom fell in love with the Micheladas), we shuffled back to our rooms, exhausted after a long and eventful day.

The bus dropped me off at the San Jose airport around 3pm, I think. It became somewhat hard to keep track of the actual time because of the whole daylight savings time deal. For those that don’t know, Nicaragua has just recently decided to use daylight savings time because they think it might save a little energy. In actuality, because of the country’s proximity to the Equator, the time of sunrise and sunset only varies by about 45 minutes throughout the entire year. So it’s a bit of a joke that they’ve decided to use DST, and apparently many Nicaraguans believe it’s all some sort of government conspiracy. For awhile after the time changed, whenever a discussion was had that involved a specific time, the question of “is that real time, or is it new time?” would have to be answered. Costa Rica still does not observe DST, so traveling infrequently between the 2 countries can be a little confusing. I have since decided that daylight savings time is about the stupidest thing ever thought up ever. I am going to start doing things at whatever the hell time I want to and just call it Zach’s Convenience Savings Time and insist that everyone else follow that, it makes about as much sense.

I called the hotel when I got to the airport (international roaming is so handy!) and they were happy to come and pick me up in 15 minutes. So I sat down at the top of the parking structure where we caught the hotel shuttle the first time around and waited, trying to ignore the suspicious stares of the guards that were hanging around the “departures” entrance. Which was actually pretty easy to do. Especially because, as I found out the next morning, they didn’t seem to be doing much guarding at all. When I caught my flight the next morning, I blew by one of the guys standing at the entrance, and he seemed to want to ask me something, but obviously thought it would be too much effort to stop me, so he just turned his attention to a very suspicious looking cigarette butt lying on the ground instead.

Good god, Phoenix airport is a piece of shit, isn’t it? I mean, getting through the feds is always a pain in the ass when you are coming back into the country, but ferchrissakes! You walk out of the fed area and there is a complete and utter lack of available information about where your connecting flight might be found. I was bloody lucky that I happened to stumble upon some America West screens, or I would’ve been stuck there for who knows how long. And then you have to go through fucking security AGAIN! What sort of demented bastard designed this place?

Amazingly, I was able to get to my connecting flight on time and arrived back in P-town around 4pm. First order of business: step outside the baggage claim area and take a couple of deep breaths of pleasant, bug-free, non-humid oregon air. Second: cough and sputter a bit from inhaling a bunch of exhaust from all the cars idling outside the baggage claim waiting to pick people up. Third: go back inside and wait another 20 minutes for the carousel to even start distributing baggage. Fourth: get picked up by syd and proceed directly to Amnesia Brewing for some real beers. Ah, Portland. It’s good to be home.

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

The route I took to get here was a bit different this time, as I flew into San Jose, Costa Rica, which is about a 7 hour bus ride from SJDS, compared to Liberia (the city I flew into last time), which is a much more reasonable 2 hour bus ride from SJDS. San Jose is by far the largest city I’ve been to in Central America, not that I’ve been to that many. The cab ride from the hotel Brilla Sol, where we stayed the night, into downtown San Jose to get to the TransNica bus terminal was an exciting one. It started out pretty mellow. In hindsight, I suspect that the cab driver was easing us into his driving style, which I would classify as “somewhat deranged”. We had agreed to share the cab with an american woman from New York who was staying at our hotel while she learned an important lesson: try not to leave your computer bag in a cab, the one with your new laptop, your money and your passport in it, no matter how frustrated you are that the driver is trying to get more cash out of you. Otherwise known as “it’s important to keep your wits about you while traveling”.

After agreeing to share the ride into town, Ezra and I slid into the back seat while she took the front passenger seat. As I said, the ride started out mellow, as the driver found his way onto the freeway during highly congested rush-hour traffic, and we settled in for a slow journey down the packed 3 lanes. Eventually the cars started to loosen up, however, and the woman from New York started to give the driver her theories on how to effectively and efficiently maneuver through this sort of driving situation. He was agreeable to it all, but it soon became apparent that he needed no tips as he began to dart and weave through the still fairly dense crowd of cars, alternately jamming his foot down on the gas, then slamming on the brakes. I can’t imagine the number of clutches and brake pads they must go through here. I can only suspect that they know how to get to the secret land of clutch and brake trees where car parts grow plentifully year round. Maybe it’s a secret they learn at birth. That would explain a lot of things, actually. But I digress…

As we finally left the freeway, I loosened up a bit, expecting that one would likely be driving slower while moving through the downtown of a largish city. This was apparently the wrong thing to expect. Throughout the entire ride, our driver had been switching between 2 or 3 radio stations which all seemed to be playing the same selection of music. Yep, you guessed it: 80’s pop rock & roll hits. As we entered downtown, our driver turned the volume up and picked up the driving pace considerable, as the dramatic synthesizers of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” began playing through the small, tinny speakers behind our heads. The driver aggressively weaved his way through the 4 lanes of downtown traffic, seeming to take the song at it’s word, as if we didn’t make it to our destination by the end of the song it would mean certain doom. We finally arrived at the bus terminal and parted ways with our heroic driver and the now somewhat shaken woman from new york. We waited around for about 15 minutes before we were allowed onto the cushy Nicabus to settle in for the long drive to the border.

The countryside is considerable greener than when I last left it. This apparently happened overnight. Well, not overnight, but certainly within the time span of a week, as Ezra said that it wasn’t like this when he left. This of course is the product of the wet season. The aforementioned occasional heavy rains are causing a rapid transformation of the land from brown and barren to green and lush. During parts of the trip, I was almost able to imagine that I was back in the willamette valley, an illusion that was helped along by the near-sub-zero air conditioning on the bus. It’s 90 out, but the humidity makes it feel more like 105, and I actually got cold on the bus. I had to borrow Ezra’s sweater that he happened to have in his carry-on bag. The bus really is pretty comfortable, though. The time and miles pass along fairly quickly, the scenery is nice, and we got to watch a spanish dubbed version of “Dodgeball” which constantly skipped and stuttered due to the bumpy, windy roads over which we travelled.

So, by around 4pm on Thursday we finally got into SJDS, and I settled into the new house, just across the street from the old one, affectionately called “Casa del Blanca”, and sometimes also known as “Casa de Gringos”.

Next: Ooh, pretty pretty jungle!