Travel, Photography, Life.
Dan Perry
Dan created this blog to document his South America trip, which covered every country on the continent and lasted over two years. He currently lives in Madison, WI.
Homepage: http://www.trekkerglobe.com
Posts by Dan Perry
The Colombian, The Spaniard, And the Unreachable Island
May 22nd
March 20, 2008
Day 846
I tried to go to the Bay Islands a week ago but accidentally got dropped off in El Salvador. I had a decent time in Central America’s smallest and least visited country, but the time had come for take two in Honduras.
I paid a premium for the luxurious direct bus into Honduras that would completely avoid the crime-ridden capital, but the glorious bus still managed to break down on the highway for most of the afternoon and I was forced to watch a string of movies starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. The sun was already on its way out of the sky by the time I got to San Pedro Sula, the second biggest city in the country and only slightly less horrible of a place than the capital of Tegucigalpa.
I wanted to leave town right away but the bus company to go to La Ceiba was already closed. Worse still, transportation was due to shut down completely tomorrow because it was Good Friday, so it was looking like I would have to waste two days just to get to the islands. Suddenly I ran into a Colombian woman who lived on the islands named Sonia and a Spanish guy named Ivan who were traveling together and in the same predicament. A long time ago I learned to follow the locals in these situations, and these two were the closest thing to locals I was going to meet.
We took a taxi to another bus station, but it was closed. We had one last chance at another bus station across town and went for it. The last bus for the next two days was on its way out of the parking lot just as we pulled up, and Sonia and Ivan wasted no time in jumping aboard. I was right behind them, but the assistant told me I wouldn’t fit. I had never heard of such a thing as not fitting onto a bus in Latin America, so I pushed the assistant out of the way and squeezed in next to him. Technically I did fit, even though I was unable to take full breaths and nearly needed a bottle of grease to get back out. We pulled into La Ceiba late at night and got “lucky†again as we scored what was surely one of the only rooms left in the city. It was the size of a jail cell with only one bed, and as a courtesy, the owner only charged us double the normal price because he knew we were desperate. We all were hoping to get the ferry to the islands today, but delays made that impossible. We’ll try our luck tomorrow. Why does Easter week travel have to be so difficult?
A Beautiful Colonial Town
May 22nd
March 18-19, 2008
Day 844-845
I had to take a series of four buses to get across the country to the town of Suchitoto, but I was able to do it all in one day. After being in the boring, bland flowery region, I was blown away by the beauty of Suchitoto as soon as I got there. The whitewashed colonial buildings had a common familiarity to me after visiting so many similar towns, but this town happened to be on Cerron Grande, a huge lake surrounded by forests. It reminded me of Villa de Leyva, Colombia without the tourists and with a stunning natural surrounding. It was the best town I had visited in I don’t even know how long.
I found a hostel overlooking the lake owned by a nice local couple that even had a few other guests. I loved being there but could only stay one day. I didn’t want to waste time again because of Semana Santa, so I bought my bus ticket out of El Salvador a few days in advance. Coming to El Salvador early actually seems to have worked out well because I got an email from a girl in the Bay Islands stating that they were completely full and would best be avoided for the remainder of the week. We’ll find out how true that is tomorrow.
The photo album for this entry is here.
The Non-Flowery Route
May 22nd
March 16-17, 2008
Day 842-843
I avoided the roaming street gangs and got out of San Salvador as soon as I could figure out the local bus system. My destination was the Ruta de las Flores (Route of the flowers), which the employees at my hotel all enthusiastically recommended. Too bad they didn’t tell me in advance that none of the flowers on the route were in bloom at the time.
It took several bus transfers to get to Juayua, the most exciting town in the region. A large food market was happening, with dozens of street vendors selling local Salvadoran fares. There was a lot of domestic tourism as the locals escaped the capital for the weekend, but not one foreign tourist was in sight. I did meet a couple of locals over a few beers, but they were regular working guys. No chance of hanging out during the day.
The other area attraction was Apaneca, the highest town in El Salvador at 1450 meters. The main thing to see there was (of course) the church, which was five hundred years old before an earthquake destroyed it in 2001. A replacement was being built, and by the looks of it, it might be complete in another five hundred years. The town drunks did a fair amount of preaching to me after taking a fountain bath, but everyone else was too busy going about their daily business to talk to me.
Even after one day of being in the area I started feeling lonely. I’ve always admired little towns in the highlands, but I never figured out how people could live there with so little to do. For some unknown reason, almost nobody visits El Salvador, and I started resenting the “divine intervention” that put me there. It would have been much better to take a few friends with me.
The photo album for this entry is here.
Divine Intervention
May 22nd
March 15, 2008
Day 841
The day started off easy enough with the early bus out of Managua. We had an easy border crossing into Honduras after a few hours. I found out that you don’t even need to get your passport stamped for land crossings between Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, so my passport won’t quite fill up so fast.
I was supposed to get off at a city near the border in Honduras and find another bus to take me north to Tegucigalpa, and I let the bus assistant know of my plans when he was loading my backpack in the storage compartment. The terrain outside appeared to be dry and barren with no human settlements in sight. Some Tom Hanks movie about the US secretly giving the Afghanis money during the cold war was playing, and before I knew it a couple hours had passed. All of a sudden we stopped, and I asked the assistant if we were in my city yet. He had an “oh shit” look of surprise on his face when he saw that I was still on the bus, and he broke the bad news to me that he had forgotten about me and we were, in fact, already crossing into El Salvador.
I thought briefly about getting off the bus and trying to make my way back through Honduras, but at that point I’d have to traverse the entire country to get to the Caribbean coast. I decided to continue to San Salvador instead. I was planning to go there eventually anyway, so I figured as long as I was in the country, I might as well stay a few days.
A few people had warned me not to go to El Salvador because of the extreme gang violence that was happening there. I met very few people who had actually been there, though, and that piqued my curiosity about the place. I started reading about the tiny, practically unknown country and discovered that like Nicaragua, there was a terrible civil war there that cost 75,000 lives, and of course the US government played a large role in prolonging it. Still, it ended in 1992, so the youngest generation wouldn’t have any memories of it. Hopefully the country would be peaceful enough for the older generations to forgive and forget.
I found a place to sleep near the bus station in the capital of San Salvador, and when I looked around all I saw were a Wendy’s, a Pizza Hut, and a street full of cars and devoid of people, much like I’d expect to see back home. Maybe the gangs were fighting on the other side of town. I told the desk worker at my hotel about how the bus didn’t drop me off in Honduras, and she said it was divine intervention that I came to her country instead. Indeed, Holy Week had affected me deeply, whether I wanted it to or not.
Another Party To Ruin My Plans
May 22nd
March 14, 2008
Day 840
I took a short bus ride to Managua this afternoon and headed straight for the Tica Bus terminal to buy my ticket to Honduras. I knew that traveling during Semana Santa (the week leading up to Easter) would be difficult because it was a vacation week for most people. Still, I was shocked to learn that the bus was already sold out for the next six days! I looked at the only other company with buses to Tegucigalpa (the capital of Honduras), but they were sold out several days in advance as well. So since I came to Central America six weeks ago, my travel plans have been disrupted first by carnaval in Panama City, then the local festival in Liberia, Costa Rica, and now Easter. It’s times like this that you wonder when these people actually do work.
I finally found an international bus going to El Salvador via Honduras, and I bought a ticket to get dropped off at a city near the border with Nicaragua. I’ll have to catch a couple extra buses from Honduras and probably waste a day in the process, but it’s certainly a better option than having to hang out in Managua for the next several days.
The Little City that Could
May 22nd
March 11-13, 2008
Days 837-839
My next stop was the small city of Granada, which, like Ometepe Island, was on Lago Nicaragua, the largest lake in Central America. Granada was an important trade center from its founding, so much so that the French, English, and the liberals from Leon constantly fought for control throughout its turbulent history. That all came to a dramatic end when American William Walker, who had briefly controlled the city, was forced to abandon it and had it burned to the ground in 1856.
The city was mildly interesting with an old church with a lookout tower where one had a great view of another church, a few nice parks, and a crafts market in nearby Masaya. Again, the people were friendly, but it was a very poor place where horses were still being used as often as cars. I didn’t feel like staying long, but I found out too late that the bus to Honduras left from Managua (the capital) early in the morning, and I didn’t feel like spending any time there, so I had to stay in Granada another day.
The photo album for this entry is here.
The Forgotten Island
May 22nd
March 8-10, 2008
Days 834-836
Ometepe Island was just a hop, skip, and a jump from San Juan del Sur, and was, in fact, visible from the main highway when I first entered Nicaragua. However, the large island that was made from two volcanoes wasn’t a very touristy place for some reason. Unlike San Juan del Sur, it was totally devoid of nightlife. It was so dark I needed a flashlight to walk around, even when we weren’t experiencing one of the frequent blackouts. And there were warnings of water shortages, despite being located on the biggest lake in Central America. It was my kind of place.
One day I rode buses around the island. Life moved very slowly and traditionally with farmland taking up most of the flat area surrounding the volcanoes. There were lots of hiking trails to check out the wildlife and bits of remaining original swampland. Just the thought of a volcanic tropical island located on a huge lake sounded exciting, and the culture and wildlife made it even more worthwhile. I couldn’t understand why more tourists didn’t visit it.
My Ometepe challenge was to climb the Concepcion Volcano. Several people warned me to take a guide because of the high chance of getting lost for days. I didn’t see how you could get lost on a volcano because you just walk back down if you can’t find the trail, but I caved and hired one. Indeed, the trail was easy to follow, but it was still nice to have a guide to point out the animals and plants of the forest covering the volcano.
Along the way, we saw lots of wildlife, especially howler monkeys. Sometimes they would surround us in the trees, staring at us with their beady eyes, screaming at the top of their lungs and swinging around the branches to intimidate us without any sign of fear. Mixed in with the monkeys were birds the color of the Nicaraguan flag making several varieties of beautiful calls. A huge tree had been chopped down illegally with an axe so as not to attract the attention of the authorities. Some of it had been hauled away to build a house, but most of it was left to rot. I could tell conservation was a priority, until it meant that a human couldn’t have a dwelling for himself.
I was told I couldn’t climb all the way to the top because the volcano was in the middle of spewing out noxious fumes. Indeed, when we got to 1000 meters, I began to smell the sulfur. However, we ran into a large group of disabled Europeans who had ridden to that level on horses and had been camping there and filming a documentary for the last five days. They were continuing higher on a rope, but that’s where I had to stop. I didn’t mind too much, though, because the cloud cover got too thick to see anything at that point and the view from where we were was spectacular.
My other big news is that my shirt collection is officially rockin’. Not too long ago, I only had two shirts, and life isn’t very interesting when you’re wearing half the clothes you own on any given day. But then I scored a shirt from some hippies in Colombia, I won a dressy shirt in a poker game in San Juan del Sur, and I completed my collection on Ometepe by buying a Hawaiian classic from a guy in the street who had gotten it off the Goodwill ship, fresh from the United States. Now my shirt collection is five strong and life couldn’t get much better.
The photo album for this entry is here.
The Sunset Sail that Wasn’t
May 22nd
March 4-7, 2008
Days 830-833
I ran into English Richard from the Corcovado National Park once again in Liberia. Just when I thought he had gone back to England long ago, there he was next to me getting ready to head into Nicaragua for the last part of his trip. I’ve learned many times during my trip that if you don’t think you’ll ever see someone again, you’ll definitely run into each other, but if you actually plan to meet somewhere, it won’t happen.
Richard, me, some Canadians, and a crazy Finnish alcoholic with ADHD headed to Nicaragua together. As soon as we crossed the border, I could tell the difference from Costa Rica. Burly men were hauling wood and food around in horse drawn carts, bicycle taxis were more common than the ones with engines, and many people were trying to eek out a living by selling a few onions or a pack of gum on the streets. This was obviously a much poorer country than the one we had left. We all got some local money and headed to San Juan del Sur in an overstuffed taxi with no radio, seat belts, or turn signals, and a trunk that was overflowing with all our worldly possessions and was being held halfway open by a few strands of rope.
San Juan del Sur was a small beach town on the Pacific Coast. It was packed with tourists, but they were of a different breed than those of Costa Rica. High-rise five-star hotels were replaced with small hostels with twenty beds to a room, McDonald’s was replaced with the local sodas selling equally unhealthy food, and the loud, fat Americans the color of bathtubs were replaced with laid-back, tanned Aussies, there to catch some waves. The few actual Nicaraguans in town seemed to tolerate the gringo explosion quite well, especially considering their country’s turbulent history.
The US government has severely damaged many countries I have visited, but none quite as badly as Nicaragua. Back in the early twentieth century, the US manipulated politics in Nicaragua to the point that if a non-favorable president was elected, the US marines came in and kicked his ass right out of power. This was all done so no other country could build a canal across Nicaragua, even though the US already had its eyes set on Panama for the building of the canal. The Somoza family later took over the country with the support of the US government and installed puppet leaders using fraudulent elections when they themselves were not in power. Anastasio Somoza Garcia was a brutal ruler who killed anyone who got in his way and eventually his family and friends owned most of the property in Nicaragua, while the rest of the people remained desperately poor. But we continued to support him because he let us use his land to launch a revolution in Guatemala and to invade Cuba. Franklin Roosevelt said of Somoza, “He may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.” And of course let’s not forget the Reagan years, when fear of communism led us to sell weapons to Iran illegally at inflated prices and siphon the extra money to thousands of Nicaraguan Contras in order to overthrow the democratically-elected government. And this is just scratching the surface of what we’ve done to Nicaragua. I was really surprised at how friendly the local people were and how quick they were to forgive.
Even though the fighting in Nicaragua has ended, I could see another disturbing invasion brewing around town. Every American I talked to seemed to be either a real estate agent or someone looking to buy land here. All of the nice houses along the coast were already owned by Americans, and even the older places were being bought out because the locals didn’t realize how much money the land would be worth in a few years. It’s the same thing that has already happened in Costa Rica, except it’s only in its beginning stages. I’m surprised the government is allowing this subtle invasion of their country to happen, but they’re probably also getting a piece of the action, if you know what I mean.
The beaches around San Juan del Sur were bordering on paradise with fine tan sand and crystal-clear water. A few of the more turbulent beaches were packed with surfers, but many others were devoid of human life. One day I went with a few people from my hostel on a French-owned sailboat for a “sunset sail.” When we got out of the harbor, our comandante driver cut the engines, put up the sail, and we drifted to a beach that was inaccessible by land. Dolphins followed us through the water, we did some snorkeling, and played lots of Frisbee. The problem was that the crew all got themselves in a big hurry to leave and were pushing us along to a smelly boat taxi and on the shore to a truck to take us back to the hostel well before sunset. A couple of us stayed behind and watched the disk of the sun give us its final farewell of the day on the horizon, while everyone else was too busy hurrying back to the hostel. Even in a place as laid-back as San Juan del Sur, some people just can’t live in the moment.
The photo album for this entry is here.
Party Time Is No Fun
May 22nd
March 2-3, 2008
Day 828-829
My room was next to the road and when the fireworks went off at 5:00 AM, I thought someone was trying to kill me. Later in the day, I must have looked like they nearly succeeded because I had barely gotten any sleep by the time I rolled out of bed at 6:00 to catch the early bus out of the country.
When I walked to the bus station, I got delivered the bad news: At least 200 others had also decided to leave the country and were in line before me. The bus came and the pandemonium ensued as the young men started pushing away the little old pregnant ladies with no regard for their wellbeing. If the driver hadn’t broken up the fight for seats, someone very well may have been trampled to death. The driver maintained order, but he still wasn’t above taking advantage of the passengers by suddenly tacking on a $2 “service charge” for each checked bag, which of course went directly into his pocket. The bus ended up getting packed to the point that the last few passengers had to stand in the stairwell and nobody even had enough room to fart. Looking back, it was probably a good thing I didn’t make it aboard.
Most countries have a simple system for getting on buses. You buy a ticket from the ticket booth, where you receive your seat number. When the bus shows up, you board it and sit in your assigned seat. That’s it, it’s really that simple. But so far in my travels, I have now encountered only two countries where the system doesn’t work that way, and a fight to the death occurs when you want to get on a bus: Costa Rica, and The United States of America.
I walked back to my hotel and figured out my options. Buses to the border left Liberia roughly every two hours, but the hotel desk employee assured me that the chaos boarding the buses would only get worse as the day progressed. When I asked why there were so many people, he replied, “fiesta.” I asked him how long the fiesta would last, and he told me, “All of February.” I pointed out that it was, in fact, March, but he just shrugged his shoulders and told me, “I guess it lasts through the beginning of March, too.” So my only chance of getting on one of the public buses to the border was to act like a five-year-old who had eaten one too many pixie sticks.
I figured I had two other options: Try to cross into Nicaragua at the other border crossing, or take the international bus, which I had just found out existed. The first option would involve catching three buses at just the right times, and maybe a fifty-fifty chance of making it near the other crossing by the end of the day. The other option of taking the international bus wasn’t any better because it was booked solid for two days. I decided to minimize the risk and bought a ticket for the international bus, but that meant having to hang out in Liberia’s February fiesta for two March days. Then again, when in Liberia…
Orchids and Accidents
May 22nd
March 1, 2008
Day 827
This morning I met a retired guy named Rick from Maine, and he introduced me to the orchid museum next to my hostel. I never really paid attention to flowers before, but the guided tour was actually interesting. There was the orchid that only lived one day, the colorful butterfly orchid, and a bunch of others that used various sneaky tricks to get insects to pollinate them. The Canadian kids in my group weren’t so interested, and resorted to burning stuff with their magnifying glasses to pass the time.
My bus finally left in the afternoon and dropped me off at the intersection with the main highway. While I was waiting for another bus to pick me up, a motorcycle with two people on it pulled up to the busy intersection and began turning left amidst lots of traffic. Just as the driver was easing into his lane, a car started turning left from the other direction, but didn’t see the motorcycle and smashed into it. The driver flipped through the air and landed on the car’s hood. It looked pretty bad, but he was able to walk to the side of the road under his own power.
The emergency response was impressive. Within one minute, twenty people surrounded the passengers to see if they were okay. Within five minutes, a police car showed up. Within ten minutes, the ambulance was there. And after fifteen minutes, the passengers were on their way to the hospital and the road was completely cleared of debris. The driver, who was wearing a helmet, broke his nose, and the passenger, who was not, didn’t look injured. It was scary to watch, but at least there were no major injuries.
A few minutes later, my bus to Liberia showed up, and the scene of the accident was left behind in my memories. Liberia was a small city about 80 KM from the border with Nicaragua. A big party with loud fireworks was going all night, but I went to bed early so I could get on the first bus out of the country tomorrow.
The photo album for this entry is here.