Nicaragua: Managua,Ometeppe, Leon December 18, 2002
Last winter I spent many hours flying from Chicago to Ottawa to London to Qatar to Kathmandu. The flight to Managua was under two hours and I was glad I had decided to be a loafer this winter rather than a hiker in some far off place. The descent into Managua was a rather thrilling one, as the Managua has several large volcanoes around it and the pilot had to bank hard several times before getting properly lined up with the runway. When the plane touched the ground and slowed to a taxi, the occupants clapped and cheered. I wasn't sure if that was a custom, or if I should have been more worried about the flight.
Managua was not what I was expecting. I was expecting a Central American version of Kathmandu, complete with much garbage, beggars, and filth. Instead, I found a mostly clean city, few beggars, and pretty statues of revolutionaries carrying AK-47s. We rambled through the easy traffic for fifteen minutes before entering a residential neighborhood. He dropped me in front of Casa de Huespedes Santos, which was the cheapest place listed in the Lonely Planet Guidebook that I was carrying: $3 a night. I should have been tired from my ordeal in Miami, but instead I found myself pleasantly high on the fact that I was in Nicaragua, home of the Sandinistas and Contras and Daniel Ortega, who had been made out to be something of a rascal when I was growing up.
The hotel was rather dumpy, but more or less clean and with a lot of character. I settled in and joined a group of young backpackers around a table. Several Australians were there and they had been traveling for more than a year. They had had some crime problems in Nicaragua so far, but they sounded mostly like crimes of opportunity, based on the foolishness of the Australians. We went around the corner to a house front where an old lady was selling food. I got a large scoop of gallo pinto (literally, spotted rooster, but in fact just rice and beans), some fried cheese, and an enchilada, which was more like a deep fried burrito than the saucy thing you get in the States. Topped with pickled cabbage and lost of homemade hotsauce and wrapped in a banana leaf, it was the best $2 dinner I'd ever had. | |
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