From the melancholy lowlands of Leon to the fresh-air highlands of Matagalpa

Happy New Year from Northern Nicaragua! We had such an adventurous day of New Year’s travel, that today is one of those times where I must write before I forget any of the details and absurdities. It all really began on New Years Eve in Leon. Why were we in Leon? Well, Leon is one of the oldest cities in Nicaragua, with fine architecture, the country’s largest cathedral, and a vibrant student culture due to the university located here. Travis and I left our 1-month home of Granada on Sunday morning, and decided to head north for a week to see a few more of Nicaragua’s hidden gems. Before hitting Leon, we began by visiting an un-touched ocean side pueblo, Las Penitas, where we stayed in a lovely cabana on the sand with a direct view of the Pacific Ocean. The sound of the waves crashing at night was awesome, not to mention the stars we could see in the sky. It was exciting to see the Pacific again; strange to think this is the same ocean we swim in at home. We figured we deserved a little seaside retreat for 2 nights being that we were spending all the holidays without our families and the traditions of home. It was quite a find, as any comparable place on the west coast of CA would cost probably 10 times what we paid (it’s hard to beat $20 a night). On Tuesday afternoon, we took a 1-hour chicken bus ride inland to Leon. Although Leon did indeed have some stunning churches and the cathedral, Trav and I struggled to bond with this city and never did discover a sense of place in our wanderings there for two days. That said, we were ready to head out of town on New Year’s Day.

As a side note, the holidays have not been a favorite part of our traveling schedule. This is surprisingly not because we’re away from the comforts of home (although we have definitely missed our families), it’s actually because these days are very inconvenient for travelers. I originally assumed we’d enjoy the holidays here because of the unique different traditions we’d experience and the citywide fiestas. Instead, the streets are dead quiet, everything is closed and shuttered, taxis are harder to find, and the bus schedules are infrequent and flighty. Even when we stayed put with our family in Granada on Christmas Day, I really missed the town’s lively and welcoming atmosphere. Although there are the very late night fiestas that draw the people outside, most Nicas are inside their homes passing the time peacefully with their families. When you are traveling in a city without a “home” to just relax and enjoy the traditions the day brings, it’s typical to crave the 2nd best thing, which would be a familiar hotel lobby, a cozy coffee café or a restaurant filled with people to pass the time in. When these things are not available to you, we’ve found that loneliness beckons and melancholy can set in pretty quickly. Unfortunately, on New Years Eve in Leon, these emotions lead to a downward spiral of negativity, unnecessary fears, and uncertainty about our developing plans and purpose for the next few weeks. Fortunately, we are in a much better place (emotionally and physically) now, a few days later. But hey, in case you hadn’t already guessed, when you’re traveling long-term like this, not everyday is filled with excitement and ease. Ho-hum days are pretty typical for us too.

So anyway, back to my story about another epic day of travel for Travis and I. Our need to be flexible in this journey really began, unbeknownst to us, when we dropped off our load of laundry at the “Laundromatic Express” on New Years Eve morning. In our brief Spanish conversation with the owner, we understood that our laundry would be ready for pick-up at 3pm that afternoon, but we could retrieve it anytime before close at 7pm. So, after spending the day seeing some local cultural sights, Travis and I returned around 5pm and were rather alarmed to find the establishment locked up. With our bus leaving the next day in the early afternoon, we decided to cross our fingers and pray they’d be open tomorrow. However, this was highly unlikely knowing how the city would be a sleepy place on New Years Day. As far as a backup plan, our only thoughts were to show up the next day, knock on all the surrounding doors of neighbors to see if they knew where the laundry owner lived, and maybe she’d be kind enough to come in for a few minutes to let us retrieve our laundry. If not, we just had to set our minds to be okay with the fact that we might have to spend one more night in Leon.

On the morning of New Years, we headed straight to the Laundromat on our way to breakfast and were not surprised to still see it shuttered. Because we were hungry and have previous experience knowing we don’t operate well in this famished stage, we chose to eat first and then figure out what to do about our predicament. It was now 9:00am, and our bus was to leave at 2:45pm. Plenty of time, right? Well………. we got VERY lucky. When we returned after breakfast (we ate at a quiet, sleepy hostel because all the local establishments were closed), the door was opened and the owner was sitting outside on a plastic chair waiting for us to come by. She was just as happy to see us as we were to see her. Our guess was she wanted to close back up after we left and spend the rest of the day at the beach with her family, like every other Nicaraguan family in town. It was SO kind of her to come in- she said she ended up closing early the day before, and thought we might be needing our laundry today so she came in to wait for us to pick it up. And we did! Good thing we came by early so she could take the rest of the day off. Obstacle #1 cleared up- the plan to leave the city was back in the works.

With it now being 10:30am, we needed to check out of our hotel and kill some time in the next few hours before our bus. Again, with everything closed, there was not much to do. So, we headed to a different hostel cafe that had free wireless Internet, and did some research for our next few weeks of traveling. This hostel was called “Bigfoot Hostel,” and it reminded us of why we don’t stay in these types of popular, dormitory-style backpacker places when we do these little side trips. These college age, international, groups of “kids” are interesting for people-watching, but there’s something about this crew that is just dirty (from months on the road living out of a backpack), lost (kids who don’t know what to do with their lives so don’t want to return home) and lonely (we see many solo backpacker travelers- writing in journals, reading books, or just staring off into space). Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking down the backpacking culture because there is definitely a time and place for it… but for the immersion purposes Travis and I have for this year, being a part of this unique vibe of people does not fit into the experience. Plus, we don’t fit in to this group of kids, nor do we want to try! However, as we sat in this hostel among these kids slowly waking up and wondering around with their New Years Eve hangovers, we couldn’t help but feel some of the out of place/lost in space spirit in the air making us want to leave this town even more.

Finally, it was 1:45pm… time to head to the bus station. It took a good 10 minutes to hail a cab on the dead street, but finally a driver in a blue car came by and pulled over for us. He assured us he was a taxi driver and asked us where we needed to go, but we were hesitant in getting in the car because we didn’t see the taxi sign. Fortunately, the security guard to our hotel was watching this scene and he assured us that this guy was indeed a taxi driver. The 5-minute drive was worry and stress-free, but I guess I should mention that the driver finished the can of beer he drinking on the way to the station! Another first-time experience for us. We were just hoping it was his first beer of the day.

So here we are now at the bus station. It looked a bit different today than when we arrived (about 90% less people). Although we never found a tourist information office that was open, we had asked multiple sources the previous day if the buses would be running on schedule on New Years and they assured us everything would be normal. Then again, in comparing our 3 guidebooks, none of them listed the same schedule for bus departures, but the 2:45 time seemed the most popular. But, because we still didn’t feel absolutely confident about this fact, we wanted to get there on time in case things didn’t go as planned. Although the bus stations look completely unorganized with colorfully painted school buses everywhere, it’s actually always been very easy for Travis and I to find the bus we need. This is because each bus is manned with a driver and the “2nd hand man” who’s job it is to find the passengers and get them onboard. They do this by yelling out the destination city, over and over again (i.e. “Managua, Managua, Managua!”), especially when confused people like Travis and I walk by. If they’re not saying the city we’re traveling to, we ask them where that bus is and they always know.

We weren’t so lucky today. The first few people we asked said, “Matagalpa? No mas hoy. Manana” (“Matagalpa, no more today, come back tomorrow”). “What do you mean tomorrow?” we thought… “Everyone assured us the buses would be normal today!” We were pretty devastated by this news because we really, really wanted to get out of town. We split up, went in different directions and sought other opinions. But even after these attempts, word at the station was for us to return to town and stay another night. Big bummer. Then, we hit a stroke of good news. One of the busmen must have noticed our desperation to leave town. He walked over to us and told us there was another option to Matagalpa at this hour. This was to catch the 3-hr. bus to San Isidro, then transfer at that station for another 45-minute ride to our destination. Although this would add 1-½ hours onto our trip, we’d at least get there this evening. Turns out we had 3 minutes to make this decision, because the San Isidro bus was pulling out of the station. We hopped on and were off!

Without having a chance to first pull out a map and make sure that San Isidro was indeed on the way to Matagalpa, we plunged in to the bumpiest, craziest bus ride I’ve had in my entire life.
About half of the distance of our trip was a road under construction. Therefore, we were on a makeshift side road composed of dirt, rocks and big holes. Travis and I had the back seat of the bus so we could keep an eye on our luggage, and some of the bumps were so intense that we actually got air and were lifted off our seats! Sometimes when you looked ahead to the front of the bus, it looked so tweaked and twisted from the curves and bumps that it seemed like it would break in half. It was absolutely wild. To add to it, the poor child next to us had some type of flu or motion sickness, and she spent the first hour vomiting. Nice. We actually found the whole ride to be a major workout. We had to concentrate so hard in just staying upright in our seats and not flying to and from that it took the air out of us.

Three very sore and tiring hours later, we arrived in the sleepy, nothing-of-a-town San Isidro. Travis went around asking where to catch our next bus, and when it would arrive. He received a similar reaction to the one we had at the bus station earlier. “Well, it’s supposed to come every ½ hour, but today… I don’t know, it might be an hour, maybe two…” Being that it was getting dark and we were standing on the side of a dimly lit highway in Central America, we used our best safety senses and decided it was time to hire a cab. Fortunately, this was easy to find, and within a ½ hour we were in Matagalpa. The only problem was this driver refused to take us to our hotel and wanted to drop us off at the bus station. We repeatedly asked him to deliver us to our desired address, but he kept saying no. Because of the language communication difficulties, it took us forever to figure out that this driver was not a licensed driver for Matagalpa city limits, only for San Isidro city. In these cases, the drivers can only drop you on the outskirts of town, and it’s up to you to find another cab. Finally we understood.

The next crisis was where he dropped us. All guidebooks say not to hang out near bus stations after dark… and here we were standing alone when the driver pulled away. Of course, it was located on the bottom of a dark hill, and within minutes Travis and I were huffing our luggage up the hill to find some better light and get out of that sketchy place. As we were fleeing we encountered a very drunk man on the street who not only was rambling random words to us, but also kept trying to touch us. This totally unnerved the both of us (me more than Travis… Travis knew he was just drunk, not harmful) and we wanted another cab so badly we were practically hailing every vehicle that drove by. Finally a cab pulled over for us. It already had two people in it, but the driver invited us in as well and said we’d have a few stops along the way. No biggie, at this point we didn’t care. Of course, we didn’t know that every time he dropped someone off, he’d pick up the next Tom, Dick or Harry that needed a ride. It was classic. We made like 4 random stops across town before we finally arrived at our hotel, the “Fuente Azul” (Fountain Blue).

We were so happy to be there! For the first time in our Nica travels, the hotel owner actually had our name written down and a room ready for us (we’ve showed up at three other hotels in the past few weeks, where we had called ahead and made reservations, but they had nothing marked in the books). To make things better yet, this is the cheapest and largest room we’ve had, it has the biggest and softest bed, and HOT water! After 6 weeks of cold showers, you have no idea how excited I was!

Well, this is where this travel journey ends. We’ll tell you more about Matagalpa and why we’re here later (another intriguing language/home stay program… this time just for a week), but I just had to share about the difficulties, highlights and adventure of this little trek across the highlands of Nicaragua on New Year’s Day.