Butterflies and murals in Nicaragua

There are two ways to tell the story.  I can say we spent 12 hours on a microbus, two taxis and four busses to cross two borders through sweltering heat and torrential rain.  Or I can say, breakfast in El Salvador, lunch in Honduras, and dinner in Nicaragua!  I tend to like the second version better, and hope to forget as much of the first version as possible.  Except we found a friend on our last bus, a Nica cowboy complete with hat and gigantic belt buckle.  Despite our inability to understand much of what he was saying (at least we got the gist), he talked with us for a while in a dusty bus stop waiting for the bus to arrive.  (We were afraid we were going to have to wait for an hour in the heat, but the bus arrived and soon took off early, much to our relief.  It stopped at a store and the driver bought a drink, then we returned to the bus station.  We sat for about 20 minutes and we took off again, where he picked up a few people along the way, and then returned to the station again!  D´oh!)  Our bus eventually arrived at another tiny town, and we all crammed and I mean crammed into a little microbus, where despite having my pack in my lap I still was getting very friendly with two other passengers sitting opposite me.  All the travel had taken longer than we had expected, and we were arriving at the Nicaraguan border right at 5pm, in the rain, and we weren´t sure if we were going to be able to find a bus on the other side or if we were going to have to get desperate and hitch.  But after making our way through, with no bus in sight, we found our cowboy waiting for us on the other side with a taxi.  He even negotiated a decent price for us.  Our stop was only about 20km down the road, and he was off farther into the highlands.  I can´t say it enough, we just keep meeting these super friendly people who go out of their way to help us, despite the language barrier.  People are awesome.

We were in the town of Somoto, a small town that had made a claim to fame based on the recently discovered river canyon that is the start of the Coco River, which is one of the longest in Central America.  Of course by recently discovered, they mean discovered by us white people.  Anyways, we hired a guide who hiked us in through gorgeous farmland to the canyon.  When the water was deep, we swam down along, letting the current help push us through a beautiful and, at times, deep canyon with steep rock walls.  We got out and clambered along the sides and over huge rocks when the river turned into shallow rapids.  It was great.  At several points along the bank we came across huge numbers of yellow butterflies drinking along the banks.  When we would walk by, they would all start flying around all at once, leaving us to walk through what we termed "Butterfly Cloud".  Our guide was great at talking slow and simply, so we were able to feel all fancy talking in Spanish all day.  The only issue we had was the water itself.  We had imagined some sparkling mountain spring, when in fact it was very brown, full of all that farm runoff and who knows what else.  We kept our shirts on to protect from the sun, and lets just say they were nowhere near as white when we were done.  Anyway, it might not have been as magical as we´d hoped (except for those butterflies!), but it was still beautiful, and a very fun day.

We spent another night in Somoto, and then moved down the road to the college town of Estelì, which is notable for being full of murals.  I am a huge fan of graffiti art, and have been taking photos at every opportunity all along the way, so I was pretty excited for a city full of murals.  Some were political, some were for kids, and some I have no idea what they were.  We just walked through the city like we were on a treasure hunt.  We found a terrific little restaurant, but unfortunately Estelí is also a cigar factory town, and it is impossible to enjoy eating anything when someone behind you is smoking a stogie.  I´ve been spoiled by living in so many cities where public smoking is illegal, and while the smoking down here isn´t as bad as it was in Asia (in fact most of the smoking I´ve been around has been by the Europeans, not the locals), I sure will be glad when I get home and can eat in a restaurant without fear of nasty smoke defiling my meal.

We are now in León, another college town, historically the arch-rival to Granada, where I think we are heading tomorrow.  Back around the time of the US Civil War, the city of Leòn thought they could finally defeat their poltical enemies in Granada by inviting William Walker into town.  He was an American who came down with a bunch of mercenaries he called "fillibusters", which apparently is another way to say pirate.  He did indeed defeat Granada, but instead of handing the city over to León, he decided to stick around as the new "President of Nicaragua".  You see he thought he could make some improvements, little things like reinstituting slavery, and hopefully give some backing to the Confederacy.  What he did do was to unite the bitter political enemies who, with some help from the Costa Rican army (back when they still had one), were able to drive him out.  Being a good sport about it, he had the good grace to burn the city of Granada to the ground on his way out, and posted a sign "Granada was here."  His awesome sense of humor somehow wasn´t enough convince the locals to let bygones be bygones, and he was captured by the Honduran army and executed.  The truth is I find this embarassing tale terribly interesting, and having found out that William Walker himself wrote a book about his exploits (I assume while he was still happily president) which I am desperate to find.  If not here, I´m hoping ebay will be good to me when I get home!

If we were in the mood to hang out, I think we would enjoy León a lot, but for whatever reason we are both feeling pressed to move on.  I don´t suppose that has anything to do with the horrible realization that we only have about 5 weeks to go!  Ack!  We still have so much ground to cover if we want to make it to Panama City.  And we are still thinking we want to go to the Corn Islands, and down into some other out of the way places in Nicaragua.  Will we make it?  Stick around to find out!