To Omotepe

(image is Nicole, swaddled in gnats, with her game face on).

The volcanic island that looms out of Lake Nicaragua has been described as one of the most magical and fantastical places on earth. The trip to get there, however, is an all too familiar slog through the vagaries of the underdeveloped Nicaraguan tourist industry.

A minibus (which costs $15) drove us to the dock at San Jorge, where the driver (who had no $5 bills) took payment. I was able to pay only by emptying my pockets of every spare dollar and piece of Nicaraguan money I had. That left me on the dock of a small, poor town with a $20 bill—a fantastical sum, considering that the boat itself cost less than $1 and they had no change.

Enter Juan, a pint-sized man who offered to help us with everything. He showed us where the boat would come, how much it would cost, and then tried to find some change for us. There were no money changers near the docks, but there were stores. Soon, Juan was running along the street with our $20 bill, going into every place looking to buy a bottle of water. Finally we watched in dismay as he ran up a hill and out of sight. We figured we'd never see our $20 again.

In all our travels we've only been robbed once. (Unless you count taxi drivers. Once, we were lost in China, for example, and needed a ride to see the terra cotta warriors. A taxi driver, scratched his head, made a great show of calculation, and said "Five dollar." We agreed, got into his car, and he drove us exactly 100 yards to the gate, which was just out of view. With much laughter, we paid him in full.).

But not this time. We waited ten minutes and he soon appeared, sprinting down the hill with our water bottle and change. "A tip?" he asked. We gave him about $7. He seemed happy.

The boat ride was hot and fly-ridden. By fly-ridden, I mean that we were, quite literally, covered in tiny flies. They didn't bite, but they were good at attaching themselves to us and drowning in our sweat. Nicole found this particularly unpleasant, Needless to say, we arrived in a terrific mood.

Hotel Terrasol: Grenada

Year ago, I was attending a business meeting with a client in Silicon Valley. He was from out of town, but he had formerly lived in San Jose, and like many Californians, was obsessed with food. During his brief visit, he insisted on revisiting all of his favorite culinary haunts, one of which, oddly enough, was Dragers Supermarket in Los Altos. We ended up talking business at a card table in the parking lot, while he shoveled down a quart of chicken salad with a plastic fork.

Flash forward to today. We are staying at the Hotel Terrasol, where the restaurant serves up California-style cuisine using fresh, local Nicaraguan ingredients. For two days, we feasted on octopus pasta, chicken in papaya and rum sauce with peppers, and pork with cilantro and sour orange. I spent some time talking with Victor, the chef, and, to make the very obvious point being labored to death here, he was the executive chef at Dragers at the very time I was dragged to that weird parking lot lunch.

In any case, when in Grenada, you must eat at the Hotel Terrasol. Stay there too, it's quite nice.

Grenada, Nicaragua

You can spend an exceptionally long time in Latin America without admiring a building. This isn't a statement of prejudice, but of fact. The Spanish conquistadors built beastly churches and vast public squares that look like they were designed chiefly for executing heretics (this was one of their functions). The newly independent countries complimented them with ponderous Neo-classical buildings and ghastly Beaux-Arts opera houses. Seeing them, you must always be ready with words like "stately," "impressive," and "imaginative." I'd advise staying away from more accurate adjectives like "overbearing," "squat," and "horrid." Your fellow travelers, mostly eager 20 year old backpackers and beaded retirees, will think that you have no sensitivity for other cultures.

Nicaragua's jewel city Grenada is the exception that proves the rule. We dropped our things at our hotel and sauntered out into a hot, steamy afternoon. The town square was small and was not particularly suited for beheadings. In each of its four corners, it had a pleasant tree bower where you could get a vigoron, a dish of steamed plantains, salad, and pork rind, served on a banana leaf. This was good stuff, even though they didn't serve beer.

"It's a family park," explained the restaurant proprietor.

Grenada is filled with little colonnades and arcades, brightly painted churches and courtyard buildings that burst from the inside with lush gardens. It's a clean, peaceful town that wears its age well.

Road to Grenada

Crossing to Nicaragua was a long, hot, and dull process, punctuated by endless polite no-thank-you's to men who changed money, women who made cheese tortillas, and children who wanted a peso for no particular reason at all.

One feature of the border deserves comment. When you pass through Nicaraguan customs, you stand in line before a customs official, who sits at a small table. On top of it sits a regulation-sized stoplight. You hand him your declaration, he looks it over, and then directs you to push a button. At the point, the stoplight changes from red to green, and you can go. Don't try to dispense with the custom, it doesn't work.

Then it was on to Nicaragua, which is completely different. Most of my countrymen believe that below the United States are a large number of exactly similar countries, with borders arbitrarily drawn between them. You can't really blame them. Mostly we only see them in the context of a storm or war, which tends to blur finer cultural distinctions.

For the record, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are entirely different places. Nicaraguans (Nicos) despise Costa Ricans (Ticos). Ticos return the insult with interest by ignoring their northern neighbors. Ticos shop in bland, orderly Western supermarkets. Nicos shop in bazaars to the deafening sound of dozens of stereo systems. Tican towns are well built, with lots of stone, tiled roofs, and gardens. Nicos have a lot less money, so they build with tin and baling wire.

When you cross the border, even the landscape changes from a dry jungle to more open spaces of poor ranches and sparse trees. Soon, on the right, Lake Nicaragua heaves into view: beautiful, black as you might imagine, with the twin volcanic island Ometepe looming up like a just awakened giant.

Flashback, Uspallata Argentina

You might think getting stuck in Liberia because of a combination of Tropical Storm Alma and Nicaraguan Mother's Day is a one-in-a-lifetime occurrence. But no. There was another time when we were stymied by an unlikely confluence of two entirely unrelated events.

It was January 2006, and we were heading out of Argentina's Mendoza wine region to Santiago, Chile, a trip that took us over the mighty Andes. The halfway point was the town of Uspallata, at the foot of Cerro Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas. The guidebook warned us that accommodations could become scarce during the climbing season, which it was. So we called a hotel while still in Mendoza and told them we'd be arriving at eight. No problem, they said.

Except that by the time we arrived in Uspallata at seven, our hotel had already given our room to someone else. Our disbelief quickly approached panic. We knocked on the doors of every other hotel on the town's one street, and found nothing available.

It was getting dark, the wind was picking up, and visions of sleeping on a sidewalk were dancing in our heads. To give you an idea of what we were facing, Uspallata stood in for Tibet in the movie Seven Years in Tibet. It's a high-ish, cold-ish, desolate-ish, don't-want-to-sleep-on-the-ground-under-any-circumstances-ish kind of place.

By this time, we had figured out what was wrong. Not only was it climbing season, but we had also arrived just before a massive festival celebrating a particular kind of Argentine folk music. Uspallata was bursting at the seams with intrepid, sunburned mountaineers and thousands of people who had come from all over the world (see below) to listen to Pablo Somebody-or-other strum his ukulele.

Argentina, by the way, is a sophisticated country filled with open air cafes and tango music. I'd never suspected it of harboring folk music, let alone some vibrant folk festival popular with the bead-wearing hordes.

Eventually, we poured out our sorrows to a bus station attendant, who directed us to a family that offered 4-wheel drive tours of the mountain. They called every hotel in the area. Luckily, a youth hostel two kilometers outside of town had room, and they loaded us in their car and drove us there.

We found ourselves in a hostel filled with a curious mix of folk music aficionados and mountain climbers. And no food. Not a scrap of bread or even a candy machine, which will always do in a pinch. Luckily we had two bottles of wine leftover from Mendoza, and immediately came to the same conclusion: That would be dinner.

We went outside, sat on stumps, and began to plow violently through the Malbec. By and by, the hotel owner came out and invited us to a bonfire, where he gathered his guests and handed around bottles of homemade hooch. We were an unlikely group of friends: grim mountain climbers, bizarre international folk music fanatics, and us. The climbers were a particularly subhuman lot. It apparently takes all of your mental and physical resources to get up 20,000 foot peaks, because unless you wanted to talk about the finer points of pitons, cutoffs, rappelling harnesses, alternative routes, and oxygen tanks, their store of conversation ran dry fairly quickly.

The folk music fans were a different matter. The most memorable among them was a tall, blond 23 year old from the Netherlands, who had—in only two weeks in Argentina—already pushed through an intensive Spanish class and managed to shack up with a good-looking Argentine bravo who spoke no English. Since she spoke no Spanish, for a moment, I wondered what they talked about. Then I realized they were probably just bouncing the hammock every spare moment they had. Besides if the male half of the equation actually understood what was coming out of her mouth, it would have been all the worse for him.

We spent a merry hour listening to her babble on about the music of the great Pablo (god knows where she discovered it) and how she had come especially to see him. Then, we watched the Southern Cross rise, and turned in.

The next morning we woke up to bright sunlight, a hangover, and the strange sight of the Dutch woman following the hostel owner's pet goose around with a camera. Once we got to town, we learned that we wouldn't be able to get a bus to Santiago for two days. We also found that Uspallata was deserted. Even the small supermarket, which in no way adhered to its posted business hours, was shut (presumably to avoid the after-concert riots which are endemic to the folk music circuit). There was, however, a gas station with a small store. Over the course of the next two days we relied on its limited supplies for food.

Needless to say, we eventually did make it to Santiago. There, we went out and had a great pasta dinner kicked off by two pisco sours. We thought we had died and gone to heaven.

Patrimony National, Liberia, Costa Rica

Among the 20 or so things you're not supposed to miss in Costa Rica is the Calle Real in Liberia. It's supposedly the "best example of colonial architecture in the country."

So we pulled out our guidebooks and joined about ten puzzled tourists milling around with their guidebooks. We passed to and fro, up and down the Calle Real—which is a strip of ordinary bars, backpacker hotels, muffler shops, cheap eateries, and hardware stores.

What we didn't realize is that winning the prize for colonial architecture in Costa Rica is like winning the Puerto Rican All-Commonwealth ice hockey title. The Calle Real has perhaps two small buildings left over from colonial times, and they probably weren't very important then. Other than that, it's just a street.

Liberia is a nice town. It has a small plaza bedecked with flowers, a number of good but cheap eateries, and three bus stations (Costa Rican towns never have just one). But we're happy to be pressing on.

Hurricane Party: Liberia, Costa Rica

We were enjoying a morning coffee in the tropical storm, when someone asked if we spoke English. She was a small woman with a large chip on her shoulder. Had we been to the beach? she asked. Had we SEEN what was there? she asked. Her tone indicated that the beach was the place where Costa Ricans molested their children in public.

She had been to Central America several times, she said. She was a seasoned and patient traveler, she averred. She had been to Nicaragua (pronounced Nee-haar-A-wah) and Panama (pah-na-MAH), and had never ever turned her back on a place before. But she had gone to Playa Flamingo (PLY-zhha, Fla-MEEN-goh), a tony resort, and had been appalled. It was unspeakably bad.

"What was wrong?" we asked.

"It was soooo touristy," said this tourist, "I just don't go for that kind of thing." She searched for the best way to illustrate her disgust. "They had a Pizza Hut," she said.

We nodded in deep sympathy (even though we'd just knocked back a personal pan pizza apiece at the airport in Dallas).

She asked us if we knew if other beaches in Costa Rica were like that. Without waiting for an answer, she continued on. She and her husband loved to travel. She was very fond of Nee-haar-A-wah, where things were not like they were in Khost-ah REE-kah. Of course, the beaches there weren't so nice, and the policemen carried machine guns and picked up spare change by robbing tourists, but at least she didn't have to share air with Pizza Hut employees.

After having gotten that off her chest, she pushed off to her room. I felt a little bad. Costa Ricans are a sensible folk who abolished their army 60 years ago and have, as a result, never had a civil war since. They have managed to build up a stable tourist industry, a large number of coffee plantations, and a safe, stable society.

Of course, for the people most inclined to take the side of the oppressed underclass that makes Costa Rica a place to avoid.