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This entry was posted @ 2:26 pm by Emily Ding under the category 'Latin American Literature, Nicaragua'. It has received 0 comments so far. Leave yours too.

I’ve forgotten to ask the Nicaraguans I’ve met about the weight poetry holds for them in their lives.

There is apparently a saying in Nicaragua that everyone - the politician, the farmer, the revolutionary - is a poet until they are proven otherwise… or perhaps that was just Salman Rushdie being a romantic. Writers easily fall prey to that.

But if it is true, I would have liked to get under the skin of some of the country’s poets. Yet at the same time, as one of Nicaragua’s modern poets (I can’t now remember his name) said, translation equals assassination. And I wholly agree. No matter how acclaimed a work is, I would rather not read it if I can’t read it in its original language.

However, I came across a poem by female poet and revolutionary Giocondo Belli (read an interview), a poem which seems to be the most ubiquitously translated:

Rivers run through me
mountains bear into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines,
earth for sowing love
ng like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to set it free, beautiful
full of smiles…
i want to explode with love

Discounting my (probably uneducated) disdain for translated works, this translated poem works for me. Nothing describes the landscape of Nicaragua so well, its burgeoning quality.

This entry was posted @ 9:35 pm by Emily Ding under the category 'Nicaragua'. It has received 0 comments so far. Leave yours too.

I remember my first ride on a chicken bus through Nicaragua because of something I saw.

I was on my way to Granada, having boarded a bus from Masaya in the thick dust that blew from the dirt road, encrusting the sidewalks and the streets. I liked to have my hair wrapped up in a bandanna when when it got too dusty; the particles lodge into your hair like glue.

While I was bumbling along on the bus, I looked out the window and saw a stuffed man dangling from a tree, hanging by his neck. He was wearing what looked like a grey suit.

Then I thought it was a scarecrow, and didn’t think much else of it. But recently I picked up Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile, a slim volume of reportage he wrote while he visited Nicaragua in the mid-1980’s when the current President Daniel Ortega had first come into power.

In his novel, he’d described stuffed men exactly like the one I saw hung by the neck from trees, and he’d explained that they were the campesinos’ way of decrying Ronald Reagan, who had led the effort back in his presidency to crush ‘the communists’ of Nicaragua, defying international law.

Years later, I guess still nobody sees the need to take the Reagan doll off the tree. Or maybe somebody’s holding a very strong grudge.

This entry was posted @ 12:40 pm by Emily Ding under the category 'León, Nicaragua, Outdoors Adventure'. It has received 3 comments so far. Leave yours too.

So I went volcano boarding today.
Yes, it’s like snowboarding, except it’s on very fine black volcanic sand.

The only place you can do it now in Nicaragua is at the Cerro Negro (Black Mountain), about an hour-or-so drive away from the city of León. All you have to do really is book a place at Big Foot Hostel and they will transport you there and back in a truck where you ride in theback. Jailbird jumpsuits to ensure minimal injuries and masks to keep the stones out of your face and boards are also provided. It costs $19 USD per person and an additional entry fee of $3.50 USD into Cerro Negro.

The only catch is you have to carry your board up the cone of Cerro Negro, but it isn’t a difficult climb. An hour and a half perhaps, with rest stops along the way. Heck, if I can do it, anyone can.

Big Foot runs morning and afternoon tours, and while I was there the morning one was filled up so I signed up for the afternoon one and it was great because they were only five of us, compared to the usual group of 20. You get more time to explore Cerro Negro with less people. It may be hotter but to be honest I don’t think it makes much of a difference. It gets pretty damn hot in the mornings anyway. Just make sure you you don’t forget your sunscreen and you will be fine. The trek up is absolutely shadeless.

It’s not just about the boarding either. You can walk into the crater and explore it. The views are great, there are at least three different terrains - it’s not all black ash. There are some good pictures on this page.

Best of all, you don’t have to trek down.

About the Cerro Negro
Cerro Negro is the youngest volcano in the Western hemisphere, a pitchblack cone rising above the green surrounding it. The first eruption was in 1850, and the last in May 1995. The longest was in 1960 and lasted three months. The Cerro Negro is also characterized mostly by Strombolian activity, and usually flood cities by up to 15 meters of ash, weighing down rooftops as well. I’m told that’s why the residents around the area - even the women and kids - know how to detach a roof and to put it back, because they often have to clear their roofs from the fury of Cerro Negro.

Trivia
A lot of thought have gone into the boards you will use. Australian Darryn Webb, pioneer of this adrenaline-rushing mode of transport down Cerro Negro’s black slopes, started off himself trying out McDonald trays, so his bubbly Dutch girlfriend (who was our guide - well, and their dog called Bagel) told us. They’ve also tried everything else from picnic tables to refrigerator doors to mattresses and goodness knows what else. In the end they’ve settled on a piece of wood with a strip of laminate to minimize friction, which can only be used twice (not surprising considering how scratched up they get by the end of your run) before being recycled into bookshelves. Apparently, they also used to try it standing up like snowboarding, but it was too dangerous.

There was a guy who tried biking down the slopes too, and he escaped death with plenty of broken bones. Then he went back, when the slopes were covered with snow… and miraculously escaped any injuries. The craziness.

My Own Experience
Yes, you can get seriously hurt. And it is actually scarier than you would think. I thought it wouldn’t be all that scary since you’re actually sitting down like on a slide, but when you’re just about to push off down a 40 degree slope, damn but it does give you butterflies in your stomach. Or at least, for me, but I’ve never been very good about heights.

To get straight to the point, I crashed. Big time. So much so that my fellow volcano-boarders called it ‘the best crash of the day’, for its embarrassing clumsiness or its ingenuousness, I’m not sure.

Basically what went wrong was… not once did I put on the brakes. I basically let it fly, all the way down, and three-quarters of the way it was great, I’d balanced my weight correctly and the board was headed straight down at increasing speed. I felt like a landing plane unable to stop, screeching on tarmac - it sure sounded like it.

Then came the big dip. And my board started to swerve to the right. Uh-oh.

And honestly, I did think about putting on the brakes. But I was already going at such high speed I was afraid that if I tried to slow down now I’d throw myself off too much. So I decided, no … keep going, and hang on for dear life.

The next thing I knew I was tumbling sideways down the slopes. Not just rolling down, but actually bumping off the slopes… thump! thump! thump! So it was described to me.

I think I was prepared for the fall however, so I’d let myself roll down the slope with my arms close to my body, and thus I escaped with minimal injuries, just scratches on both my forearms and some to the underside of my face. It could have been worse. I could have tumbled headfirst rather than sideways.

My small backpack had also tore and my phone had fallen out without my knowledge. Later when our guide returned it to me (she’d picked it up), it had been terribly scratched. ‘It looks a lot better now,’ she quipped cheerfully.

Well, if nothing else I guess I’ve got a story to tell. And my phone still works.

This entry was posted @ 10:49 am by Emily Ding under the category 'Crossing Borders, Transportation, Nicaragua, Guatemala'. It has received 0 comments so far. Leave yours too.

Recently, I traveled from Guatemala to Nicaragua by bus via El Salvador, and was surprised that the immigration officers didn’t stamp my passport. I didn’t think of it immediately at the time, but no stamps could mean a little inconvenience for me. Right then I was more dismayed at how there would be no evidence of my footprints through Latin America in my passport. Talk about priorities.

Anyway, the problem: I’d been in Guatemala for a month and was planning to go back for another month after visiting Nicaragua, and as far as I knew I could only be in the country for a month without a visa, so if I had no stamps in my passport to prove that I´d gone out of Guatemala… you see what I mean?

So today I went to the Ministry of Foreign Relations in Managua armed only with my amateur Spanish (I couldn´t find an English speaker but as it was I got by perfectly alright!), and I was told that as a Malaysian I could move freely around Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua freely for 90 days without a visa. Otherwise I would have to go to bordering Mexico or Costa Rica and come back again before the 90 day-period expired. I´m still trying to figure out why they´ve amalgated these four countries… someone told me it’s due to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and that’s probably right.

This entry was posted @ 2:54 pm by Emily Ding under the category 'Latin American Music'. It has received 2 comments so far. Leave yours too.

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This entry was posted @ 10:36 am by Emily Ding under the category 'Transportation, Nicaragua'. It has received 0 comments so far. Leave yours too.

I met a Nicaraguan lady a week ago whose sister works with NGOs on the Carribbean coast of Nicaragua so she has offered me some advice on how to get to some places in the NAAN (North Atlantic Autonomous Regions) and NAAS (South Atlantic Autonomous Regions). I’ve pretty much cut-and-pasted her email below.

TO SAN CARLOS
To go to San Carlos, there are two ways to do it:
1) One is to go by bus from Managua to San Carlos and then by boat from San Carlos to el Castillo; the trip takes about 12 hours by bus to San Carlos and about 2-3 hours from San Carlos to el Castillo; the buses leave early in the morning (3-4 am) or in the afternoon (4pm). The bus route is the cheapest one.
2) The second way to get there is by airplane from Managua to San Carlos and then by boat. The flight takes about one hour and the boat (2-3 hours). The flight may be around $130 round trip. El Castillo is a nice place because of the fortress and the history of el Castillo, and there is also a natural reserve in that area. You CANNOT GO to Bluefields from there. You have to go back to Managua to go to Bluefields.

TO BLUEFIELDS
To go to Bluefields there are two options:
1) One from Managua to Bluefields by airplane; costs about $130 round trip.
2) Second option is by land from Managua to el Rama (a city) and from el Rama to Bluefields by boat (around $15-20 round trip). The bus fare is about $15-20 round trip but it takes about 8-10 hours from Managua to el Rama, and from el Rama to Bluefield takes about 2 hours by boat.

TO PEARL LAGOON
You can go to Laguna de Perlas by boat from Bluefields; it takes about 1 hour. Only way to go to Laguna de Perlas is from Bluefields.

TO THE CORN ISLANDS
You can take a flight from Managua. Or you can also go to the Corn Islands from Bluefields by air or by boat. The air fare may be reasonable ($50–not really sure about the fare); by boat is less expensive but could be dangerous because it travels by sea and the boat is a very small one.

TO PUERTO CABEZAS (BILWI)
You can fly from Managua and you can also fly from Bluefields but it maybe that they send you to Managua (in transit) first and then to Puerto Cabezas; thus, you need to check the connections first.

There is no boat to Puerto Cabezas. However, there is a route by land; you will have to travel through many places (and is a long, long trip); could start from Managua, go to Boaco, go to Rio Blanco (town), {riding on a “good” road}; go to Siuna (town), Rosita y Puerto Cabezas {dirt road and in bad shape}; this trip takes about 15-18 hours based on the road conditions. The fare is not expensive (although, I have no idea how much).

TO WASPAM
As to the route to Waspan, you are right, the best thing is to go by air from Managua.

NOTE
If you decide to go to the Atlantic Coast, please keep in mind that the boat schedules may not be on regular, daily basis; and the boat may be fragile and small ones; as for the buses, yes, they may break down sometimes and may be uncomfortable.