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

Apparently, in Nicaragua, everybody - the politician, the farmer, the revolutionary - “is a poet until they are proven otherwise”… so said Daniel Ortega in the mid-1980s to Salman Rushdie when the author visited his country (The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey).

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.

1. Purified water - I don’t do it anymore now but when I first entered Guatemala, I’d started following Lonely Planet’s overzealous advice and brushed my teeth with drinking water when one of my fellow homestay mates told me he was doing that. Lonely Planet also tells you to wash all your food with drinking water and that you shouldn’t eat uncooked vegetables but I’ve been doing all that in blatant defiance of their advice. It is impossible to escape the salads in Central America: one, because it’s so ubiquitous; and two, because it’s so good. I’ve been eating plenty of market/street food (actually it’s my favourite) and I’ve been okay. Maybe Bel is right, maybe Malaysians have got stronger constitutions. Our tummies have been trained well by the not-so-distinctive-as-we’d-like-to-think Malaysian feature: the pasar malam (night market).
2. Hot water - This commodity much taken for granted at home in Malaysia and in London is scarce and only available in some houses (you have to install a waterheater which obviously requires extra money) and even if it is available it is usually inadequately provided. Either the water only remains hot at low volume, or it is too hot you run the danger of scalding yourself, or too cold - there seems to be no way to have anything in between. Water pressure is also generally dismal. I always feel like I have soap suds stuck in my hair after I shower. In Guatemala when I couldn’t access hot water I didn’t shower at night because it was too cold. In Nicaragua, where I’ve been traveling for a month now, I’ve only had hot showers for a few days when I was in the highlands of Estelí and Jinotega. But in Nicaragua, the lowest country in Central America, it’s almost welcome because it’s so hot.
3. Toilets that flush - Not all toilets flush, and even if they do, they might not if you clog it with tissue paper. In Guatemala and Nicaragua you don’t flush anything down the toilet, not even toilet paper that you’d think is supposed to go down the toilet bowl. Instead, you throw everything into a wastepaper basket that is provided, whether or not your tissues are filled with urine or faeces or that monthly inconvenience women go through. Very nice.

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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 Nicaraguan Journey, 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.

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

The place to do it 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 anback truck. 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 as unfit as I was I survived it, then anyone can.

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