Volcano boarding - A tale of two Shoshanas

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After my last update I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Leon and taking picture after picture of church after church, something in which this country is most certainly not lacking. The buildings are all painted in these fantastic bright colors, and there is more branding/advertising here than in the US. Apparently if you don't want to paint your own walls/store/house a major multinational company will paint it for you, with their logo! So you'll be driving through the countryside and walls will be painted with HUGGIES, OREOS, KOTEX, etc. Leon was much the same, although one thing I can say about central America so far is that it seems to be much cleaner than I remember SE Asia being. There are actual trashcans lining the streets, and very few people seem to smoke cigarrettes which is encouring after visiting a place like Thailand where EVERYONE smokes, all the time. Even the tourists here smoke less than they seemed to in Asia.

Motorcycles, dirtbikes, cars and horse drawn carts remain the main form of transport with no central American equivalent of Tuktuks anywhere in sight. After the sun went down I got dinner and a couple of beers at Via Via the hostel across the street from Bigfoot hostel and had a couple of beers and watched the Nicaraguan pool sharks play while trying to figure out what rules they were using. Eventually one of them asked if he could sit with me and practice his English so we chatted for the next couple of hours and I practiced a couple of spanish sentences as well, until around 10 when I realized that I was exhausted and so I said my goodbyes and walked across to my hostel. I sat down on my bed to write in my journal my plan for the next ten days and woke up hours later to find that I had just passed out fully dressed on top of my notebook, with my contacts in, and everyone else was in bed asleep. I took my contacts out and went back to sleep only to be shaken awake by a man stage whispering "ms zimmerman! ms zimmerman! someone is here for you!" I panic, thinking I've somehow missed the volcano boarding tour I had signed up for and rolled out of bed and sprinted for the door, only to find a man waiting for me at the entrance to the hostel holding a piece of paper with the name of a bank(?), an address and "senora zimmermann" written on it. Both men (the hostel worker and the stranger) are trying to talk to me in Spanish and I'm not understanding much except that apparently they think I'm supposed to be going to volunteer with this federation that works with children....which doesn't sound like anything I would EVER volunteer for. I make it as clear as I can that there must be some sort of mistake, they apologize and I head back to bed for 15 minutes of sleep before I have to wake up. It was a very strange incident and I can't for the life of me understand how that mix up occured.

At nine a group of ten of us and our two guides (one british and one australian as well as a native driver) piled into a pickup truck and headed off to Volcan Cerro Negro. We had a nice talk in the back of the truck, four people were in a group together, one American, one Welsh girl, one British guy and their guide, and then a couple from Britain, a spanish man, an american who just got out of the peace corp and a european who spoke no real english. We stopped at the entrance to the national park and pay our 100 cordoba entrance fee and sign in. Which is when the girl behind me in line says "that's my name" and I was like "no it's not" she's like "yes, yes it is, my name's Shoshana, you can ask them". It blew my mind. I would never have ever imagined meeting another Shoshana anywhere except Israel, and here's this red-headed girl who was born in CA but goes to GW and so has been living in DC for three years and she happens to be in Nicaragua at the same time I am...and with MY NAME? What are the chances of that? We got to visit with the armadillo and snakes they had on site, I jumped at the chance to hold the snake while most everyone else cringed or took pictures, and then we got back in the truck. No real surprise here but the closer and closer we got to Cerro Negro the more this black monolith LOOMED at us over the greenery. We finally pulled up by it's base and each person was given an orange bag to carry around their necks and a wooden sled type thing about the size of a snowboard, and up we went. The path was awful, full of fist sized volcanic pumice rock that shifted and rolled when you stepped on it (NOT great for my sprained foot) and steep in areas. After our second rest stop we were finally climbing the volano proper and the wind picked up and was doing its best to blow you over by catching the board and flinging it around while you tried to both hold on and keep climbing. We finally reached the top of the volcano (the heat baking up from the ground did not improve the climb very much) and rested in hurracaine force winds before beginning the trek across the volcanoes spine. We dropped off the boards at one spot and then walked over to the rim above the crater and took pictures before walking back to the boards and putting on our heavy parachute like orange protective suits and science lab goggles. We got a short speech about how to the control the board (pretty useless in practice) and then two by two we were shoved down the side of the volcano. Its a loooong way down and the slope actually increases halfway down to 41% at which point you drop out of sight of the people on top. I was the third set to go, and I pretty much immediately went over sideways and had to right myself, made it another halfway down the slope and wiped out again, and then made it the rest of the way down without incident, clocking in on the speed camera at a respectable 43 km/hr and coming in as the fastest girl to make her way down. The Spanish man came SPEEDING like a bullet down the side of the mountain and actually was clocked going 76 km/hr, one of the top 10 highest speeds ever reached, but once he hit the bottom he couldn't stop and ended up just kind of cartwheeling over a couple of times. It was a FANTASTIC, AMAZING experience that if it didnt involve climbing up carrying the boards I would have wanted to do again immediately, but at that point we all looked like we belonged in an Orbitz gum commerical, covered in volacanic ash and dirt, rocks in our hair, throats, sinuses, underwear, everywhere. We rode back in the back of the pickup truck, and I remembered that I really am happiest in a foreign country, riding around half hanging out of the truck with the wind in my hair.

We made it back to the Bigfoot hostel around 1pm and celebrated with our complimentary mojitos, which (after a shower) turned into four mojitos, which turned into a quick dinner and then card playing and beers, more beer, more beer, a session in the tiny little swimming pool and eventually a late night snack at a street vendor (finally good food!) which is a long hand way of saying I never did make it to las penitas before I left Leon. The other Shoshana was on a GAP tour so she and the two others that had been on the volcano boarding trip introduced us to the rest of their group and that's who I spent the night hanging out with. I will say I feel preeety smug about outdrinking a bunch of british people and not even having a hangover to show for it.

This morning I met up for breakfast with Karl (from the GAP group) and Sara - the peace corps girl - and Matt from the Bigfoot Hostel (also American) and Karl told us where they would be staying in Grenada and the three of us decided to all head down together today. We got a taxi over the microbus terminal and found out a little too late that they expected us to sit the entire ride with our giant backpacks on our laps. Well at least there was air conditioning so we figured it wouldnt be too bad, until we actually got underway and the driver immediately turned off the a/c. Apparently it was only on long enough to keep the passengers from melting before they could fill up the van. So we spent a very hot and sticky hour and a half or two hours back to Managua. Got into the city and transferred buses so quickly (to Grenada( that the second bus was actually still moving while we were trying to fling ourselves into it. One more hour in an un airconditioned but much less crowded bus and we arrived in Grenada, and checked into the Bearded Monkey hostel. They were out of dorm beds so it looks like tonight we'll be on mattresses on the floor.

First thing I did in Grenada was hunt down the Blue Mountain horse tours office and book myself a two hour tour for tomorrow morning ($35 outrageously expensive but again so unique its worth it). I made it back to the hostel as the first rain drops fell and it rained for the next hour or so, but its finally stopped and the weather is even cooler so I'm going to go exploring now. Hopefully tomorrow I'll wake up early and see more of Grenada and then take the tour, and get back to the hostel early enough to make my way up to Laguna de Apoyo for the afternoon.

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Comments

[Christa]

I miss you!
Wow, Shosh, your trip sounds amazing so far! I can't wait to see pictures! Volcano boarding sounds like THE COOLEST thing ever. I love that you got to hold a snake and that they provided a complimentary cocktail, haha. Stay safe, have fun, love you!