Nicaragua, in all its soggy glory.

---

Well, we are now in the land of Nica, and i have never seen rain like this. To call it hurricane like would probably be a gross overstatement and an insult to those who experience actual hurricanes, but man alive it is wet here. We are hunkering down in a rotting wooden hotel that seem like an old pirate"s haunt. Except the only things haunting it seem to be mosquitos and candle carrying travellers. In order to save electricity there is a mandatory no power window for a few hours every night. Our spanish doesn{t extend to "black out" so we kind of pawed our way around last night before ffiguring out that no outlets worked, and that lightening can offer necessary light. Our day of travels was pretty drawn out yesterday. It seems like all the excitement happens on travel days...especially when it takes you from 9am til. 7 pm to travel under 200km. We were supposed to take a bus from stinky realestate devl. capital of the coast, tamarindo at 9 but the bus wouldn{t start. so the driver tried to rollit backwards down a hill to get it going but only succeeded in almost running over an old woman. we chased down another bus, and then took the most scenic (long and convoluted) route possible to get to the nearest town. I have never held my pee for 3.5 hours before, so i would appreciate some applause. It turns out that i lost another journal...some more scattered applause would be nice...and in it was the backgammon tally for the trip so far...good thing i can remember that emilie was kicking my ass with 23 wins to my 9. maybe it isn{t a gameo f chance after all.
The highlight of yesterday{s travels though, was definitely entering nica and then having an entire bus load of nicas shoo ouf off the bus in the middle of nowhere so that we could catch some supposed bus to the coast...and then once we got off the other bus whipped by. instead of reboarding our original bus i waved down a propane truck and we hopped on the back for a late night bus chase. in the end we we were thwarted by bumpy roads and the presence of propane, but we got a free 40 minute ride to san juan del sur, and there was no rain. Until we arrived. it was beautiful to ride, and we could see fireflies winking at us from the soggy fields alongside the road. we sang christmas carols for most of the ride.
we aren{t sure how long we are going to stay here, since the rain is pretty overwhelming. at least the toilets flush and the papayas are over 2 feet long.

---