Advertisement
Nicaraguans ("Nicas") are a very stern people. Not a lot of smiling or friendliness toward us gringos or toward each other from what I could see. They have been polite to us - but minimally. I guess widespread poverty and a civil war in the past 30 years might do that to a people. Nicaragua means "the land of lakes and volcanoes" - the landscape is very lush and pretty during the rainy season and there are many volcanoes that you can see off in the distance... but there is a lot of poverty... random people walking down roads everywhere between cities.
Rob and I had our friend Roberto the cab driver take us from Managua to Granada today. A bus ride would've been $4. The cab ride was $40. Worth every penny. We drank beer all the way.
Kevin was sick for the past 36 hours with a stomach virus and was down for the count when we arrived at the hotel in Granada to meet up with him and Jon. Jon, Rob, and I immediately began drinking heavily in the hotel bar with a table pulled up by the window with burglar bars. We had a great
view of the street corner - very interesting people watching.
Clean ice is not readily available in Granada we learned quickly, so after the beer was gone we drank warm vodka and "Burn" energy drink cocktails. Disgusting... but of course we finished it all off. The hotel staff people were not happy when we had a little incident in the bar that made a mess. I won't go into details.
The next day we all walked around town a bit (Kevin rallied from his stomach bug) - Granada is a quaint little town for certain but definitely with more a small town feel than that of a city.
During our lunch on a restaurant patio a whacked out young man asked us for a cigarette (my sense is that he was both mentally unstable and on multiple controlled substances). We gave him one. He then asked for money after telling us a sad story. We said politely, "no, adios amigo," and he got angry and walked away. He was wearing a red bandana on his head (looked like gang colors). Later that afternoon he walked up to us in the city square and yelled loudly "DIE!!!!" and
stared us down. We walked away while he stood there and then he stomped off angrily. *sigh*
We then headed toward Lake Cicabola Park through the south part of town. We got a bit of an unsafe vibe, as it was obviously a rough part of town we were in. We made a wrong turn down a street and four older gentleman said a few aggressive-sounding words in Spanish. We turned around kept walking. At the entrance to the Lake Park there was a sign that said basically "No guns or knives". We read later in our travel guide that tourists are strongly advised not to walk through the south part of town or go to the Lake Park for safety reasons. Nobody really messed with us though. Maybe they figured any gringos crazy enough to walk through that part of town should not be messed with?
That night at dinner back in the main street of Granada, we sat out by the street at a table in front of a restaurant. The angry whacked out gang banger in the red bandana came stumbling by and saw us. We were not happy to see him. He was in
Horse cart!
They are everywhere in Granada. a better mood and didn't seem to remember yelling "DIE!" at us earlier. Jon was sporting his red bandana out that night just for the pure absurdity of the red bandana gang banger situation. We took the opportunity to capture a nice photo of Jon with our new buddy. All's well that ends well I suppose. Glad he didn't return with a whole gang to take us out!
I think Granada was ready for us to go when we left and headed out early on a shuttle to San Juan del Sur. To our credit many of the local people laughed at us and seemed to find us amusing. Americanos!!!!
So... until next time then, from San Juan del Sur.
Salud,
- Drew (and travel crew)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.092s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0376s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
cupcakesolitaire
non-member comment
wowza shizam zam! sounds like you guys had quite a lot of semi disturbing incidents, the best part is how the guy who wanted you to die ended up posing in shots w/ yall! i luv that story.