Well, how many?
You don't know? Fat lot of good you are.
Anyway. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The plan was this. Get to the east coat of Nicaragua, see the Pearl Cays and then travel directly to the Corn Islands, little known gems of the Caribbean (apparently). Most people fly to the Corns from the old pirate town of Bluefields (or, showing little regard for adventure, from Managua itself). Those with limited Cordobas can also take a six hour ferry ride from Bluefields to Great Corn, encountering (allegedly) big waves and vomit explosions along the way.
Reasoning that if we were going to lay out almost $200 dollars to get to Corn any way other than a ferry (and having spent enough hours on Nicaraguan buses to both save the necessary funds and earn the right to eschew another few hours of transport captivity) Michelle and I chose our ambitious path. We both wanted to see Pearl Cays, (mostly) uninhabited islets off the Nicaraguan mainland with the archetypal white sandy beaches and deliciously blue waters, for which we would likely be stung for $200+. Flights from Bluefields to Corn would cost around $150, so we thought anything around $400 for the full tour from Cays to Corn would make a certain amount of sense. That is, a certain amount of sense to a crazy old man with a mercury-poisoned brain who eats chips wrapped in the Fortean Times and licks frogs for fun. And me.
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| Monsieur Eiffel, eat your coeur out. |
It took two days to get from El Castillo on the Rio San Juan to Bluefields on the Caribbean Sea. It's not terribly far as the Snowy Egret flies, but since most of the intervening landscape consists of rivers and rainforests, terrestrial bipeds must find another route via San Carlos, the most painful part of which was the evening spent in the awesomely dull environs of Juigalpa, a rancher town at least illuminated (literally) by an enormous cut-out style statue of a cowboy. Just getting there was quite an achievement given the tendency of the much rehearsed phrase "¿A qué hora sale el próximo autobús?" to produce about five different answers depending on whom you asked. Since the buses all appear to be run by different operators, all of whom want to both depart promptly but at the same time sell out not only every seat but every possible inch of floorspace, their agents on the ground are not given to helping each other out. Fortunately, this means that - almost uniquely in life - the one giving the you the answer you wanted to hear is probably the one telling you the truth. 'Edward' was selling tickets for the 10am, and despite the efforts of his rivals to persuade us that the 10am didn't exist, it was Edward's smiling visage that ushered us, on time, towards the tourist desert of Juigalpa. For a while we shared our packed bus with a 32-inch cathode ray TV, and when Michelle offered a Pringle to the lady sitting with it, she took the packet and didn't give it back. Broadly applicable moral - don't give crisps to Nicaraguan women carrying huge TVs on buses.
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| Edward, who clearly enjoys hanging on to buses |
We arrived in Juigalpa too late to find the famous Archeological Museum (famous, that is, to anyone other than the people we asked for directions) and the gallery of small cows with two heads, so the Readybrek Kid was the closest we came to cultural enlightenment during our brief stay. On balance, the 9 hour bus journey we dodged by visiting Juigalpa would have only been slightly more tedious, but we weren't to know. From the startled stares of some of the locals, we were probably the only foreign tourists to come through town in at least a fortnight, so at least one party was able to enjoy some novelty.
From there on the journey gets a bit more exotic. Through strange dusty roadside townlets with radical preachers with voices like Davros, through mountains and forests, you eventually reach El Rama, where the bus cedes its crown to the boat as the King of Public Transport. The first novelty Rama gave us was the Caribbean-accented English suddenly on offer. Two tourists wandering up to the port with enormous backpacks is an invitation to swarms of friendly advice givers, and he who speaks the most English wins. Or would, if he didn't direct us to stand in a queue for what appeared to be some sort of Spanish-language Pinter production, with lots of people standing around glaring at each other and frequent long pauses. Eventually, a second Anglophone called us out of the audience of the mystery play, and directed us to another ticket office which, remarkably, sold tickets rather than avant-garde theatre experiences.
Loaded onto our first panga, replete with obligatory crates of chirping chicks, we sheltered briefly from a tropical shower by hiding under a boat-sized piece of plastic, before launching off on the next stage of our journey. The river zipped away beneath us at startling speeds, though the speed wasn't as startling as the occasional salmon-like leap from the surface of the water and subsequent smack-down (something to which we would later become more than accustomed). We were in good hands, however, something demonstrated amply when a small child's pink baseball cap was snatched from her head by the whipping winds. Alerted by her cry of anguish, and also by the fact that the hat had just flow past his eyeballs at 50mph, the driver launched us into a sharp about turn. Most of the passengers, completely oblivious to this act of chivalry, looked briefly terrified, but were soon helping pass back the dripping headgear to the delighted girl after it was fished from the waters.
As we reached Bluefields Bay, the waves were getting higher and the boat was flying out of the water more often. For some reason, we didn't properly assess what this might mean for a panga ride on the open ocean, and continued our quest for the Cays and the Corns.
To be continued...
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| The world's most terrifying salesman: San Carlos bus station |
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