Off to Nicaragua

D & D Brewery

Procession in Leon

 

Saturday, March 31 2012

For the second night in the row, around 3 in the dang morning this dang rooster was crowing (Maybe I should quiz the rooster on his ancestral lineage before throwing a rock at it)!  That thing has no idea what time it is! You should see the place where it lives.  The lot is right next to the one we’re in.  We’re on the third floor so we can look out our window or off the back porch and down into their trash dump of a yard.  There’s this rickety shack that looks like something that you’d see on the eastside of Charleston, SC, perched on unlevel cinder blocks over this muddy trash filled swamp.  The dang place is crawling with disrespectful chanticleers and beady eyed rats.  So you would assume that no one lives there.  No so, in fact people do live in that filth.  We heard them approaching one evening as they crunched thru their garbage on what I guess was their walkway. 

Anyway, the rooster was crowing all night.  I got up once to go try to kill it by hitting it with some rocks that the guy next door (from Georgia, the state) gave to me to throw at it.  But who was I kidding?  I was not going to be able to kill this rooster by hitting it with a rock from the third floor balcony of the building next door.  So even tho we didn’t get a good nite’s sleep we were still at the boat dock at 5:45 am to catch the 6:20 Vomit Comet back to the mainland.  We boarded the boat and took our seats.  As luck would have it one of the women that was throwing up on the ride over was on our boat again and she came and sat down next to me.  It wasn’t long into the wavy ride before she signaled one of the crew for a plastic puke bag. 

Back on mainland Honduras we got our truck and drove 4 hours west and then south to Lago Yojoa.  New Beige is running better than ever and it’s a great feeling to drive her smoothly with no operational issues lingering about.  Phish’s “Contact” came on by the grace of MP3 shuffle to celebrate New Beige’s resurgence.  The other day a Honduran customs official even referred to her as “Champagne” colored, which made her blush. 

We checked in to a room at D & D’s brewery.  This place is a small beer brewery, restaurant and jungle hotel.  It was set up by some guy from Oregon, the state.  We’ve yet to try the beers but I’ll be sure to write up Marcie and I’s full review.  Stay tuned.

A couple hours later:

The beer list was full of light fruit beers, normally this is not ok for a respectful microbrewery but in this climate I thot it might be a good choice.  They brot out a shot glass sample of each of their 6 beers for free.  When I tasted them I immediately saw the reason they were light bodied; they were really watery.  I really didn’t like any of the 6 (raspberry ale, strawberry ale, blueberry ale, pale ale, amber ale and porter) but I felt an obligation to at least buy something, so I hoped for the best and ordered the amber ale.  When it came my first reaction was: Is this beer? It was flat and cloudy. It looked like someone handed me a mug of apple cider.  After tasting it I would have been happy with cider.  It was terrible.  I like beer and I’ve not had one in weeks.  Even if it had just been alrite I would’ve gladly downed it and ordered another.  But instead I didn’t even drink half of it (this is practically unprecedented).  The beers at D & D Brewery reminded me of when a German Wizen Lager (see Flensburger), originally clear, goes bad with time or heat and turns into cloudy flat muck.  The beers here are frankly an embarrassment.  I now know why the brewmaster (?) chose to have his brewery in Honduras: There’s no way that he could sell a beer this bad in Oregon.

~Jon

*Jon’s decided to stop using unnecessary letters to spell out his words in case you were wondering. 

~Marcie

** I’m taking some inspiration from the electronic age of texting lingo and putting to rest some old English suffix’s like “ough” (Apologies to Sean and Tim Keough).  Hopefully one of the political parties will put this on a bill sometime in the near future.

~Jon

Bonus Section!

“A Couple Things I’ve Noticed”

By Jon Palm

In Latin America the style these days for young pansy type guys is “Hollister” and “Abercrombie and Fitch”.  It was really funny in an embarrassing sad way to see this style come and go in America a few short years ago.  But now to see it pass thru the realm of consciousness a second time is even more insightful as to human behavior.  Most of the outfits I see here are cheap obvious imitations that are nothing more then the brand name spelled out as conspicuously as possible.  I can’t figure out if this is more or less stupid than paying more for the “real” brand name.

It’s never fail funny to see someone with your team’s gear on around here.  Do you know where the shirt that you wore as a 10 year old in Mariner Youth Soccer is now?  Its being worn in all its peeling iron on numbers glory by a 12 year old Honduran kid playing football barefoot in a dirt lot with palm trees as goal posts.  Every few days I’ll see someone with Red Sox or Patriots (Drew Bledsoe the other day) gear and go up and give the obligatory fist bump.  No one ever turns down a fist bump but they have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention the team.  You see a lot of Yankees gear, some Sox and occasionally even Steelers’ gear. 

Sunday, April 1 2012

We left D & D Brewery after having what according to Lonely Planet were the best blueberry pancakes around.  I make way better pancakes and the waitress didn’t even bring me butter or syrup.  I had to ask for it.  If you’re serving pancakes you need butter and syrup.  Geesh.  Lonely Planet was way overestimating the coolness of this place.  We purposely made this place a stop in our schedule because LP said it was so cool (Great beers, pool, atmosphere, blueberry pancakes).  I think someone got paid for that review. 

We then drove around the lake and admired the views.  There were many people on the side of the road with strings of fish for sale.  We drove through the capital of Honduras, which is Tegucigalpa and I can’t remember ever seeing a crappier capital city.  It was fairly easy to drive through with Jon navigating and me driving.  It was then another hour to the border. 

At the border with Nicaragua our truck was immediately swarmed with the people who try to “help” you through the border crossing processes.  We had learned several borders back not to get help from these guys so we parked our truck and started the exit process for Honduras.  It was a fairly quick trip to Customs and then Immigration to surrender our permits.  A gentleman then moved the chain for us to cross over to the Nicaraguan side to get our tires sprayed with insecticide, buy mandatory insurance, get our visitor permits and our vehicle permit.  This was also fairly quick and we started to try to drive through the other chain at the end of the border area.  No way Jose!  One of the guys at the Nicaraguan side kept trying to tell us something and we just kept showing him all our papers we just got.  No one could figure out what was going on so the guy took our passports and started running back the other way.  I look at Jon like “Oh shit, should we have given that guy our passports?”  He did have a uniform and was trying to tell us something so Jon went after him while I waited with the truck.  Apparently somewhere along the way we didn’t go to Nicaraguan Immigration and we still had to pay and get our passports stamped.  After that we were on our way. 

In Nicaragua they use the type of money called Cordoba and the exchange rate is 23C to $1.  They also seem to not have topes in Nicaragua, which is great and New Beige is loving driving now.  We drove through to Esteli where we found a hotel for the night and went out to dinner at an organic place that had many vegetarian options.  I got the vegetable mix with cheese and bread and Jon got the vegetarian lasagna.  

A guy that worked at the hotel and showed us where to park was admiring my bike when he showed us to the parking lot.  We had been wanting to get rid of the bike for some time now since I lost my tire so when the guy asked about the bike Jon told him we wanted to sell it.  Jon and the guy bargained in Spanish and Jon told him we wanted 200C for the bike ($10).  He only had 100C on him and said he would get us the other later, which he did.  So we gladly gave him the bike.  Both of our bikes were good bikes back when my Dad and Gladys got them for us to go on our bike trip from Pittsburgh, PA to Cumberland, MD back in 2007.   They lasted for a long time and had been on many adventures.  We had unloaded Jon’s bike back in Mexico for a car wash.  Both bikes wouldn’t shift gears anymore, Jon’s didn’t even have brakes and mine was missing a front tire, so they ended up just taking up space and being a liability for theft.  We are happy to be rid of them.

Monday, April 2 2012

Ok, blog blog blog.

I got up early and walked around to scout out the town of Esteli, Nicaragua and procure supplies.  This city is the hub of an agricultural valley in the dry hi-lands that produce some of the world finest tobacco (for cigars) and coffee.  We got a move on fairly early and rolled down the road south on Central America 1 and then west on Nicaragua hi-way 26 to Leon.  Yes, Leon. 

On the way we drove up to two men in police uniforms at some kind of a road block check point.  This happens at least once a day, no big whoop.  They usually want to see if your papers are in order and sometimes to look in the truck to make sure that we are not operating some kind of mobile narcotics lab.  These two particular guys started talking to me in Spanish and I was not getting their meaning.  When I asked them to speak more slowly they spoke more rapidly.  We couldn’t figure out what these guys wanted so we started showing them our documentation for our vehicle that we just got at the border yesterday.   But something was not quite rite about these guys.  I couldn’t see any police vehicle nearby so I glanced at their holsters to see if they were packin’ (sorry about that, I couldn’t resist), but their straps were empty.  I pretended that I wanted to show them something on our vehicle permit they were looking at, grabbed it away from them and handed it back to Marcie for safekeeping.  I asked them Que necessitas?  They replied, Gasolina, dinero por gasolina por la polica, or something like that.  I was pretty sure now that these guys were not real cops even though they had uniforms and badges, so I said Lo Siento, Yo necessito irse, and drove away watching my side mirrors to see if they would give chase.  You can’t usually pull this move with the real cops so this was the litmus test.  They didn’t follow so I guess they were scammers. 

We had heard about carjackings happening at fake police checkpoints.  This might have been one of those.  A shakedown in the daytime and a robbery at nite. 

Besides me driving the wrong way on two one way streets we got to Leon without furthur incident and checked into a hotel in the center of town.  It’s wicked hot here, at least 90 f daytime high.  It’s also Semana Santa week everywhere in Hispanic countries.  So there are lots of Nicaraguan tourists on holiday.  As far as I can see the only attractions are the religious themed processions that march around the streets.  Thousands of people line the sidewalks 4 and 5 deep to see a bunch of guys in robes walking slowly and somberly carrying a replica Jesus casket.  We have been seeing pretty much this same thing for the past week in Guatemala, Honduras and now Nicaragua.  I was bored with it 2 minutes into the first one.  There are better floats made in any American small town high school homecoming parade.  I can’t understand the attraction, but it must be some kind of mass hypnosis that makes all of these people believe that there’s something much more significant below the surface, because it does not pass the eyeball test. 

It’s 10:30 pm here and still way too dang hot.  I’m dripping sweat just typing.