During the two months that I was at the Ahimsa Yoga Ashram, we’d only get one day off a week, and that was usually on a Monday. I felt like there was a certain poetic justice to having Mondays as our day off. Instead of hating Mondays because they marked the end of the weekend, Mondays got to be – for a few weeks – my favourite day of the week.
During the rest of the week I felt like a yoga teacher – and/or student – but on Mondays, I felt like a traveller and an adventurer. We had a bunch of wonderful Mondays on which I learned a lot more about Nicaraguan people and their culture, and about how different people travel and live.
I started off writing about all my Mondays off, but that made this post way too long. So instead, I’m going to tell you about my favourite Monday off, and then include a few little stories from other Mondays that had the biggest impact on how I thought about Nicaragua, travel, and life in general.
The Monday we intended to visit Masaya National Park
This was our second Monday off. On the first Monday, we’d gone to Pochomil, a little beach town that used to be really popular and busy, but that after Nicaragua’s civil unrest had become a bit of a ghost town. Going there reminded me a bit of being at a night club after everyone’s left…. it just felt kind of sad.
So on this second Monday, we’d decided to go somewhere that was guaranteed to be cool – the Masaya Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in Nicaragua.
Getting there wasn’t going to be easy – we’d have to get a tuk tuk to the closest town, catch three different buses to get to the National Park, and then, finally, hike up to the volcano. But despite that, we were excited. On the night before, we baked some vegan banana bread to take with us (along with some killer homemade pineapple and mango jam), set our alarms for 5am, and went to bed early .
The next day, at 5:30, Sam, Ali, Eva and I crammed ourselves (and Leo the dog,) into a tuk tuk that we had pre-ordered the day before, and drove into town to meet Semjon, who had ridden there on his bike.
That was the easy part done. Now we had to figure out the buses.
Here’s the thing about buses in Nicaragua. There aren’t bus routes online. There’s no official timetable that you can check. There aren’t designated bus stops. The buses wait in the terminal until they’re full enough, and then drive along a route, calling out to everyone they see along the way, and stopping whenever someone wants to get in or out.
If, like, me, you’re used to bus stops and signage, this system is a little disconcerting. You have to know the bus route – which you figure out by asking around (in Spanish, since most people here don’t speak any English) – and then stand or walk anywhere along that route, until a bus comes by.
Luckily for us, Semjon and Sam both spoke Spanish and had caught these buses before, so they confidently shepherded us to the right spot.
The first bus we caught barely came to a full stop. It was racing along, and even though it slowed down when the driver saw us, we had to run after it to get on. The driver jumped out of the still rolling bus, and called out to us to use the back door to get on.
These buses are old American school buses, built for kids, and I think the backdoor was initially intended as an emergency door since you literally have to climb a little ladder to get up to it. We hurriedly clambered our way up (Leo took a flying leap), and pushed our way in.
And when I say ‘pushed’, I mean pushed. Do you know how the backs of buses usually say how many people they’re licensed to carry? I don’t think Nicaraguans pay attention to those numbers. The bus was so full that you could easily believe that someone was trying to break a Guinness World Record for the most number of people per square meter that could fit into a closed space. We got incredibly up close and personal with a lot of locals.
The first bus got us all the way to Managua, and stepping off it felt like entering into a completely different world to the quiet jungle we’d just come from. Nicaraguan bus terminals all seem to be located inside markets, and in addition to the plethora of little stalls and stands, there’s also hordes of people walking around, calling out their products and their prices at the tops of their voices. It’s fairly chaotic.
There are no signs anywhere either, so the only way that you can figure out where to go next is by asking around. Semjon led us through the crowds, past a multitude of buses heading in other directions, to a minivan, where he managed to haggle us a cheap price for the next leg of our trip.
Now you might wonder where this minivan suddenly came from. I certainly did. Weren’t we catching buses? How did Semjon know where this minivan was going? What was the deal with minivans? Let me explain.
As far as I could tell (although keep in mind that I couldn’t speak much Spanish, so I might not be 100% correct), minivans were privately operated and ran the same routes as the buses. Because they were smaller, it didn’t take as long for them to get full, so it was often faster getting a minivan out of a terminal than a bus.
While bus prices were set by the state, minivan prices were negotiable, although they often cost about the same as a bus. Like the buses, the minivans were full. There’d be people standing or crouching in the minivan so that instead of fitting 6-8 people, there’d be something like 25.
The cool thing about the buses and the minivans is that they know each other’s routes and they’re great at syncing up. When we told our driver where we were going, he chased down the next bus we needed to catch so that we ran off the minivan, and right onto the other bus. And this third bus, to our delight, was half empty. What luxury! We spread out across the seats at the back of the bus, dug out the banana bread and the jam, and ravenously tucked in.
We ended up getting dropped off at the park half an hour before it was even meant to open (this wasn’t planned – we’d just gotten there a lot faster than we’d expected). ‘Perfect’, I though, ‘we’ll really get to take advantage of the whole day.’
But after we’d been waiting a while, an employee came out and explained that there’d been some unusual volcanic activity lately, and a bunch of scientists had come to study it today. The park was closed to the public.
In what I would later learn was true Nicaraguan fashion, she gave us her phone number because information like this isn’t posted online there – if we planned on visiting the park another day, she said we could call her to see whether it would be open.
Well, that was a bit of a bummer. But Ali had a great Plan B up her sleeve. On a previous trip to Nicaragua, she’d thoroughly enjoyed visiting a little pueblo called San Juan de Oriente, which was an artisan village of ceramicists, and she suggested we go there.
San Juan de Oriente was both lovely and sad. You could tell that it had seen better times – probably before the civil unrest in Nicaragua. It’s full of stores selling beautiful handmade pottery. It felt a bit like stepping back in time – these weren’t fancy stores, but the homes of artisans. They’d sleep and work in the back, and sell their wares out the front.
The first store we visited was my favourite. It had these wonderful hand painted ceramic whistles in the shapes of various animals. They were stunning, and so cheap – only $2-$3 each. We each grabbed a whistle and played – some better than others – and the old man whose store it was started doing this adorable little dance.
I desperately wanted to buy lots of different things here, but I had to stop myself because I had no space or weight allowance left in my bags. I’m glad the others did though – I think the stores in San Juan de Oriente really need the business.
The last time Ali had visited, she’d been particularly impressed by the gallery of an internationally renowned ceramicist. She couldn’t remember his name exactly, but she thought it was something like Hector Gutierrez (I looked him up later and his name’s actually Helio Gutierrez). We wandered around, searching for his gallery, with no luck. Someone mentioned that he’d become an alcoholic, but given that we had the wrong name, I don’t know if that was actually true.
While we never found Hector, we did find lots of interesting food along the way. In Nicaragua, a lot of people sell food from their homes. They’ll put a paper sign on or next to their front door with a list of prices, and will sell things like homemade ice creams, juices, and chocolate covered bananas.
We tried an orange and beetroot juice, some chocolate bananas, and a fresh tortilla, hot off the pan, with homemade cheese that the woman had made from her own cow, the night before. Along the way we also found some mangoes fallen from a tree (delicious!), and bought a big bag of jocotes, this wonderfully tart fruit that’s endemic to the American tropics.
We also went into so many stores, talking to the artisans about their wares and their processes. One of them let us come into their home and showed us the entire process, letting us touch and see different pieces in various states of progress. Even when we weren’t buying things, people seemed happy to talk to us, and pleased that we were interested in learning more about their way of life.
It wasn’t just the artisans either. Later on, we stopped at a tiny little comideria for pupusas, and Semjon started talking to the women in Spanish. I couldn’t follow along because I didn’t know much Spanish, so I don’t know exactly what he said to them, but soon they were teaching him how to make pupusas, and let him make one himself. The experience desperately made me wish that I was fluent in Spanish already – I want to talk to little old ladies and learn how to cook from them too.
Eventually we made our way away from San Juan de Oriente and towards the Mirador de Catarina, from where you can see the Apoyo Lagoon, the Great Lake of Nicaragua, the city of Granada, and a lot of other things that I didn’t know the names of.
It’s pretty cool, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. The cool breeze up at the Mirador was so pleasant after all the walking we’d been doing in the hot sun, and the view was arresting enough that we spent a fair while just sitting there, taking it all in. I love visiting places that really make you aware of how small you are, and how big the world is. It’s such an awe inspiring feeling, and it reminds me to pause and spend more time appreciating the beauty around me.
Eventually, we left the Mirador to head back to Masaya, catching another few buses, and trudging on through the hot sun. Masaya reminded me a little of Managua because of how busy it was, but it was also very different. Managua was more built up, and definitely fancier. Masaya, for the most part, still seemed very austere and arcadian. There weren’t many glass windows or credit card readers here – it was all open little tiendas, payment in cash, with very little English spoken.
But it did have a lot of street food! We tried some homemade peanut ice cream (basically peanuts, milk, and either sugar or cream ground together, and then frozen), and salted plantain chips topped with shredded pickled cabbage – both delicious.
Masaya also had an abundance of second hand clothing stores. There was one on every block, and sometimes 2 or 3. I think, from the brands and the sizes, that the clothes all come from America. I guess this is what happens to the second hand clothes that don’t end up getting sold in Goodwill. I felt overwhelmed just looking at the piles of clothes so I didn’t do any shopping, I just looked from afar.
I did try to explore Masaya’s markets. These markets are famous, and I’d been looking forward to checking them out because I’d heard so much about them. But when we actually got there, I felt claustrophobic and overwhelmed. I lasted all of about 10 minutes before I had to bow out. Semjon and Eva spent ages there, and came back with all kinds of wonderful tales. Semjon was particularly excited about some raw chocolate he’d bought – freshly ground cocoa beans with sugar and milk mixed in – and a cocoa fruit that he’d eaten.
Sam and Ali spent most of their time at La Nani Cafe, probably the bougiest cafe (by far) in all of Masaya, with glass windows (the only place that I saw with glass windows, apart from the supermarket), free wifi, and air-conditioning. It was also very expensive. I sat there for a while, drinking a mango smoothie and guiltily enjoying the artificially cool air.
As much as I loved being at the Ashram, leaving all the comforts and security of home and coming to a completely different place to live in a completely different way can be a little disorienting. Sitting at the cafe, reading for a while – something I used to do back when I was living in the US, and before that, back in Sydney – felt comforting and familiar.
Going to the supermarket was also a really soothing experience, because this supermarket had some of the same products as I used when I was in the US and Australia. It made Nicaragua feel less foreign. I bought some Kinder to take back to the Ashram with me, like a little edible security blanket. Funnily enough, I got into trouble for the Kinder when Xian noticed the wrapper in the bin at the Ashram. Kinder is neither vegan nor Ayurvedic.
The cool part of this story comes when we were heading back home. Eva, Sam, Ali and I (and Leo the dog) started on our journey back home at around 5. We couldn’t stay out that late because the tuk tuk drivers in the town near the Ashram didn’t keep driving once it got dark (the town was basically dead in the evenings), so we had to get back early enough for the tuk tuk to drive us home. Semjon could stay out later since he’d be biking back from town, and we’d last seen him a few hours earlier, in the markets.
The first bus we caught got stuck in traffic at some point. I think there might have been a soccer game or something on – there were hordes of people all wearing blue flooding the street. It took ages for us to get to the next stop. When we did, Ali and I both took turns peeing behind a large tree. Suddenly we heard the others laughing and chattering excitedly – Semjon, who had caught a different bus, at a different time, had ended up arriving there at the same time as us. What a coincidence!
What makes this even better is what happened next. A ute drove past, and Semjon stuck his arm out and ran after it. The ute stopped and agreed to give us a ride, and we sprinted over, jumping into the back. We had a gorgeous drive in the back of the ute, looking up at the clear, cloudless sky blanketed in stars.
The driver dropped us off at El Crucero, where we had to catch one last bus to San Rafael. The last bus, thankfully, had enough seats for us all. The lights were a gentle soft yellow and Celine Dion was playing over the speakers. It felt strangely romantic, and I couldn’t help singing along a bit.
Close to San Rafael, Sam had to ask another passenger if we could borrow their phone so we could call the tuk tuk driver and get him to pick us up at our stop. We had to do this every single time we went anywhere on a Monday, actually, and it’s a sign of how helpful people in Nicaragua generally are that whoever we asked was always super obliging.
We made it back by around 8:30pm, quietly filing in through the gate and tiptoeing down to our cabins. I was still bubbling over with excitement, so I wrote down all the details about the day before I went to sleep. I had to omit so much in this retelling because it would get too long, but what I wanted to remember was:
- That we’d managed to get around all day without a phone, just by asking people for help and directions. This isn’t something I usually do because it involves so much trust and so little control, but things had worked out so well.
- Talking to people and being genuinely interested in how they did things often led to them showing and/or teaching you – like with the pottery and pupusas – both of which were super cool. I can’t wait until I know enough Spanish to be able to do this.
- Catching the buses, figuring out where to go, searching for Hector…. all of it was fun. On my own, I often get impatient because I just want to be at my destination. I think maybe the fact that we were in a group helped me enjoy all of it.
Other stories, told mostly in photos
What Nicaragua’s really like
Nicaragua was nothing like what I’d expected, in so many ways.
- I’d thought Nicaragua would be really dangerous, but instead I felt so safe there, all the time. People were just decent. We hitchhiked so much, and went to lots of different places – from bigger towns and cities to small, quiet villages. It was a lot safer than San Francisco!
- People are really friendly and helpful in Nicaragua. We would talk to truck drivers, random people selling things on the streets, security guards, hairdressers, bus drivers, and everyone was friendly and willing to help. I don’t mean to generalise – I’m sure there are people who aren’t like that too – but I think it’s a cultural thing there. People are used to talking to each other, and because there isn’t internet everywhere and people don’t have that much money, it’s normal to ask for and give help. It’s how things get done there.
- Men can behave in a sleazy way in Nicaragua, but I think that’s because they’ve been taught that you’re meant to flirt a lot with women, not because they’re actually creeps. And if someone makes you uncomfortable or does something inappropriate, and you call out, other people will come and help. Maybe it’s the sense of community that causes people to step in and do things instead of just watching quietly.
- Having said that, Nicaragua is super religious. There were three churches near the Ashram, even though there weren’t many people. At one church there were just 5 parishioners. When we were on the buses, I’d notice that so many people were wearing religious shirts, un-ironically. Sometimes people would come up and try to preach to us. The sad thing is that some of it was really homophobic.
- The educational system in Nicaragua is awful. Even Xian’s son would get so many days off, or come home early, because the teachers would have a surprise ‘meeting’. He’d spend so few hours at school. A lot of the kids who did go to school still weren’t fully literate. A lot of the adults who’d gone to school weren’t fully literate. Lots of people spelt things phonetically, because they didn’t know how to write the words. A lot of people are incredibly superstitious and have strange beliefs – which I guess makes sense if you don’t get taught much at school, and don’t have access to libraries or the internet.
- Nicaragua has the worst income inequality I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. So many people don’t have running water. A lot of things that we take for granted just aren’t available there. But then there’s a chain of supermarkets, La Colonia, that caters for the rich. There’s shopping malls and Hooters, and in Managua, there’s giant mansions with security guards (with guns) out the front. The rich drive around in luxury cars while the poor live in hovels. It’s pretty stark.
- Nicaragua has such a problem with litter. Xian explained that in the past, when they’d eat something, they’d just chuck the banana leaf (which was used as packaging) out the window, and it would decompose. Now everything uses plastic. And there’s plastic everywhere. Some stores wrap individual fruits in plastic. And people don’t realize that they can’t just throw it on the streets. It’s especially bad in rural areas – Xian’s property was mostly good, but it would still get garbage coming down the river, and the dirt roads outside were piled high with garbage on either side. There aren’t public bins in most places, either, so it’s hardly a surprise.
- There’s a huge problem with teen pregnancy in Nicaragua. I think that’s probably because they don’t get taught about contraception at school, and then their parents don’t teach them about it because they’re super religious.
Coming from San Francisco, where I’d been feeling burnt out and lonely, life in Nicaragua really made me think. Despite all the faults that I mentioned, being in Nicaragua was so relaxing. It’s a much more open place, out of necessity. If you don’t have internet, and can’t buy fancy tech gadgets, then the way you find out about things is to talk to people. People help each other, and talk to each other, and it was so nice getting to be a part of that. Life is simpler there, and slower. It was the perfect place for me to go to recharge and get some perspective.
The Way of the Potato 