First Taste of the Carribean: Bluefields,Nicaragua

24/08/09-28/08/09

Following our reluctant stay in Managua, the next morning we were up at 3.15am to catch a 5am bus to Rama, from where we could take a 2-hour speed boat ride to Bluefields, on the Carribean coast of Nicaragua. The journey to Rama took about 7 hours, with very few stops, none of which provided an opportunity to get any decent food, although thinking about it, it probably wasn´t such a bad thing as the boat ride to Bluefields was extremely bumpy...not something you want to experience on a full stomach :) Vic and I, along with another Spanish couple, managed to get the worst seats in the boat. Right at the front, where it is the most bumpy, and facing backwards. On top of that it was the middle of the day and therefore extremely hot and sunny. I had my eyes shut for most of the journey, as it was hard to keep them open at the speed we were travelling, but what I did see of the journey was very beautiful. The boat trip takes you along the Rio Escondido (hidden river) and along the way are several small huts, the simple and modest homes of indigenous families still inhabiting the area. There are two indigenous tribes that remain in Bluefields, the miskitos and the garífunas. With two hours between Rama and Bluefields, the families that live in the middle of the two appear to be completely isolated. We saw a few local people using small speed boats, but it seems that most families only have small rowing boats or canoes, which would probably mean half a day´s journey to get to either of the two ports. I assume they must be very self-sufficient, and I wouldn´t be surprised if there were at least a couple of people within the community that make a regular journey to do a big shop for everyone. The people tend to work together a lot more here!

Bluefields is the oldest and most important port town on the Carribean coast of Nicaragua. Long ago it used to be a British Protectorate and so one of the major languages spoken here is English, along with Creole, similar to English but more difficult for us to understand :) The population mainly consists of people of African descent (the British introduced Jamaican slaves to the area when it was British territory) and mestizos (a mix of Spanish and indigenous peoples). It doesn´t have much in the way of sights and we didn´t like it all that much, but it serves as a base to visit the Corn Islands, an 8-hour boat ride away. There are only a couple of boats per week so we got to spend a day and a half in Bluefields before the next boat left. We tried to buy tickets in advance to ensure we had a seat but we were told that it was only possible to buy tickets on the day of travel, which meant that on the Wednesday we were up early to start queuing at 6am to make sure we got tickets. The ticket office didn´t actually open until 7.15am, and although there weren´t a huge amount of people in front of us, the tickets sold out within about 10 minutes :( It seems that a lot of tickets had been sold in advance!!!, which we had been told was impossible a couple of days ago. We could not believe it! It also didn´t help that several people in front of us had bought tickets for other people not in the queue and so the few remaining available tickets were soon accounted for.

We then found out that there was another boat heading to the Corn Islands at the same time (9am) that very day. It was a private boat that was primarily used for tranporting goods but that could also carry passengers. We managed to find the captain and bought two tickets...phew! All this time we had been accompanied by Sophie and Audrey, two lovely French girls who were staying in the same hostel us and who we had met on our first day in Bluefields. Once they had their tickets as well, the four of us rushed back to the hostel to get our bags and then rushed back to the port again to find a space on the boat. There must have been all of about 12 seats on board (well that´s all that I saw anyway)...the rest of the passengers were seated on the floor. We managed to find a space to accommodate all four of us and so from 8am we waited, and waited and waited. 9am came and went, as did 10am, 11am and 12pm. Just after midday, the captain appeared and told us all to get off the boat, as there were too many people on board and not everyone had purchased a ticket. We felt confident in the knowledge that we had our tickets, but then they started calling out passenger names from some kind of list that they had made up, and to each of these passengers they gave a life-jacket, which was necessary for the journey. They didn´t have enough life-jackets for even half of the passengers waiting to get back on the boat. It was an absolute nightmare!!! Eventually, more life-jackets materialised from somewhere, but there was such a mad rush to get them that it was almost impossible to get anywhere near to the man handing them out. Vic was great and after some skillful manoeuvering he finally managed to get life-jackets for all four of us, so we all clambered back into the boat, certain now that we would get to the Corn Islands after all. How wrong we were! Our wait continued throughout the early afternoon, during which time we were made to get on and off the boat a couple of more times and a man armed with a baseball bat came around to inspect our tickets. If you´re thinking this all sounds a bit surreal, let me assure you that it was! But it is so completely typical of the utter disorganisation that you encounter so often in this country. By 3.30pm we had had enough and the four of us decided to go back to the hostel and hopefully check back into our rooms. Vic and I decided that we would head back to Managua the next day and so at 4pm we were back at the port again to buy tickets (in advance this time) to go back the same way we had come a few days before. We couldn´t believe our misfortune when we saw that just half an hour after we had given up waiting for the boat to leave it had finally left! If we had waited that little bit longer we would have spent four fun-filled days on the Islands and we would have seen the fiesta del cangrejo (the crab festival - don´t ask me why they call it that), which is celebrated every 29th August in remembrance of the abolition of slavery. It would have been great, but que será, que será. To make up for the awful day we had had, Sophie, Audrey, Vic and I went out for a really nice meal and as a treat we even ordered a bottle of flor de caña (the most famous national brand of rum) between us, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Then it was time to say goodbye, as Vic and I had another early start to get back to Managua the following day. Sophie and Audrey, we are so pleased that we met you and I´m sure none of us will ever forget our Bluefields experience :) I hope you have had a brilliant time in San Juan del Sur and Costa Rica and really hope that we will meet again one day!

And so that was Bluefields...the next day we took the speed boat and bus all the way back to Managua. We had already arranged for our trusted taxi driver to meet us at the bus stop, although we ended up at a different place to where we had arranged to meet him which panicked us at first, but somehow he had realised where we would be and so we arrived at our hotel with no problems. After arranging our bus tickets to go to El Salvador the next day, we only ventured outside again to get some dinner, preferring instead to stay in the hotel this time :) We had to get an early night anyway, as we had yet another early start the next morning.

Our bus for El Salvador left at 5am the next day. We were travelling with Ticabus, a well-known bus company that provides transfers all over Central America. The journey took about 12 hours, with two border crossings, Nicaragua -Honduras and Honduras-El Salvaldor, and so we arrived in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, at around 5pm. We have decided to skip Honduras for the time being because the political situation is still a bit precarious at the moment, and knowing our luck, if we went there, something is probably bound to happen, so we will wait and see if it will be possible for us to go there towards the end of the trip.For the time being, we have at least seen a little part of the country and I managed to get one nice photo (the last one of this entry). The little we saw of Honduras looked quite peaceful (a lot of the violent activity tends to happen in and around the capital), although we did see a few references to Micheletti. (For those of you that don´t know what happened in Honduras at the end of June, the elected President Manuel Zelaya was forced out of the country and has still been unable to return as yet, and in his place, Roberto Micheletti is now the acting President, although no other country has recognised him as the rightful President and they are calling for Zelaya to be reinstated. The population of Honduras is of mixed opinion...who knows how and when it will end?) Once we had checked into a nearby hotel in San Salvador, we spent what was left of the afternoon watching yet another film at the cinema, called My Sister´s Keeper with Cameron Diaz. It´s a good film, but very very sad, and I think if we had known what it was about we might not have gone to see it, as it left us feeling a bit depressed, but it is worth seeing. It seems that to move around San Salvador you have to use a taxi the majority of the time, and they never charge less than $4 or $5! American dollars were introduced here in 2001 and have completely eradicated the need for the local currency, meaning that things are a lot more expensive here! We´re only planning on spending about a week here though, as we are eager to see Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, and we only have 3 months left!!! Time flies when you´re having fun :)