The car was automatic, so I was fine. But it had no gasoline, was dirty, totally beaten up and had no license plate or even registration papers! According to him, if the cop stopped us on the way, all that I had to do was show him some of the papers – which seemed completely of no value – in the glove compartment and he would let us go. On top of this he requested us to take the car out for a car wash on the way and he would reimburse us for that! Of course I didn’t want to get into this nightmare. So back to the Rental counters for a third attempt. As they say, third time was the lucky charm. The Budget car rental agent finally managed to provide us the car we wanted. Thanks to my paranoia , I had actually reserved in Dollar as well as Budget before I left seattle. So, for a third time I resigned all the papers and by this time, almost all the people in that part of the airport knew that I was staying at the Hacienda San lucas in Copan Ruinas and pretty much knew my contact info! This comedy did not end here as a Similar kind of circus was replayed at the El Salvador and Nicaragua airports also.
Driving Me Crazy
According to me one of the ways in which a traveler sets himself apart from a tourist is through his craving to “experience” a place rather than “see” it. Don’t treat a city or town as a destination but treat it more as a habitat where you live and get as close to the people and their lifestyle as you can. The simplest way to achieve this hit the road and drive yourself. Sometimes this experience could be bland but pack a lot of adrenaline rush like driving the autobahn where the roads are well laid out and traffic much organized thus taking away the adventure and semi-danger traits which instead show up in the form of sheer speed. On other occasions the experience could be spicy like when you drive in a third world country where people regard traffic rules as much as they care about their fashion sense.
Each one of the countries I visited dished it’s own flavor of shocking driving conditions. In Honduras people insisted on overtaking only in blind curves. So whenever you see a curve in front you , you better hit the brake pedal, coz at any bloody moment you could be served with a speeding car on your own side of the median! In El Salvador using the Indicators had for some reason fallen out of fashion and microbuses did not care about any vehicle on the road smaller than them! 2 minutes into the busy San Salvador traffic I was shitting bricks. Driving in crazy cities like Mexico city and NYC had not prepared me enough for what I was get myself into here. In Nicaragua the roads were smothered with potholes make the driving much more thrilling than playing a fast paced video game. Nowhere in any of these countries did they seem to care about having a Traffic sign before critical sections of the highway like hairpin bends or speed breaker. They assume that your sixth sense would save you. And not to forget and discount from this mix, the few million pedestrians who treated the highway as their own backyard, soccer field, park bench etc., The funny thing here was that these folks are so cavalier about playing these road games that they even have a T-shirt which read:
DRIVING IN HONDURAS
- Blind curves are ideal for passing
- Use Horn in All Situations
- Green light signals start of the race
- Red light means watch out I’m coming through!
- All garbage goes out the window immediately
- When driving at night at least 1 head light must be out of order
- In all city driving situations , Jungle rules apply
Surfboarding can’t get hotter than this!
Most of Central America sits on a fault line and Volcanoes are as common in this part of the world as coconut trees are in kerala. Even with this much abundance of volcanoes, Nicaragua with it’s 19 volcanoes seems a bit too much on the wild side. Taking about wild, it has been a while since we had done anything crazy it was too hard to resist when you hear about something called “Volcano boarding”! Also known as ash boarding this is a very unique experience that you may not find anywhere else in the world. As soon as we arrived at the gorgeous colonial El Convento hotel, we fixed a Volcano boarding trip with a local outfitter via the receptionist. The cool thing was this was not the guide that every online article or backpacker blog were raving about. We were never a fan of plastic package tours.
The thing that increased the “scary” factor in this experience – like when riding the rough waters of Zambezi in Africa – was that our guide Carlos was of a very non-touristy flavor. Something everything gets so artificial and tasteless in America thanks to the ten thousand restrictions, warnings and spoon-feeding kind of instructions plastered all of the over in any national park or wilderness area that it takes the fear factor out of it. Here the only way you would find you should step on something or that you are going over a dangerous edge is by a small kid screaming “peligro” or a completely un-attentive guide quietly whispering to you that you may be treading into toxic and poisonous soil! You really feel that you are at your own risk. That is what sends a few shivers down your spine.
Volcan Cerro Negro rose out of the horizon like an enormous slagheap. Staring up at it, shimmering in the heat, I couldn't help wondering what I'd let myself in for. A lot of times in the past I have learnt the hard way that Pain is an unavoidable predecessor to pleasure. So, it was not surprise when I was told that I had to carry a Huge wooden surfboard that weighed at least a 50 pounds on my back all the way up the steep slope of the volcano before I can slide down the beautiful glittering black sand. After a 40 minute reasonably arduous hike, we made a pit stop and got into the mouth of the volcano to come in touch with the innards smoldering away like some angry deity. I have never been into the crater of any volcano though I had climbed a few and this was a very unique experience indeed to be standing right inside a bloody active volcano! The edges of the crater were stained yellow like bits of uneaten food left round a monster's chops - testament to previous outbursts. There was nothing much of any instructions, much less training. After a couple of minutes of demo right at the edge of the slope from Carlos, I got ready and strap on my board, padded up and prepared to take the plunge. It looked a lot steeper from the top - but the only way out of here is down. With the metal base sufficiently lubed up with floor polish to aid my passage across the ash, I took a deep breath, thought about all the cocktail stories this mad run down would give birth to and set off down the slope and ... stop dead. The weight of the board, combined with my own 70kg, caused me to sink down into the blackened shingle. Having expected to be carving spectacular turns all the way to the bottom, with a huge rooster tail of black ash cascading out behind me, in reality I just flapped my arms about and came to quick stop.
This is not the speedy adrenaline adventure I'd had in mind. Carlos gave me an idea and asked me to try a different approach. Instead of leaning back and hoping for the best, I put all my weight forward in an effort to move my centre of gravity further downhill. At last I shift some of the inertia and I'm off - very slowly at first then took off as soon as I hit the smoother sections and was racing down like a madman for quite a while. The speed rush I was hoping for hit me like a bag of sand and even before I could sink in my padded hand into the hot sand to slow down, the board dug into the dirt and I tumbled over. Didn’t hurt much, but what was worse was that instead of the soft, fluffy 'ash' I'd envisaged, there were lots of sharp stones and those caused a bit of discomfort. Like a brave soldier I stood up immediately and positioned myself for the next run and noticed that there were stones in my shoes, stones in my pockets and stones in my pants. A couple of more slides later I made it down in one piece. While it wasn't exactly the graceful sporting experience I'd imagined, it's not every day that you get to ride down a live volcano, with Central America spreading out in front of you.
Dollar goes a long distance
The one continually amazing thing in this trip that never ceased to pleasantly shock me at least once every day was the value that single bill of greenback had here. Almost all the places that we touched in this circuit were so unbelievably cheap that sometimes I started doubting my mathematical skills and refused to trust the converted price in dollars of the items we bought, used or consumed! At a point I couldn’t contain myself after paying 40 cents and 50 cents for a beer the entire evening and that too at a bar! Entrees at restaurants were not more than $3.00 and good neck and shoulder massages were costing $2.50 for a 15 minute session. And the buying power of the dollar didn’t just stop there. Thanks to the cheap prices combined with a great exchange rate for the dollar in most of these countries, we stayed in some of the coolest boutique hotels in central America. In Honduras we stayed in a 150 year old Hacienda nestled in the hills above the tranquil Copan valley. In Granada, The Gran Francia was a colonial gem and with it’s architectural beauty it was a tourist attraction by itself. Hotel El Convento was not just the best hotel in Leon, but one of the best in the country. This architectural dream surrounded impressive, almost English gardens with stunning backdrops of the mountains viewable from the central courtyard. And the shock factor in all these locations that I mentioned above was that the Daily Room rate never crossed 80.00USD on an average!
Verdict
Overall, we were completely blown away by everything that these 3 tiny central American countries had to offer to us. So much character was ingrained in this region and it’s people that it is hard to believe that it was even clouded by war and civil unrest at one point of time. Please, ignore all the articles that talk about danger in travelling to these parts and disregard any such warnings in the official govt site. This is a virgin travel spot screaming for attention and waiting to be exposed. Our personal favorite out of the three was Nicaragua. There was something about this country that struck a chord in us that we had to fight hard to resist the urge to stay back here and extend our trip! So hit the web and start planning your trip to the land of craters and lakes and look up on where to stay and play in Nicaragua before the rest of the world gets the skinny and it gets too hot!
