Warm in the Rain in Nicaragua

By Mike Gerrard

As our van stopped at the traffic lights in Managua, the battered capital of Nicaragua, the vendors descended. The windscreen boys slopped soap and water onto the glass, while the man selling newspapers sauntered towards the passengers in the back. Like every street-seller he held up his wares, in this case the broadsheet’s front page. On it was a full-page colour photo of a nude woman, in a pose that suggested she did yoga in her spare time.

‘They download them from the Internet,’ our guide Richard told us. ‘They fill the papers with them and sell them round the streets.’ We waved away the newspaper man with a smile, and I noticed across the street another salesman. This one held up brown puppies, so tiny he could carry four of them in one hand. An older man in a white vest and blue jeans approached him, and began examining one of the pups. The lights changed, our driver gave some coins to the squeegee merchants, and we moved off.

In Nicaragua these days people have to make a buck where they can. Never a rich country, other than in its people and its landscape, Nicaragua was brought to its knees by the US trade embargo which began in May 1985 and lasted for five years.

The Americans hadn’t cared for the left-wing Sandinista government. President Reagan funded the country’s rebel Contras through money raised by the CIA who were illegally selling weapons to Iran and then siphoning some of the funds off to support the Contras. By 1990 the ordinary Nicaraguan people had had enough, and despite some of the Sandinistas’ fine achievements, such as boosting the literacy level from 50% to 87%, the government was voted out. You can teach a peasant to read the label on a tin of food, but better make sure first he has a tin of food to read.

Given the past history of embargoes and civil war, you might go to Nicaragua expecting to find a sense of danger and a feeling of Yankee Go Home. Hardly. It turns out to be both the safest country in Central America and the one most popular for elderly Americans to retire to. Yankee Come In!

‘Nicaraguans don’t hold grudges,’ Richard said. ‘They’re the nicest people you’ll find in Central America. I’ve travelled all over and they are definitely different from any other nation – they’re easier to get to know, and they especially like a laugh and a joke.’ Richard Leonardi is himself an American, and runs Tours Nicaragua with his Nicaraguan wife, Ninoska Garcia.

One advantage of going organised in Nicaragua is the access it gives you to experts. They love meeting visitors, and equally love the chance to earn a few extra dollars when the state of the economy forces graduates to work as taxi drivers, and taxi drivers to have a second job, to make ends meet. If you’re a birdwatcher Richard will hire the best ornithologists in the country, or if you’re a political student you can do a ‘Battlefields of Sandino’ tour with a university lecturer. We were heading to see the country’s former capital, Leon Viejo (Old Leon), declared a World Heritage Site in December 2000, and were being shown round by the country’s top archaeologist, Rameiro Garcia. You want credentials? Rameiro is the man who, in mid-2000, discovered the remains of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, who founded Leon in 1524.

Cordoba it was who gave his name to the country’s currency, also founded the achingly beautiful Colonial city of Granada on Lake Nicaragua, and generally made the green land turn red with the blood of the native people. Rameiro had made one of the most historically significant finds in Nicaraguan history, but as he showed us the tomb in a derelict church where he unearthed Cordoba’s bones, the archaeologist’s feelings were clear.

‘Cordoba doesn’t deserve to be a hero, but he is because he founded the country. But Nicaraguans feel their native heritage was destroyed. Slaves were worked into the ground. Native peoples were fed to his pet dogs. If he had left us the way we were, we would have had much more culture and a multi-ethnic society.’

Indeed, only about 4% of the population today is native Indian. As we wander the site, which has atmosphere but little more by way of buildings than foundations, it becomes evident just what a bruised and beaten country Nicaragua is. Rameiro says that there is much here still to be found, but few resources – financial or human – with which to find it. Leon Viejo was destroyed by an earthquake in 1610, and not discovered again till the 1960s. The modern capital, Managua, was hit by a quake in 1972 which took over 10,000 lives. Hurricane Mitch swept the country and killed more people in 1998.

And wherever you go in the country it is hard to avoid the past political turmoil. On a hill in Managua overlooking Laguna Tiscapa, one of the city’s several volcanic crater lakes, we see the statue of Sandino, a huge black metal sculpture looking rather like the man from Sandemann’s port.

The hill here is now a military base, and is where Somoza’s palace was situated. We look over the edge of the crater to the lake, and there at our feet are some cement remains. These are the tops of the cells where Somoza kept and tortured his political prisoners. They were kept as a reminder, the rest of the palace torn down by the people when Somoza finally fled the country in 1979.

In Los Pueblos Blancos, a group of pretty villages with whitewashed houses south of Managua, we learn the ironic fact that in these, the most beautiful and peaceful-looking villages in Nicaragua, both Somoza and Sandino were born within 3km of each other. In San Carlos, a port on Lake Nicaragua for which the word ramshackle was surely invented, we learn that it was the first place in the country to fall to the Sandinistas.

From San Carlos we journey up the Rio San Juan in a little boat, huddled beneath sheets of black plastic as the rain thunders down. Across the Caribbean Sea, and unknown to us, a hurricane is thrashing its way through Venezuela, the result being a dumping of rain on Nicaragua in monsoon proportions in what is supposed to be the dry season. We spend a day and a night in the rain forest, but there is so much rain it’s impossible to walk in the jungle and we’re confined to our base, the Refugio Bartola.

The Refugio is a rustic collection of eight simple rooms, where the Rio San Juan meets the Rio Bartola. A few hundred metres across the San Juan we are looking at the thick jungles of Costa Rica. About fifty metres across the Rio Bartola is the Gran Reserva Biologica Rio Indio-Maiz, about 380,000 hectares of pristine lowland rainforest. It is part of the biggest expanse of rainforest north of the Amazon basin. They call it the lungs of Central America.

In a 3-week survey in 1999, every mammal known to exist in Central America was found within 3km of where we are sitting, swinging in hammocks and watching the rain spatter the surface of the river like a thousand fish coming up to feed simultaneously.

Among the numerous creatures seen in the survey were three-toed sloths, lesser anteaters, 214 bird species including two completely new to Nicaragua, spider, howler and white-faced monkeys, agoutis, river otters, tapirs, cormorants, bitterns, herons, egrets, ibis, four types of vulture, the snail kite, the Mississippi kite, the crested eagle and the bat falcon. There were six types of wren, six types of swallow, 27 types of flycatcher and the wonderfully-named black-bellied whistling duck.

As I sit and read the results of the survey, it is scant consolation to know that the creatures are all out there somewhere – and no doubt sheltering from the torrent and feeling just as miserable as me. Nor does it help to know that this magnificent and unique stretch of river will be changed forever if a group of businessmen in Nicaragua succeed with their plans to drive what they call an Eco Canal through the jungle, linking the Caribbean with Lake Nicaragua. The name ‘Eco’ we later learn is short not for Ecological, but for Economical. It will only require the straightening of a few bends in the river, and other minor changes. Very few barges will use it, we are told. Only one or two convoys a day. The wildlife will be unaffected. Virtually unaffected.

The thought of the canal plans comes back to me a few days later, as we stop in a town called Rivas. We gaze at a mural which marks the spot where the Spaniards met the local Indian chief for the very first time. ‘There’s an old Nicaraguan joke,’ Richard tells us. ‘They say that the Indian chief was homosexual, and when they met he embraced the Spaniard. And Nicaragua has been fucked ever since.’

For a country which ought to have a downbeat feel to it, Nicaragua is colourful, vibrant, exploding with lakes and volcanos and rainforest, attracts visitors who find Costa Rica too commercial, and is filled with people who are gentle, shy, funny, argumentative, generous and who don’t ask for money if you ask permission to take their photograph. Instead they smile, and say ‘thank you’ afterwards. It’s a country that made me feel warm, even in the rain.