Saturday, December 26, 2009

A Galileo Christmas

Ahoy,

Right now i dont have the time or energy to begin the next part of my saga, but i thought id share my holiday experience. A day or two after my last post, the hostel i was staying at decided to jack up their rates for the holidays and didnt grandfather in existing guests. on top of that, they turned out to be fairly strict about check in and check out policies among other things. with my rate deadline coming up and fifteen minutes before i had to let them know if i was staying another night, i made a split second decision to ditch san juan and their tyrannical ways and head back to san jose. i quickly packed my things and headed out with a couple i had met that were also leaving. 11 horrific hours of border cross, taxi, bus and hoofing it later, i arrived at the very familiar hostel galileo where i was greeted with excitement, hugs, and a little dog. It was actually a great feeling to be back and it seemed like my homecomming was equally anticipated. a few days later it was xmas. xmas eve was spent with the hostel owners, workers, and a few guests consuming many appetizer dishes and drinking wine (a treat here) and a bottle of rum that somebody gave us which seems to always make me very sleepy.

the next morning was xmas morning. the hostel put together little gifts for all of its guests which was really nice. once everybody was awake, we hit the tree with yuletide joy and opened gifts. the rest of the day was spent perusing the cable for festive movies but no luck was had. a relaxing day all together. following this are some xmas pics along with a few santa gems to tide you over until more travel adventure is written about. happy holidays!









Monday, December 21, 2009

Life On A Bus

This morning i awoke at the ripe hour of 530 to hop into a range rover stuffed with nine other liquor stinking surf rats to head to a place called playa yankee. For the past few days, i have found myself in san juan del sur, nicaragua, a supposed surf community but without the surf. to surf, you have to hit a shuttle about a half hour away to where there is actually a break. this morning a friend of mine from santa and the brother of my musical love interest who now works at the hostel of which i am staying, organized a trip to the heavily secluded and rarely surfed playa yankee. It was a beautiful beach with misty rocks on each side of our break, and some picturesque waves. the craziest part though was that the ten of us had the place to ourselves. Because of a mishap I had with a board the other day, i had rented an 8 foot sail boat, the largest i have ridden to date, but amazingly enough was able to surf pretty well on the thing. Yes, i am seriously surfing now. dropping in, riding... still falling, but really riding as well. we surfed for a good four hours in utter bliss before the bus had to take us back. We all ended up taking our lumps as well, because you cant just get a few good rides for free, but with some luck, we will be back at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

because of this adventure this morning, i have been in a lazy fog ever since so i am going to attempt to begin the trails and tribulations of my journey into guatemala. It all started on december second where i found myself along with about eight other people waiting at the bus stop in front of the backpackers hostel in santa teresa. seven of us spent our last night enjoying the good company with beverages and dancing. we were all in various different stages of fatigue and hangover. the eighth person and clearly the smartest, spent his night taking it easy at the hostel and packing himself a breakfast of hearty sandwiches for the journey ahead. needless to say he was chipper and ready to go in the morning. about forty-five minutes late, as we were about to abandon hope, we hopped onto the first bus that would take us to paquera the port city where we take a ferry to another port city called puntarenas. I have definitely experienced more pleasant things than an hour and a half ferry ride at eight in the morning with a light hangover. i spent my time at the bow (i think) of the ship talking to a french canadian trucker turned vagabond and letting the salty breeze keep the thoughts of seasickness out of my head. others were not so lucky. one of my crew, omer, an israeli surfer seemed to be completely down for the count while others were spotted puking into little sandwich bags while keeping blue in the face. Rob the sandwich man was perfectly content with his breakfast and ken, one of the hungover 7 decided to prolong his agony and crack a few more beers on the trip. we got to puntarenas and quickly lost a percentage of our crew for they were going elsewhere.

four of us remained and i quickly flagged down a cab to take us to a bus station. this cabby ended up speaking perfectly fluent english, and he told me he spent some time as a driver in not new jersey, but new joisey. no joke. He also said he could get me to managua and my friends to san juan del sur (where i am now) by that night. we crammed four guys, four backpacks, a bodyboard, a surfboard, and a guitar into the little sedan and we were off. He immediately whipped out his cell phone and started making some calls. he told us he was going to drop us off at the ¨cruz¨and there a guy would be waiting with a ticket for me to get to managua. also at this same spot, the bus for my friends to get to san juan would also swing through. he held up his end of the bargain and sure enough, i bought a ticket from a strange man and we all sat and waited for our respective buses.

For all that know me and know me well... well not even that well. I am more often than not wearing a shirt that was given to me for donating blood. the bloodsource furnished my clothing throughout college and beyond. as the beginning of this little anecdote, today was no different. I dawned my favorite, and by this time lightly stinky ¨life is unpredictable, give blood¨t shirt provided by the blood source.Now, this ¨cruz¨was in the middle of nowhere and there was a little store there with snacks and some more than subject looking sandwiches. Behind the counter was a surly tico about middle aged and missing a number of teeth. tightly pressed against his body was a bloodsource ¨trust me, i´m a blood donor¨t shirt. absolutely dumbfounded, i showed him mine and asked him where he got it. to my suprise, he said california. i still cant help but wonder if he actually dontated blood.

Moving on, about ten minutes later, my bus arrives and my ticket guy starts yelling at me to get on. quickly i throw my backpack in the compartment below and drag my guitar onto the bus. It was full of nicaraguans and i was hard pressed to find an open seat. there! about three quarters back in the bus, there was an open window seat covered with backpacks and sweatshirts. I asked the guy next to it if it was available and he started clearing it off for me. a few hours later, we hit the costa rica border. we got off, showed our passports, got a quick stamp and were back on the bus. we drove two hundred feet further to the nicaraguan border and got off once again. i had a funny feeling about this but grabbed my guitar and followed the masses. also in that two hundred foot drive, a currency exchange guy came on board and exchanged some of my costa rican colones for nicaraguan cordoba. im pretty sure i was grossly ripped off.

We get off the bus and get in a line snaking back and forth in the sweltering heat. i happened to fall in line right next to my seatmate and started asking him questions about what we were doing. that was my first introduction with nicaraguan spanish. I couldnt understand a word. well, i could understand one word, pasaporte, but everything else was a mush. to my credit, this guy spoke very soft and fast.

The line ceased to move. i wondered what was going on many times and as the beads of sweat rolled down my forehead, the mayhem and traffic around the line only grew as well. I pulled two apples from my guitar case and offered one to my seatmate. He accepted it and I was relieved to have a friend in the psychological mess that i was about to endure. while we were waiting, i watched our bus, with my backpack move ahead of us a little ways. once again i nagged my new friend making sure we were in the right line and that the bus would wait for us. he gently and subtly nodded and told me we were in the right place. lightly further in line, i watched our bus drive off around a corner out of my sight. at this point i looked at all the people around me and didnt recognize anybody from the bus outside of my new friend. i started to panic a little thinking my backpack and bus left me in this pit of purgatory between two countries. clutching my guitar, i probed my friend again and received the same effortless and tiresome answer. frankly, i didnt believe him one bit. I resigned myself to the fact that my backpack was gone and my only traveling possessions left were my guitar and passport. after about a minute of pondering this, i realized that maybe it wasnt so bad. i would have freaked out if i had my backpack without the guitar, but having the guitar and no backpack was quite allright.

finally, we got to the immigration office, got passports stamped once again and i walked back outside to begin my next logical step. find the bus. there was a bus behind the line that looked just like ours, but i was sure it was from another group. a moment later, my seatmate walked out, flagged me down and brought me to that bus. for some reason, they did a full circle around the office and stopped behind the actual border line. why? ill never know, but i´m damn glad i gave that guy an apple and started a friendship.

we then drove another two hundred feet and they made us all get out again. I grabbed my guitar and went outside. they were taking all the luggage out of the storage underneath the bus. i grabbed my luggage and followed the masses to get in line. I hadnt noticed it before, but there was one other gringo on the bus and i happened to get in line right in front of him. His name was todd, he was a forty-five year old guy from mississippi worriedly sucking down a cigarette and looking cautiously from left to right. ill be honest, i was about as worried at this point as he was. there were just too many stops and checks for anything to make sense. we introduced ourselves and shared our utter confusion about the situation. this stop was strictly to open up and look inside your luggage to make sure you werent trafficking any contraband between countries. about a half hour later, we were back on the bus and headed towards managua.

three hours later, we arrived, at about seven at night in a grimy and dimly lit bus station in yet another dangerous capitol. Todd didnt speak any spanish so we ended up setting out together to find a reasonably priced hotel. By this time, my travel guide had also disappeared so we picked a place out of his and told the cabby to take us there. the cabby had other plans. he took us to his buddies hotel of which he kept saying it was the same place. we were a little put off so we told him we wanted to look at a room. they brought us into a dorm room and as soon as the lights came on, I saw a cockroach scuttle across the bed. Since i have been here, i have been in close quarters with many bucks, roaches included, but the one place that is absolutely off limits is the place where i lay my body down to rest. thoroughly disgusted i changed my list of demands when dealing with the cabby. now, along with close to the bus station and cheap, i emphasized clean as well. after that, he rounded the corner and took us to the place where we had initially asked him to take us. we gave the rooms a quick lookdown and since they were clean and the bus station we needed for the next morning was a block away, we obliged and settled down for the night.

after such a day, the two of us also braved the dimly lit streets for about two blocks to grab a few beers to cut the tension of the day. after that, we said our goodnights and hit the hay.

The next morning we awoke by 415 to go grab a ticket for our bus to el salvador, our next destination. I bought the ticket with the last of my nicaraguan cordoba and figured i would get money from an atm when we stopped next. this is where many of my troubles started. we stopped in another town in nicaragua for lunch and my atm refused to work. we stopped at the boarder from nicaragua to honduras and my atm refused to work. this was a problem because there was a departure and entrance tax for the two countries. A very nice attendant in the bus who actually gave me a pillow to use earlier in the ride told me he would cover me and then take me to an atm when we stopped in el salvador for the night.

The hours breezed by on the air conditioned ticabus. beautiful countryside stretched for miles upon miles and illuminated my daydreams. there were also a few movies played and because ticabus is more of a tourist bus, the movies were in english, or with english subtitles. nonetheless, they were awful films. i think the proposal was one of them and if you havent seen it, you can gladly go about your life knowing you missed a blundering piece of hollywood baloney.

around five or six that night, we arrived in san salvador, the capitol of el salvador. we got rooms at the bus station and then the bus attendant took todd and i to find the atm. he took us to a gas station which had two atms and once again, neither of them worked. fortunately, this is where todd stepped in to become my sugar daddy. he fronted me a few bucks to pay the bus attendant, pay my hotel fee for the night, and grab a small dinner from the gas station. we also grabbed a few of our now traditional end of the bus day beers to wind down before going to sleep.

The next day, we wake up at 5 in the morning again to get our tickets to guatemala. the bus was unfortunately full and we had to wait untill 1230 for the next bus to leave. in that time, we got some coffee, a light breakfast and shot the shit until our next bus stint. Oh yeah, once again, my new sugardaddy paid my way and bought my bus ticket. my bill was stacking up. for the record, i wasnt exactly useless during these times. My little bit of spanish was perfected pretty quickly when it came to matters of money, not getting ripped off by cabbies, finding reasonable hotels, and getting us on and off each bus every day. Id like to say i was pulling my weight.

another six or seven hours of bus time passed and by new i was impervious to boredom and insanity. that or i was so bored that i had reached insanity and just didnt know it. we got off at what was my final stop in guatemala city. from what i have read, you dont go out in guatemala city at night. no way, you will get mugged, injured, killed, blah blah blah. i took it seriously. we hit a cab across town to another place we had read about in the travel book. booked ourselves a room and hit the downstairs restaurant for a number of celebratory drinks. the worst of the travel was over, but I still needed to find a place where my atm card would work. on the homefront, my parents assured me that they spoke with the banks and my card was NOT frozen.

The next morning we went on a hunt. we hit three different atms and on the third try, it worked. I once again had cash in my pocket and it put an end to a couple day long scare. I payed todd back and then set out to the bus station to get him squared away with his bus ticket to flores so he could then jump over to belize. Everything passed simply and quickly in the daylight. before i knew it, we were saying our goodbyes. each was very thankful for the other during this three day trek and were glad that everything turned out just fine. after Todd was gone, I chilled out in my hotel for the rest of the day before meeting up with my friend anne the next morning. Little did i know that this was only the beginning of being penniless in a foreign country.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

So It Goes

I know its been a while and since i am here by myself with nothing but time, i had planned on writing out in full detail the incredible adventure my friend and i had over the past few weeks. unfortunately for you, i ended up meeting some nicaraguan teenagers and spending the night walking around the city and talking with them. This saga will probably have to be compartmented and told over a series of posts. as soon as you think youve seen it all, something more incredible, rediculous, or both comes your way. example, i thought i had done a few pretty cool and maybe adventurous things until i met a thrill thirsty irishman who treked the amazon barefoot.

i´m just going to begin with the mild, but tiresome trip leaving guatemala and getting where i am today. Yesterday, I woke up early, said goodbye to my friend anne as she left for the US and wandered the smog laiden city of guatemala before boarding a bus to managua, nicaragua. the bus was to be an overnight bus and arrive the next morning. that would have been nice. we set sail around three in the afternoon and right off the bat i realized my chair didnt recline. not only did it not recline, but when it isnt reclined, there is virtually no leg space. my knees were squished like sardines against the seat in front of me. this feeling however has become commonplace as i have left the comforts of tourism for the nitty gritty of the chicken bus. more on that will be explained when telling the whole story. THis predicament however was a little bothersome because everybody else had working chairs and i knew the likelihood of sleep on an overnight trip would be nil if i couldnt recline. Anyways, we set sail and i hoped that there would be an open seat but my chances looked slim.

I also noticed once again with this new method of travel that i was the only gringo on the bus. the only difference here was that i didnt have anne with me. the funny part is that everybody i met remembered my name. Even the bus drivers i purchased the ticket from the day before remembered my name when i walked by the station hours before the bus was set to leave. The bus was packed full of nicaraguans, guatemalans, and an argentinian who were all very nice, helpful, and patient with my pidgin spanish.

i digress. about an hour or two after taking off, we hit our first boarder. they got us all out of the bus along with all of our luggage and lined us up in a row to be inspected. once the inspection process begins, it takes a matter of minutes, but we sat and cooked in the guatemalan heat for a good hour before they decided to inspect. after that, we had to get stamped out of the country by customs. post stamping, we pile back into the bus, drive thirty feet and do it all again at the el salvador boarder. i was sitting with a few new friends i had made and we were all in agreeance that the next two boarder crosses would be equally excruciating.

after the inspection, we crammed back into the bus and i was fortunate enough to find an open seat next to a larger nicaraguan man. The seat reclined and i thought there might be some hope to catch a wink of sleep. Unfortunately, this bus had television sets and they decided to play a movie at slightly outrageous volume. to make matters worse, the movie was that blacky wacky wayans brothers move white chicks... and it was in spanish overdub. it was awful... lightly traumatizing. after that, the hour was getting reasonably late and the drivers continued to blast music through the speakers. around the time sleep was finally starting to fill my eyes, BOOM! honduras border number 2. same process rinse and repeat only this time we got to add a little bit of exhaustion into the mix. I had to pay three dollars to get into honduras which put my funds down to 7 dollars for the remainder of my trip. I gave the rest of my american dollar stash to anne who needed it for the hefty exit fee for her flight. I had a few oranges and a bottle of water to get me through the trip.

After the luggage check on both sides of the boarder, i made my way into the bus and passed out. I woke up some hours later and realized that it was overly hot and that we had not moved at all. there we sat all night until the early morning when the sun rose. so much for an early morning arival with a country and a half to still travel. when we started going again, the blaring music kicked back in full force. despite my wildest efforts, i think i maged about an hour and a half of sleep the whole trip. it seemed like most of the passengers were also pretty bothered by the music. it was really unpleasant. some hours later, we hit the nicaraguan boarder and the tarif there took my last 7 dollars from me. Once again, i was entirely broke heading back to the country where my financial troubles began.

fortunately, we had a quick pitstop at a gas station and i quickly chanced the atm inside. without any hastle, it worked swimmingly and my poverty was no more. unfortunately there was not enough time to grab a bite to eat. with a belly literally rumbling on the bus for it had not eaten in over 24 hours, some of the passengers became bothered with its grumbling and gave me a few cookies that they had purchased earlier in the trip. it was very kind of them and very satisfying to put something in my aching organ.

the last few hours of the trip blew by in a daydream and before i knew it, i was in managua without a further destination than finding a computer with internet. I said goodbye to my travel companions and hopped into the disgusting city. instantly i realized that there was no internet anywhere close and the pushers were out in full force trying to sell youe verything fron knock off sunglasses to salty nicaraguan baked goods with honey on top. It took me a grand total of ten minutes to hop on another bus to granada. i lucked out in this chicken bus because i got the front seat and didnt have to deal with the droves of passengers compressed together in the back. you guys really cant even imagine what this looks like until you see it. the front however was roomy and cozy. forty minutes later, i was in the beautiful city of granada hunting down internet so i could get in contact with some friends in the country and find a hostel for the night. During the last few weeks, i lost my very handy central america guidebook and annes guatemala guidebook was stolen while we were sitting atop mayan ruins. more on that later, but for now i am without guidebook. once i found out where i needed to stay i put my pack back on, grabbed my guitar and started hoofing it in the mid day heat with shotty directions to find my new home. about a half hour later, i arrived safe and sound to a quaint little place called hostal mochilas. i think i am currently its only guest. with that obstacle tackled, i set out to find food and spent the rest of the day wandering the markets trying random street dish after random street dish. nutritional value is now officially a thing of the past. the new name of the game is sustenance. from there i ran into the two nica kids who i chased away the rest of the night with. tomorrow i head to san juan del sur to get in a few last jams with my musical love and to enjoy some more good surf. hopefully itll all go according to plan, but it really never does. as for now, i am in one piece and have food in my belly and a roof over my head. simple pleasures really.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

not a dollar to the name.

what on earth did my mother do to my ATM card? this is night 1 in Guatemala without a penny to my name. plaastic doesnt work, but somehow i am still here. must be a modern marvel.

-Scott

P.S.
Sorry mom, just giving you a hard time... but seriously, my card still doesnt work.