Abran's Beneficio de Cafe in Esteli

If you love coffee, and good storytelling through photography, check out the new story on Fritz's photography blog, to learn about a local coffee processor in Nicaragua!

The Tisey Reserve and the Eccentric Sculptor Alberto

Tisey, Nicaragua, is a Reserva Natural, near Esteli, in the North. It’s an area encompassing 9,344 hectares of mountains and valleys, trees and rivers, and farms and farming coops.

Our friend and guide, Carlos, took us on a day-long trek through part of the Reserva, beginning with breakfast at a coop where they grow organic vegetables with organic fertilizer made from the waste of the organically fed cows and goats, which produce organic milk, from which they make swiss-style cheese. From there we made the several-kilometer trek to Alberto’s farm, on the side of one of the hills, where he lives with his siblings on their family farm, where he was born in 1944. Growing coffee, tropical fruits, and other comestibles, they live off of what they grow, and sell the excess for income.

You can read the whole story, and view lots more photos of the eccentric and intriguing Alberto Gutierrez, a sculptor who carves into the hills of his farm in Nicaragua, at Fritz's Photo Blog.

Here are some more photos of our adventure in Tisey:



It was quite a hike, up hill and down, and Shannon did it without complaining, even though she was a bit sick.

Do you want to know what Nicaragua is like?

Nicaragua is-

Waking up at five in the morning with the roosters and all the other tropical birds.

Rice and beans.

The smell of burning garbage.

A lime right off the tree. Or an orange. Or lemon.

Blackouts most evenings, but they only last 5 or 10 minutes.

Dollar pineapples.

Passengers sitting sidesaddle on a bicycle in front of the rider.

Dust and manure.

Fried chicken so hot you can't touch it, and incredibly tasty, for $2.

The way to say that a person is carrying extra weight is to say that they are more beautiful.

The singing swish of vulture's wings, flying low overhead.

If you're moving, you're sweating. If you stand still in the shade, the breeze takes care of you.

When you hear the ringing of little bells, you know the popsicle cart guy is coming down your street, and you can get your fix for a quarter.

Fried sweet plantains.

A dozen mandarin oranges for 75 cents.

Overdubbed american TV shows.

Crickets and dogs barking at night.

El Salvadoran Pupusas, hot off the grill, with cheese inside.

Hola from Esteli

Special deal for our readers, coke with free spaghetti!!!!

(as seen in our local supermarket)

We've settled in up in the highlands of Nicaragua, where the days are hot but the breeze is fresh and the evenings get refreshingly cool. I even needed my sweatshirt the other night!

The town we're staying in is called Esteli. It's a busy town of about 100,000 people, and it has a sort of rough-and-tumble wild west feel to it, partly because it is just a lively place and partly because of the caballeros (cowboys) roaming through. This is a big agricultural area, and there are lots of cattle ranches, tobacco and coffee farms, as well as lots of vegetable farms around here. This is also a region that produces a lot of leather goods, and there are more shoe stores here than I have ever seen in one place.

We spent the afternoon of our first day here, and the morning of our second day, looking for a place to stay. We'd spent the night in a decent little hotel, but wanted someplace a little homier and with a kitchen, and were willing to commit to a month if we could find a place we loved. We found a british ex-pat woman who had a room for rent in her place, and checked that out. We didn't fall in love with it, but she showed us a few other places she knew about and also helped us make an appointment with a real-estate agent who works with apartments for rent. We met Dona Violeta the next day and she took us all over the place, on foot and by taxi. We saw some humble little Nica style apartments and a huge empty home out in the country. Nothing seemed quite right, though, until she showed us the Hotel Cuallitlan. This place is two gorgeous garden courtyards surrounded by little casitas. Here is the front of ours:



The only little problem is that they don't have kitchens. Well, no problem after all, because the proprietress, Dona Marisela, has done this a time or two! She set me up lickety split with a kitchenette on our front porch. The fridge is inside the house. We negotiated a good price for our month stay, and are enjoying the peace and beauty of this place immensely so far.
A couple views of our house for the next month.

The courtyard and neighboring casitas. Mango and lemon trees included!

We've started language school, and both feel like complete idiots most of the time while in class, although we know we'll make progress. We speak spanish quite a bit with taxi drivers, the folks who work at our hotel, and pretty much everybody we can. Had quite a conversation with a guard outside the cultural museum today, of which I understood about 10 percent. We were asking directions to a church and some other things. His answer was quite lengthy, but he had a strong accent and was pretty much unintelligible. I feel like I can make myself understood, as long as I don't want to talk about anything else besides directions and how much something costs. Not quite true, but my vocabulary is limited enough that it's pretty frustrating.

Esteli doesn't feel as poor or as desperate as some of what we saw in and around Granada, but we still struggle with being rich Americans in a poor country. The per capita annual average income is about what we are spending on housing alone for the two months we're here.

We've been getting settled in, lots of grocery shopping at the markets and tiendas, and walking around town. We are about a 5 minute taxi ride from the center of town, and it costs just about a dollar for both of us. Interestingly, shared taxis are the norm here, so we never know where exactly we might be going en route to our destination, but it's never more than a minute or two out of our way. We both have some writing projects we are working on, and between those and the language school and figuring out life here, I think we'll definitely keep busy.

We miss you all, our friends and family, so would love to hear from you as you have time.

-Shannon

One week in

We've been in Nicaragua a week now, and I'm still not sure what to make of it. We enjoyed Granada, but the heat guided our move up to Esteli, where we arrived yesterday. It's still quite warm here, but the breeze is cooler, and it cools off much more at night, so we sleep a bit better.

I learned yesterday that Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western Hemisphere, coming only behind Haiti in that category. We've been faced with some of the poverty- lots of beggars and heart-rending stories. That, and the fact that civil war is a pretty recent memory make this a complex and difficult place to know. I was walking down the street yesterday, and walked past a pretty teenage girl sitting on a chair on the sidewalk. As I glanced down, I got confused for a moment when the foot that I saw on the ground looked like it belonged to a store mannequin. It took my brain a few moments to register that it was a prosthesis, most likely for a limb blown off by a land mine. Those kinds of stories aren't uncommon around here, where the fighting was most intense. In fact, there are local wilderness areas that are popular hiking destinations, but the guidebooks all point out that you need to make sure to stay on the established paths, no bushwacking, as there are still landmines left out there.

So it's a complex place, and sometimes I'm not sure what we're doing here. It's hot, and uncomfortable, and not as pretty as home. In addition to that, I'm being faced with uncomfortable truths I'd rather not think about, regarding wealth, poverty, and the responsibility of us who claim to be followers of Christ to do what he said regarding the poor.

This hasn't been an easy trip. It's certainly nothing like traveling around europe, or visiting a vacation spot in Mexico. That said, we start language school today, and we're going to travel around town looking for a spot to rent for the month. We'd like to settle in a bit and see what we can learn. Learning spanish is an important part of this trip, but there may be even more important things to learn while we're here.

settling in

So here we are in Granada, Nicaragua. It is the morning of our second day here, and we are still trying to get the hang of things. Granada turns out to be a pretty little town. There are plenty of travelers here, but tourism is a fairly new thing in Nicaragua, so it has a nice feeling to it. Sure, there are expat sports bars and Irish pubs (I think there are Irish pubs everywhere in the world!!), but the town is an old Colonial city, and has a look and feel I've never seen before.

As you walk around town, the buildings are classic colonial style, meaning huge doors with iron bars on them which open into big tall front rooms (often 17 ft high) leading into open courtyards within. It's fun to walk around and look into people's houses, because the courtyards always look like mysterious secret gardens inside. Houses are concrete cinder block, painted all kinds of lively tropical colors. Our own house color would fit in quite well!

Below is one lovely garden we peeked into. Fancier than some, but they are all pretty nice.

Yesterday evening we walked to the town square, a big open park near the cathedral. Here is a picture of the park and cathedral both, with the volcanic mountains looming up behind. It is very pretty here.
We are staying in a lovely, family owned guest house. The couple that own it are very friendly and we're enjoying chatting with them quite a bit. We are on one of the rooms up on the second floor that they have turned into hotel rooms, and have a little outdoor kitchen to cook in. Our room isn't fancy, but nice enough and the view from the table on the balcony is nice. There's a lime tree growing in the courtyard and I see sun-soaked roof tiles and a big blue sky. Bits of coconut trees are sticking up over the roofline.


I haven't yet mentioned the single most challenging thing about being here. It is hot. Really hot and humid. The weather report this week is for temperatures from 95-100 all week, and I don't know the humidity, but it is high enough to feel fairly sticky. The thing that is different about being here, though, is that we haven't seen an air conditioner yet. In all of our other travels to hot places, (Thailand, India, Taiwan) a/c is really common, in almost every shop and definitely in people's homes. Here we have fans. Fans are better than nothing, but we are feeling pretty melty and the heat makes it hard to sleep. I am not complaining, but it is certainly making us consider heading up into the mountains for much of our trip here. So far we are pretty groggy, headachy and just kind of feel gross. I'm sure we'll adjust, but we weren't expecting it to be this hot. We've already booked the place we're staying for the next couple weeks, so we're kind of stuck here, but after that, we are looking for someplace cooler.

Alright, enough whining. We are probably going to head up to a lake not far from here for the day tomorrow for some swimming, then Monday we are going to start language school. I am pretty intimidated about speaking spanish with folks, although Fritz is just jumping right in. His blog post about our Spanish being a competition cracked me up, since his Spanish is so much better than mine. He has been chatting people up left and right, while I have to practice sentences in my head before I am brave enough to spit them out. I am sure I'll get better as we practice and study, but I am feeling very rusty. French would come a lot easier right now.

We love that you are reading along with our adventures and would love to hear from you!! We miss all our friends and family, and hope you keep us in your prayers and thoughts!

-Shannon

On the Road Again

So I’m sitting on an American Airlines flight between Dallas and Miami, on the way to Nicaragua, reading Nexos, their Spanish-language in-flight magazine. After twenty minutes, my head is already spinning, as I try to recall the meaning of words I haven’t studied in 20 years. I made my way through a third of an article on Mexican basketball, and am pretty proud of myself.

It’s not like I haven’t been practicing. Since returning from Thailand two weeks ago, I’ve spent about twenty minutes a day with a Spanish CDROM from my mother in law. Even last night, fighting hard to stay asleep (why is it so hard to sleep when you know you have to get up at 4:15 am?), I found myself practicing Spanish in my head, then telling myself to shut up and go to sleep.

We’re headed to Nicaragua not just for the 95-degree weather and beans and rice, but more importantly, to immerse ourselves in studying Spanish. But the idea of four straight hours a day of Spanish class—one on one with a tutor—has me a little nervous. First of all, I haven’t been in real school in twenty years (I went back and got a fine arts degree 8 years ago…). I also haven’t studied Spanish in twenty years, since I took a year in high school and two in college. And, honestly, at 38, I’m finding that my mental cognition is not quite what it used to be.

Two years ago, Shannon and I spent nine days in Zihuatanejo, Mexico with her family, and a close friend, Melissa. I’d been in Mexico the previous couple of winters for a week of sunshine, but had a hard time getting out more than an hola here and there. But in Zihua, the minute we arrived at our lodging, I started talking with the clerk in Spanish, asking if he could give us a quieter room. For some reason, the Spanish just flowed out of me (in a halting, pathetic sort of way), and I took every opportunity I could to speak Spanish. In fact, one day, exchanging money at the bank with my friend Melissa, the teller helping me told me that my accent was much better than Melissa’s. This managed to piss off Melissa to no end, considering that’s she’s fluent in Spanish, and has lived in Central America for years at a time. I, on the other hand, walked out of the bank glowing.

Encouragement from bank tellers aside, I’m far from fluent. And what’s more, my wife eats languages for lunch, and has a brain like a magnet. Every country we visit, she picks up on far more words than I—even surprising our Slovak hosts once by pulling a complete sentence out of nowhere: Dyacuyem za shetko (Thank you for everything). She dreams in Latin names for plants. She aces her nursing school tests using words like hydrochlorothiozide, hydrogen ion gradient, and gastrocnemius. She learned rudimentary Spanish on the job at Waremart selling video rentals to Mexican farm workers. And now I have to go up against her, head to head in one-on-one Spanish study in Nicaragua.

Maybe a little friendly competition will do me good.

***

In some ways, this is a different sort of adventure than we’ve undertaken before. We’re viewing Nicaragua more as a place to live for two months, rather than just a place to visit and explore. Exploring will happen, to be sure, but our two primary goals are: Spanish, and writing.

This past summer, I re-read a book by my friend Rolf Potts called Vagabonding, something of a bible on the art of long-term world travel. He spoke of his experience of living in Laos long term, in order to write a book. This got me to thinking about where in the world we could live on, say, $12,000 a year. A person could save up that much, and then go take a year off, having time to be the person they didn’t have time to be in their normal workaday lives.

Our criteria included: sunshine, affordability, and the ability to get along without having to learn an entirely new, entirely foreign language. This last criterion ruled out SE Asia. And then we landed on the idea of Central or South America. We thought: why not study Spanish? We’ve always wanted to. We’ve never had an assignment or vacation that took us anywhere Spanish-speaking other than a few days in Spain and a few vacations in Mexico. We ruled out Mexico (pricey, and too many run-ins with Montezuma’s Revenge), Argentina (too much accent), and Costa Rica (too touristy). After reading further, we landed on Nicaragua: just as beautiful as CR, just as safe (according to the UN), but far cheaper.

And that landed us on this American Airlines flight between Dallas and Miami. Away from home and nursing school (Shannon took her NCLEX test yesterday, and we found out today that she passed) and work (although I always bring my work with me, in the form of a camera), we’re looking forward to learning the language, having time to think and write, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and seeing what memories we make to take home with us.

Hasta luego, amigos!