Esteli : first impressions

LOVE IT!!!! I feel very good about this place. The climate, for a start, is lovely... all warm during the day, with glorious clear blue sky and then warm enough for a summer dress yet cool enough not to be bitten by bitey things in the night.

The local connections. Esteli is twinned with Sheffield. Freedom Road in Walkley is twinned with Cale Libertad in the Monte Sinai barrio of Esteli, a social housing project. The two streets and a third Freedom Road in Australia celebrate their connection with simultaneous street parties at least once a year and have swapped letters, recipes and family news by Internet. Last year, I saw a fabulous concert in Walkley’s community centre by a well established Nicaraguan musician and his English wife, a classically trained musician who has been living in a small agricultural community just outside Esteli for the last 5 years and whose life is now here, and entirely different from what she might have projected 7 years ago!

The setting. Esteli is up from the b*stard hot dry low plain leading in form Leon. The journey up in the bus was great. The bus was full of young UNAN students who board weekly in Leon and then have to face hot crowded 3, 4, 5, 6 hour commutes home at weekends to Esteli and the communities surrounding it. I sat next to a trainee medic, from an extended family of medics. Like UK medical students, she said that she doesn’t have much time to go out partying during the week.

So, Esteli lies up from the B*stard hot plain and in the foothills of the Selva Negra, Black Forest, mountains, apparently named by German settlers for the similarity to their own Black Forest back home. The town slopes off to each side, so peripheral streets give views out to the relatively green hills and farmlands and forest reserves beyond town.

Our accommodation and a great ‘coincidence’. We dropped in first to a Peace Corps stronghold (the town has a long political history of NGO and Internacionalista involvement from the War). Bill went off exploring other hostals and came back suggeting one run by an English woman. An unusual choice for us, as we tend to favour locally owned places. Hot, tired, grubby we walked in and dumped our bags. My attention was vaguely taken with a young woman on the sofa.

Sure enough. It was Hannah, the musician from Limon/Walkley concert. It was a beautiful coincidence, the more so, since she was simply visiting the hostal to see a friend, and because I had lost her email address, from our conversation in Walkley. She now has a young child, Roxanna.

Hostal and cafe Luz are the initiative of Janey, who came to Nicaragua’s Miraflor reserve as a volunteer, loved it and has come back to stay. She also is now raising her child here. Profits from the businesses go into local grassroots projects, and Janey hasa great sense of what interested travellers will want to know about Esteli town and the local surrounds. She is well networked into an ecotourism, homestay project set in the Miraflor reserve and enthusiastic to share information with visitors to help them access exactly what they are interested in, rather than leaving people simply taking a standard package.

I am hoping to milk a cow.

Tortugas and Las Peñitas

20th - 22nd February.



The waves roll in from the wide, blue Pacific, tumbling over into surging lines of foaming water before crashing into the dark yellow beach. The noise makes conversation impossible below a shout when walking at the edge of the surf. Welcome to Las Penitas, a small beach destination only a 45 minute bus ride south of Leon.



Here, the Pacific takes prisoners if you are not careful when entering the ocean. The undertow tugs at your legs, the occasional wave threatens to bowl you over. This is not a gentle swimming beach like those we have seen in the Caribbean. This sea is a monster who will gobble you up and, if your family is lucky, spit out your remains somewhere along the shore. It is a sea to treat with respect and caution – and is a whole load of fun to play in; leaping over the smaller waves, diving under the big crashers. Timing is of the essence to avoid being slammed into the hard sand and shingle. It gets the adrenalin coursing and every so often encourages a return to the beach to regather your wits.



More gentle, much more gentle, is the mouth of the river with is sheltered behind a long sand island where turtles come to lay their eggs. The river is not sluggish, and just lying in the shallow warm waters you are gently turned and pushed towards the sea. The broad expanse of fresh water is home to numerous birds, waders, gulls and vultures, who line the banks and sand bars or stalk fish in the shallows. Further upstream the river slowly narrows to a mangrove-flanked wilderness that is a joy to explore by kayak, the silence only broken by the quiet directions of our guide Miguel pointing out a well-hidden camouflaged bird, the splash of an oar or fish, the call of birds or the rustle of something moving in the undergrowth. The occasional small log boat, ironically piled high with fresh-cut logs, chunters by or the larger, and more polluting, local fishing boat taking tourists on a noisy and dirty tour.

Arms tired from the unaccustomed effort of paddling, legs from being kept straight out in front and spirits drop until Miguel turns us around and we row with the current. We are tiring now and the mangrove does not appear to be moving past any quicker than when we went upstream but in less than 45 minutes we are back near the start of our journey, which had taken 2 hours upstream. Here we see the highlight, today’s freshly-hatched Atlantic Green Turtle babies desperate to find the sea. Except, they are penned in so that they can be released when it is dark and less of their predators are around. This is a hatchery where turtles break out of their eggs in a grid numbered from A-Z and 1-10. The eggs are laid along the beach at night by turtles returning to their own birth place and gathered up to be kept under the protection of guards. Our little 40 or so newly-borns come from V3. The urge to get to the sea is unabated for hours as the baby turtles continually cross and recross their pen searching for the water. It supposedly makes these tiny little things stronger and better equipped to make their dash through the pounding surf. They must be tossed and rolled like on a giant rollercoaster gone mad given the impact those waves have on us. Maybe two to five in a 1,000 will survive to return one day and give birth themselves on their beach. But will they find V3 if they do?

Leon

13th – 19th February


Lion of Leon

Leon – gently-fading, paint-peeling, left-leaning, Sandinista-supporting, heat-sweltering, Colonial-Spanish, ex-capital of Nicaragua.


Door Man


Door to Somewhere...once

We have had a very enjoyable few days here. In many ways it is just an ordinary small city with little major ‘pull’ to attract tourists. It is not a Granada or Antigua. And that is what is good about it. This means that people who live here either ignore you or treat you like anyone else without trying to sell you anything. Quite a few people randomly come up asking for a dollar and sometimes people stare for the novelty of seeing a gringo in town.

There are few major sites.


Viewing the Cathedral

The most obvious is the splendidly blocky cathedral is the largest in Central America and squats there like a manga sumo wrestler. It is tough and uncompromising, not graceful.


Nuns Gather at Night

What it is notable for are massive paintings of the Stations of the Cross inside, and four Atlas-like sculptures high up on the front supporting cross walls.


Bloody Heavy these Colonial Cathedrals

There are a few other interesting colonial churches, the yellow La Recollocion being the most architecturally beguiling and the 19th Century El Calvario being simply awful; a demented cross between Trumpton and Legoland. A small adobe church in the suburb of Sutiava is an interesting indigenous church.


Attendance at La Recollocion

The streets are almost invariably lined with colonial period single-storey buildings. All equivalent to those in Antigua yet peeling paint is testimony to the lack of funds for restoration and give a greater appeal for lived-in character. The theatre is a boldly coloured delight.


Leon Theatre


Drama Queen of Leon

Like many Central American colonial towns there is plenty of street life, from fruit and hot dog vendors to the tinkling bell alert of a hand-pushed ice cream cart or the Sunday special toy cars for children. The central park, outside the cathedral, is one of the best used we have seen so far. The market is enjoyable and a great place to buy your fruit, vegetables, tamales, tortillas and cheese. In Sutiava, the Casa de Queso is recommended for cheese-lovers.


Street Food


Bottle Shop in the Park

Our highlights, for very different reasons, are:

The Ortiz Art Foundation. A private family’s amazing collection of Latin American art, mostly Central American, from the 15th century to contemporary housed in two large, beautiful courtyard colonial houses. The collection is a major one by any means and holds one intriguing contemporary art piece after another that largely have clever techniques and sense of humour in common. Worth more than one visit.

The Sandinista tour and Sandinista memorials. You can read more of these below.

Lazybones Hostel. Perhaps the best accommodation we have yet stayed in on this trip. Two courtyards form the focal points for a relaxed and well-kept hostel that gets the right balance between easy-goingness, services and tranquillity. With a pool, free internet and WiFi, free tea and coffee (a blessing after the tea desert that is El Salvador) and a pleasant courtyard of rocking chairs below a grand mural aswell as the right attitude from the owners creating a peaceful, respectful clientele it is a lovely home-from-home. A double costs C$325 at the time of writing. Highly recommended!

The Cocinita Vegetarian Restaurant. Set in another lovely colonial building, the food is great. The only thing we had a problem with was what to do with the first large choice of meals for the first time. We’re used to having the ‘one’ thing on the menu we can eat! It took us a while to choose, overcome as we were with curry, tofu, falafels, gratin, pasta, gazpacho, etc, etc, etc… Everything we had was delicious. If you head towards it – don’t give up. It really is there despite the lack of life in the vicinity or obvious sign. Look for the large table in the entrance with the chess pieces – the table has two large chess boards built-in to it.

With the Sandinistas in Leon

Saturday 16th February

Check out photos from the tour on flickr here

We decided to take the Sandinista Tour of Revolutionary Leon this afternoon with a veteran combatant of the FSLN. We eventually parted after four hours walking around the war-torn monuments and places, the museums and memorials to thousands of brave individuals who had the commitment and passion to stand up against the military of a vicious dictatorship. Our guide was Dionisio, a quiet spoken man of humility yet conviction. In many ways there was a massive gulf between us. Here was a man who every night risked his life to man watch-towers, follow coded instructions and make bombs in the violent struggle against death camps, tanks and indiscriminate bombing. He could have been killed by the National Guard, Contras, or one of his own home-made bombs – as his younger brother was. While we have led very protected, privileged lives and are able to visit the country to find out something about the Sandinistas beyond The Clash album and the news of the Iran-Contra Affair.

Leon was the capital of the long-running revolution against dictatorship in Nicaragua. This left-leaning and poor university town has long been a centre for liberal thought and art. Opposition here was some of the strongest and involved a cadre of a few hundred armed combatants fighting an underground guerrilla war whilst supported by thousands of the population. Here fighting was sometimes street-by-street. Actions could be an assassination attack on a house of National Guard one night, the defence of a church against tanks the next. The FSLN – or Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional – was formed in 1961 to lead the fight against the dictatorship of the Somoza political dynasty. They took their name from the anti-Imperialist struggle of Augusto César Sandino during the 1930s.

Dionisio fought in the streets of Leon during the 1970s and is still an active member of the party, now in power again at last following the 2006 elections. He took us to the political prison, known as Prison 21 after the year it was built, where prisoners held 100 to a small room were regularly tortured with beatings, teeth filings, electric shocks and suspense upside down in water. It was all the more poignant when he only told of his two tortured stays in the political prison, but only after Georgia asked him. We saw two churches shelled by the military in the 1970s because the Sandinistas used the bell towers as watch towers. There is the street where four students were gunned down during a demonstration in 1959, the places they fell marked by four crosses painted on the road below a memorial. The courtyard building, then a social club, where the first of the three Somoza dictators was assassinated in 1956 by poet Rigoberto López Pérez disguised as a waiter. Near sunset we went to the Museum of Heroes and Martyrs which houses the photographs and some personal effects of people killed in the struggle. We ended at a the third mural on the tour which was painted in the 1990s to depict the history of Nicaragua from indigenous roots, via Conquistadors and the struggle to end with two children running hand-in-hand to a future Nicaragua of open land, lakes and mountains.

Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of the tour was to spend time with someone who risked his life to fight fascism and could tell us his personal recollections of fearing the National Guard taking him during the day because of scratches on his arms and legs caused by crawling defensively on the ground and of fighting them at night at locations communicated by secret signs.

I recommend booking this tour which is easy. Go to the FLSN headquarters on the central park, opposite the cathedral and ask for Dionisio. The tour is $10 per person.