The One with the Kinda Dead Guy

“Is he dead?” Mom asked.

“Buracho.” our driver responded.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“He's a drunk.” Kalyn answered as we passed a middle aged man sprawled face down, spread eagle, and lifeless on the side of the road...one would think someone would stop for such an incapacitated person laying on a busy road, but apparently the Burrachos are many and, as Kalyn informed us, they always wake up eventually and stumble the rest of the way home. I wondered if we were ever going to eventually make it to our hostel as we bumped over a path that resembled more of a dry creek-bed (giant boulders included) than a road.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself with the town drunk...to back up a bit:

Ash with the touring bike duo and their RAD RIDE!

After arriving in Nicuragua and hanging out at the Laguna de Apoyl for a night, we woke up to a stunnirunk.” Kalyn answered as we passed a middle aged man sprawled face down, spread eagle, and lifelngly beautiful day. At 8am, with the sun shining down into the massive water-filled crater, we donned swimsuits and took a refreshing morning dip. Post-swim we finalized our agenda for the day and packed everything to head out to Granada, a city made famous by the civil war fights that ravaged the country in the 80's. On our way out we noticed two travelers in biking apparel walking into the lobby. After chatting it up for a few minutes I learned the Xinhan (from China) and Emilien (from France) had been bike touring cross-continent for the past 8-months! The couple began their journey in Canada and traveled through the US, and Mexico, they were making the rounds in Central America. They aren't planning on slowing down anytime soon with plans to make it through South America and Africa before returning home to Europe!

We bid adieu to the pair and took a short ride to the city. I was struck immediately by the intense colors painted on nearly every colonial-style building, the strange fusion of third-world poverty and historical westernization, and the chaos of the roads! We stopped at a street called Penny Lane and had lunch before venturing into the center of town. For an hour or so we walked by one vendor after another, all catering to tourists with goods either painstakingly hand-made or imported from China (go figure). By the afternoon we were zooming in a car on our way to catch a ferry that would take us to Ometepe, the largest freshwater volcanic Island in the world and Kalyn's home for the past five-months. Just like in the movies, we pulled up to the docks just as the ferry engines were turning over and all three of us ran to catch it as the locals yelled “rapido gringa's, rapido!” (hurry white girls, hurry!), we didn't make it but enjoyed the two hour wait for the next ferry by playing uke and chatting with other international travelers.

The trip from the ferry to our hostel was over an hour of grueling bumps and swerves as our driver made his way past the Buracho and to our final destination. The long day of travel and intense heat had exhausted us all, so of course, within ten minutes of getting our rooms, we lock our keys inside the room. And, because this is a third-world country and Ace Hardware doesn't exactly exist here, there is NO SPARE, and NO WAY into the room without literally breaking out a window or breaking down the door. That is, until Kalyn remembered events from her childhood when she would lock herself in the bathroom to get away from my darling older brother, who would outsmart her and use a credit card to jimmy open the door. Lucky for us, Mom had a card on her, and in less than a minute of finagiling (and to the SHOCK of the locals who had obviously never seen this trick), the door popped open! Nothing like teaching some good ol' breaking and entering tricks to naïve locals!

The Three Amigas!

Well rested and ready for adventure, we rented horses to help us make our way to a famous waterfall on the Island. Mom hadn't been in a saddle in over a decade, and it had been several years since Kalyn and I had taken a horseback tiki-tour in Hawaii, but this was no American rodeo! Our guide Anwar seemed intent on setting the record to the waterfall and constantly yipped and hawed our horses into a frantic gallop along the road! Kalyn somehow managed to hang on to her ancient horse (who somehow managed not to die at over twenty-years old, we later found out), Mom was happy as could be back in the saddle, and with no prompting from me my horse RAN LIKE CRAZY the nearly the entire way there AND BACK! The waterfall was beautiful, Mom and Kalyn saw a family of monkeys on the way back down the trail, while Anwar happily pointed out about ten snakes along the way (information I would have been happyto be oblivious to)! The day was incredible, and even better because I was sharing it with Mom and Kalyn!

-Ashley

Little Hector, possibly the CUTEST kid in all of Nicaragua
 (and blue eyes to boot)!