A Volcano, A Market, A Boat Ride, and the Most Beautiful City in the World
By Steph
April 29th, 2006 | Nicaragua |
After an intense week of being Very Professional Filmmakers, we were able to take a little time off today. By we, I really mean I, since Trevor and Arthur shot something like eight cards of B-roll today. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This morning, Trevor, Arthur, Ana, Ana’s friend Norma, and I all drove to a national park outside of Masaya, a town southeast of Managua, that featured one of Nicaragua’s many volcanos. We took a winding but paved road up to a vantage point with a small parking lot, and I looked into the core of my very first volcano.
And whoa. It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of heights, because even though I kept one hand on the cement divider at the edge of the vantage point the whole time, looking down, down, down into a pit that just doesn’t end - and knowing that it ends in a bubbling pit of molten rock miles beneath the Earth’s surface - is enough to make anyone at least a little dizzy. And it is one thing to watch PBS documentaries about volcanos from the safety of your living room or nearest tenth grade science classroom, but it is another thing entirely to be confronted by fields of black stone where grass and small shrubs are just beginning to grow. Nothing like meeting a volcano to drive home the real powerlessness of humanity against the forces of nature (and nothing like global warming to remind you how fragile nature can be as well).
Turning around and facing away from the volcano itself was an incredible view of what I assume was Managua and Lake Managua. I started thinking again about Ezra Pound’s idea of the natural object as the perfect symbol. I looked out over the landscape, the rolling plains, a few long, lonely roads stretched out like thread in a tapestry, and remembered a three-dimensional map of Nicaragua I’d looked at in the waiting room at Eduardo Montealegre’s office yesterday. The country looked like a wave, with flatlands next to each coast and enormous, jagged mountains in the middle. Gioconda Belli often uses imagery of the body when she writes about Nicaragua, but, I reflected, why would you need to? The country is a kind of body; the skin of dry fields can barely contain its hot, passionate blood that rises to the surface and floods forth in these volcanos. But even volcanos, I remembered from that tenth grade science class, eventually cool down and become dormant, and life continues on the surface again.
From the national park, it was just a hop, skip and a jump over to Masaya, where we had the opportunity to do a little bit of shopping at the mercado, an open-air market with lots of stalls selling things like jewelry, clothing, woodcarvings, and artwork. I was struck by how much it reminded me of a flea market I went to when my family went to Cancun several years ago. I also noticed a lot more people who looked like tourists than I’d seen in Managua; while I was looking at some bracelets, I overheard a woman murmur to the man standing next to her, “Wow, hun, they speak English now!” Painfully aware of how much my lack of Spanish has limited my experiences in Nicaragua, as well as some recent remarks made by President Bush in regards to bilingual education in America, I shifted uncomfortably and pretended not to have heard.
From Masaya, we drove maybe twenty minutes or so to Grenada, one of the oldest cities in Managua with - according to a guidebook Ana lent me that was written by two of her friends from the Peace Corps - a history of being sacked by everyone from English pirates to William Walker. We ate lunch at an enormous seafood restaurant hidden on a little back street. Everyone else ordered fish. Apparently the cook just takes the entire fish, deep fries it, and plops it on your plate, head and all. My stomach was feeling a little queasy, so I just had a salad with some chicken. For dessert, we had acayo, fruit boiled and glazed in honey. To eat it, you put the whole thing in your mouth (it’s about the size of a walnut, maybe a little bigger) and suck the honey and the meat off the fruit, which leaves you with a pit. You crack the pit with your teeth and suck out the honey that oozes out. Then you take the pit out of your mouth and weasel it open. Inside there’s a nut, which you can pull out and eat; it looks like a peanut and tastes something like an almond, but more chewy. And did I mention that all of this tastes like heaven?
Feeling very, very full after such a decadent lunch, we took a boat trip around the Isletas, very small islands just off the coast in Lake Nicaragua, the second largest freshwater lake in the world and the only one with freshwater sharks. (Cue the “Jaws” theme, maestro.) When I say very small, I mean that on most of the ones we saw, there was room for a small house, a garden, a clothes line, and a dock. It doesn’t get any more private than that! We also saw one island where a school had been built for all the kids nearby; instead of a parking lot, it had a harbor with beautiful stone steps leading up to the buildings.
We ended the day in downtown Grenada, which is possibly the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. Reading about Grenada’s “Spanish colonial architecture and Old World charm” in Ana’s guidebook could not have prepared me for the gorgeous extravagance of houses and cathedrals painted colors I didn’t even know existed. We got gelatto in a cafe called “La Dolce Vita,” and then walked to the town square, where the light entered the time of day Trevor and Arthur call “Magic Hour,” all soft and golden in the hour or so before sunset. From what I’ve seen of the footage so far, it’s some of the most beautiful shots of the whole trip.
Exhausted in the best way possible, we stopped at Friday’s for drinks and fairly fell into bed, although it wasn’t even nine o’ clock when I began writing this. We’ve got a long day of traveling ahead of us tomorrow, and we’ll lose an hour of sleep tonight, since Nicaragua begins daylight savings time tomorrow.
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May 4th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed reading this blog. I’ve been sending the link to all sorts of relatives and friends. Stephanie is a wonderful writer! Thanks!!!