Convalescing in Granada
Got off the bus in the oldest Spanish city in Nicaragua in late morning, feverish. After nine days feeling exhausted and bad nights of sleep in dorms, despite the benefits of the healing waters of Laguna de Apoyo, I had finally succumbed to sickness, and was looking for a hole to climb into. Within a block of getting off the bus, I discovered the rather impressive main plaza, the Parque Central. A grand, but not imposing neo-classical cathedral painted a canary yellow, two bell towers topped with maroon. Ornate arcaded walkways, palms and thick-leafed laurel-like trees. In the four corners of the plaza were little outdoor cafes centered around kiosk kitchens with older women lording over steaming pots. People sitting over bowls of stew, cups of coffee, fresh-made fruit juices. Granada certainly had its charms.
I didn’t linger long, fever and tropical heat being a bad combination, and walked to Avenida Guzman, a street just off the plaza where my eight-year-old guidebook told me I would find the cheapest private rooms in the centro. This was the point I was at — if I was really going to be sick I needed my own room to wallow in. I inquired at the two hostels on that block, but they wanted the equivalent of eighteen and thirty dollars for a private room, and energies waning, I walked back to the plaza to regroup. Not having eaten anything yet that day and without a clear plan, my stomach steered me straight to the nearest cafe for some sustenance and a place to sit and rest.
Ordered a plate of vigoron, a delicious messy pile of roasted pork and curtido — pickled cabbage salad — with slabs of boiled yuca at bottom. Washed it down with a granadilla, passionfruit juice. Feeling just restored enough to try again, I went back to the same block, where I’d seen a residence with a sign for “habitaciones disponible”, knocked and a young man answered. Claro, they had rooms, and showed me through a shuttered-looking restaurant and a small courtyard to a big dark room with its own bathroom, for which he wanted twenty dollars a night. It looked like it had once been a hotel, but was now a family home with a couple rooms for rent. I gave my standard response in Spanish when I’m not going to take a room: “I need to see another place. Thank you, perhaps I will return.”
He understood the implied message, and said “for you I have a promocion especial, how long do you want to stay? I said I didn’t know, maybe five nights? For you, amigo, $15 a night. Mejor, I said. Sixty for five nights? Sold. I paid him in cordobas and went in to inspect my shabby palace. It would do. I turned the overhead fan all the way on and the lights off, closed the curtains, got a roll of toilet paper to use as tissues, and slept until it was dark.
At night I emerged to walk a couple blocks to the Pali, the depressing Nicaraguan supermarket chain, drab and spartan, tired produce. Bought a chicken and carrots, onions, garlic and potatoes, and a couple liters of juice. All I had the energy to do was to roughly cut the vegetables and the chicken in quarters, then drop all of it in a big pot of water with a lot of salt. Met the rest of the family whose house I was staying in, a diminutive mother in her late forties, several sons. An hour later the pot had turned into something resembling a chicken soup to which I added ramen noodles, and I devoured several bowls of it and went back to bed.
The next day I was even sicker. Enough to fill the trash bin from the bathroom with balled-up tissues, enough to stay in bed most of the day, alternately drowning in sweat and shiveringly cold. Interspersed with fits of sleep I watched a bunch of pirated episodes of Rick & Morty online, this surreal and absurd animated science fiction series that almost always ends with Rick killing a bunch of aliens. Perfect material for my state. When I get sick my mind goes to dark places — I started to wonder if perhaps I had contracted some tropical fever and if I would be able to carry on with my journey at all. The idea of walking out to the plaza, let alone moving to a different town, seemed to be activities for a different person, one with far more energy than me.
That day and the next were mostly the same — I only left the room to heat up soup and water for tea. I wonder what the family thought of this sick gringo they had taken on. I could only understand a quarter of what they said with their thick accents and abundant slang, and I didn’t have the energy to ask them to repeat things. Mostly just nodded and said Si, si. I could understand the oldest son, the one who had rented me the room, the best, but we didn’t talk much. The mother kept suggesting when we crossed paths in the kitchen, that I do various things in town, and asking why I wasn’t going out. Perhaps she couldn’t tell that I was sick.
That night in a moment of weakness, tired of watching games through choppy pirated streams plagued by pop-up ads, I ponied up and subscribed to the NBA League Pass’ cheapest option, which entitled me to eight games a month. Watched the Warriors beat the Minnesota Timberwolves through a fairly clean stream. Clearly there were some things about the states I wasn’t ready to let go of, my beloved Warriors being one of them.
On my fourth day in Granada, I was less sick, and in the afternoon the dripping and sneezing dried up enough for me to take a walk out and see something of the town. The city is full of character everywhere you look, fading grandeur and crumbling plaster in bright tropical color, trimmed with touches of colonial dignity. It has a sleepy, languid feeling mixed with an apparent sense of pride in its residents. I walked up ten blocks to the old Spanish fort, which was closed for renovations, over to a convent museum which at six dollars I decided was too expensive, pausing every few blocks to rest and just look at the town.
I carried on and walked down the gently sloping hill to finally see the lake. El Lago de Nicaragua, or La Mar Dulce (the Sweet Sea) is a gigantic body of water, bigger than the state of Delaware, and Granada sits close to its northern end. Though at this point the western shoreline is only about forty miles from the Pacific, the lake flows out to the Caribbean through the San Juan River, meaning that Granada is actually an Atlantic port. This access led to much of its colonial-era wealth, and also to it being sacked several times by buccaneers who came up river and across the lake, most famously the Pirate Henry Morgan (aka the Captain Morgan of spiced rum fame). Before the building of the Panama Canal, this was a significant travel route for goods and people going from the Atlantic to the Pacific: up the San Juan River, across the lake, and by train across the narrow isthmus to ports in western Nicaragua. Most of “49ers” who traveled to California to take part in the gold rush went this way.
In the latest case of “How the United States Treats its Neighbors”, while I was in the city I learned about how Granada was also taken over by an American filibuster from Tennessee, William Walker. During a Nicaraguan civil war in the 1850s, he was invited by the President to bring a small mercenary army to augment their forces, but after winning a battle in Granada, he simply occupied the place and set himself up as ruler. He was able to control much of Nicaragua for more than a year, and was duly recognized by the United States as the legitimate government of the country. An ill-advised attempt to invade Costa Rica stretched his forces too thin, and he was defeated by an alliance of Central American countries. When he fled from Granada, he gave orders to burn and destroy the city. Three years later, on another filibustering expedition, he was caught and executed by firing squad in Honduras.
Here at the lake, there didn’t seem to be much port activity these days, a few docked tour boats, nor much tourism either, except for the group of guys trying to sell me boat tours. The lake looked dirty, though this wasn’t stopping kids from swimming along the shore. For many years there was ferry service running from here to Isla Ometepe and the south part of the lake, and you could still see the aged ferryboats, rusting away way out on a pier. Dirty water and abandoned boats: the feeling was melancholic. On my way back I passed a complex of several run-down baseball fields, several teams of kids practicing hitting and fielding. I stopped and watched, wishing I could go out there and shag some fly balls. I was happy to see that there were girls playing along with the boys. Despite the weedy, overgrown fields, there was some talent out there.
Back in the city I ended up talking on the street for awhile with an expat named Bob who was about to open a restaurant. He was passionate about his love for Granada, but then mostly talked about how frustrating it was here dealing with the bureaucracy and lazy workers and the general chaos of Central America. I wished him good luck and walked on. At dusk I sat in the plaza and had a drink of tamarindo con chia. Tamarind has been growing steadily in my agua fresca standings. Sweet and sour and perfect for the heat. I wrote in my journal, felt weak but something like a human again. This was a fine city, with enough gravity to allow for a certain amount of respite simply by being in its orbit. The kind of place with enough presence that you don’t actually have to do anything to feel like you are getting it. People were lingering in the cafes, standing out by the cathedral chatting. I was glad to have limped my way to this place.
The next day I wasn’t really sick anymore, just tired, and I thought I could use some exercise to get my blood circulating again and sweat out the remnants of the sickness. I rented a bike for three hundred cordobas, ten dollars, bought a couple of egg sandwiches and rode down the Parque Centro Turistico along the lake shore. Past the kids swiming, all the isleta tour sellers, the restaurants and bars with no one at them, to where the pavement ends at the little village of Puerto Asese. A guy there told me it wasn’t safe to ride any farther, but I had grown skeptical of these kind of claims. It seemed to me that people mostly wanted tourists to just take the paid tours, and use the threat of crime to keep them inside the lines. Hard to say, but on I went.
From there it was sand and gravel on the road, rural Nicaragua just a few miles out of the city. Swampy fields of dry grass with cows grazing, white birds hanging around them, banana trees, hills of rocky ground, farm workers walking with machetes, shy kids in uniforms coming home from school. To my right the cracked green outline of Volcan Mombacho could be seen against the horizon. It felt freeing to have the independence of a bicycle, to be off the beaten path and the gringo trail.
Past little homesteads, ill-fated hotel concepts, out to El Rayo at the end of the peninsula, a large cove with wooded isletas with ramshackle houses surrounding it. A swimming park with signs for an entrance fee but no one to collect it and no one swimming either. Just a couple guys fishing and a bunch of local kids paddling around in rowboats. The cloudy water didn’t look so inviting, but it was cleaner here than in the city. It was hot and I was drenched in sweat so I got in but didn’t stay long. Mostly just sat and ate my egg sandwiches and watched the guys occasionally pulling in little fish and banging their heads on the dock. The kids were having rowdy naval battles in between ferrying adults out to the islands across the cove. I wondered what it would be like to be a kid here. Despite the warning I’d gotten, there was absolutely no indication that this place was in any way unsafe.
Rode back past it all again, twenty kilometers in total, and afterwards felt fine. Sat in the late afternoon in the plaza and drank a couple glasses of fresh-squeezed jugo de mandarina. Nectar of the gods. There is something about a good long bike ride that lifts the spirits, and I was also feeling that sense of euphoria that comes when you’ve been ill, then recover enough to feel halfway decent. The best day I’d had in awhile. I had passed through the sickness and was ready to resume my journey.
