We crossed the border (after waiting at least 2 hours) with a small
boat going on the Rio Frio. The "cold river" might as well have been
named
"Rio sucio" (dirty river) because there was much garbage floating
around.
The captain at the boat had to tell
the Nicaraguan customs (= the guy sitting at a table under the banana
trees) which nationalities there were
in his boat, but he couldn't grasp the idea of a mixed couple. We must
be either both Dutch, or both French,
so for the Nicaraguan authorities, I was French this time!
We met
Annet, a Dutch woman who had traveled a lot
( and wanted to hear that too), she was very sticky and followed us
around for a couple of days, we were stuck on the
same track.
On the Nicaraguan side we changed money with a "coyote",
he was holding big piles of cordobas, he must have
been the richest man in the town of San Carlos.
The difference
between Costa Rica and Nicaragua was immediately clear:
Nicaragua is so much poorer... The town was full with grafitty with a
lot of politic lines.
Immediately more beggars as well, and then we had the feeling the
people all thought we were
from the States. With the history in mind, this didn't give friendly
looks. But after we answered
the question where we were from, their looks turned into smiles, and
they became a lot frienlier.
We had also seen on TV that the war in Iraq had really kicked off now,
so we could make them
perfectly clear how much we liked the politics of the Estados Unidos...
Costa Rica didn't seem to have
interest in the war in Iraq, but in Nicaragua the newspapers are full
with it. The government is officially
supporting Bush, but that's more so because of the promised fundings.
The population is totally against, and
even in Nicaragua peace demonstrations took place. But rightwing
newspapers are writing heroe stories about
Nicaraguans fighting with the US army in Iraq...
We took the boat from San Carlos to El Castillo, which was a slow
boat, loaded with chickens and other stuff.
We passed a lot of burning fields, half of the time we were in smoke.
Upon arrival in El Castillo ( a nice rivertown, set
in terraces upon the riverbank with just two streets) we were so
lucky to find out we arrived in the middle of the
festival of "the patrons". This meant that there was ring throwing,
gambling, a market and dancing in the night.
We went to the dance, but the only ones dancing were teenagers,
everybody older then a teenager was too drunk to dance.
It was amazing to see how drunk some of them were, only at the second
day of the five day festival.
One of the surprises the festival had for us, was that at 5 o'clock in
the morning there was
a streetparade of musicians acompanied with some loud firecrackers to
go around for the "get you out of your dreams" - call..
We looked for a place to have breakfast, but none of the restaurants
were open. The cooks must have been
all drunk the last night. We ended up in some old ladies house, but
she made a very nice meal for us.
After a visit to the fort (very little) we went to the "torros". Men
had to pay more then woman, this was
probably because some of them were so macho to get in the ring with
the bulls. It was more some kind of rodeo,
the bulls weren't hurt. They didn't even get their balls tight, the
only thing to make them
wild was some fire crackers and some drunk guys with red cloths. The
bulls were very Latin American though,
which meant very tranquilo. The guys almost rode the bulls as if they
were horses. The freakiest thing was that
there were guys in the ring so drunk that they could hardly stand up.
And they felt like world's greatest toreadors,
and a few times there was a near accident with the drunks just not
being run over by a bull.
We had all sort of plans to move on, but in this part we were stuck by
the few times a boat would pass by, and no bank
at this site of the country, so we (and Annet too) had only one
possibility: go back to San carlos. Because we were on this
side of the country, we had set our mind on reaching our dream
caribbean island, but it turned out to be a tough trip...
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