Last week was the week of Semana Santa, which starts Palm Sunday, and ends on Easter. No on works and the streets become a open party zone. So rather than enduring the constant, somewhat socially acceptable sexual harassment by drunken machismos, myself and a few other volunteers headed down south to the jungle. It was intended to be a 4 day kayak trip down the river, but lo and behold a majority of my group after the first day decided that paddling was too hard and quit. Only myself and another female volunteer wanted to continue, which as single women is quite unsafe (people in groups up to 6 can stay in the ranger stations along the river for free, but they´re manned by men who only leave the station once every 6 weeks, and are very isolated). So we convinced two of the guys to stay in with us for a couple days and hang out around the ranger station we were staying in as a compromise between quitting and continuing.


Crocodile



Instead of using school buses (they don´t float!) on the river they use these modified boats. Cram as many people in as humanly possible, chickens and probably other small livestock. On school buses vendors will run to the windows to sell food, water, or anything else, this too happens on the boats. At one point a smaller boat pulled up alongside and ta-da tajadas and bags of water were being sold. (Tajadas are platanos cut lengthwise in thin strips and fried much like plantain chips just longer)


Ranger station/miliatary post we stayed in



The Rio San Juan



Headed into the jungle on a little side river with the intent to catch some fish, we only managed a couple small ones and a turtle.



its quite a different world down in the south. It rains pretty much daily, its humid but not terribly hot (in contrast to my little town)where as where I live its hot, dusty, and only rains in the rainy season (which we will be entering at the end of this month).I´ve been surprised by the ecological diversity of the country. We have the coffee and chocolate cool mountainous regions of the north, the jungle to the south, cloud forests in the north/middle of the country, the bread basket of the country in the south west, the hot desert lowlands with a ridge of active volcanoes running through it (That's where I live!) and then the flat cheese region of the east, I'm not sure exactly what the Atlantic coast is like, but I´m under the impression its mangroves and fishing communities. We have beaches with nesting sea turtles, and lagoons which have taken over extinct volcano craters. We have two huge inland lakes which, if you look at Nicaragua on a map, is quite a domineering feature.

After the long trip (it took 14 hours just to get across lake Nicaragua on the way down excluding bus time and other boat time) I´m ready to get back to work.