The coconut Tree

I recently went to a town called Bluefields which is out on the Atlantic coast. at the end of May they have Maypole festivals ¨Palo de Mayo¨. So myself and three friends made the 11+ hour trip out there.



our 5 hour bus ride between Managua the capitol and the river town of Rama ended up lasting 9 hours rather than 5 (involving tires coming off and being plugged, door jamming so no one could get in or out, I was luckily trapped outside in the pouring rain, and at some point I woke up to smoke which no one seemed to be terribly concerned about). From Rama its a 1.5 to 2 hour boat ride up the river.

The feeling one gets from the Atlantic coast differs drastically from the Pacific where I live. For starters the area was invaded by the English rather than the Spanish and remained fairly autonomous for a decent stretch of time. Also many ex slaves landed there as well as mutinied slave ships, who then mixed with the local population. They also had a large Chinese population when the area was a successful trade/shipping area.


anyway thats enough history.


On Saturday was the huge procession in the street. Each burro of the city had their own group represented who would dance and their recently nominated ¨princess¨ was presented. The parade ended with each group presenting a specific dance and the princesses competing for the title of Miss Bluefields. Well we decided that we wanted to see the whole parade and started asking around ¨where does the parade end¨? Every one we talked to kept saying, at the coconut tree. The what?! There has to be hundreds of coconut trees in this city, considering they put it in everything, beans and rice, chicken, shrimp, bread etc etc. We happened to run into two of our bosses who are from Bluefields and we asked them. They weren’t sure either so they called a friend. The phone call went something like this ¨Hi, how are you…hmmhmm…. So what time does the parade start… mhmmm… and where does it end…wait, where?!... Which one? ¨she turns to us and says, Ya so she says it end at the coconut tree but she doesn’t know where that is. The only way it seemed to find this mysterious coconut tree would be to follow the parade.
So we followed the crowded streets. Each barrio that we went through had a distinctive feel to it; you could feel when you´d passed from a Mosquito barrio to a Rama, or Spanish to Creole. Finally we came to what we believed was the end of the parade, because we had started to turn back towards the park. Where is that damned Coconut tree!? We´d been walking/dancing for a couple hours were dehydrated, happy and tired. Finally we asked someone standing near, where the parade ended. ¨Here was the response, in the barrio of Cotton Tree.¨