Attencionadetalles - Details we have observed

“You can observe a lot by watching” – Yogi Berra

20 October 20, 2010

We rode from Esteli to Granada Nicaragua a distance of 123 miles today. The ride took us a little over three hours. We are staying at the Alhambra hotel which is the same hotel we stayed in 2002 when we rode to Panama and back. We liked the city then better than any we visited on that trip so we wanted to return.
First impressions, the city has grown and with the growth there seems to be more squalor in the center of town. The center of town has a public square with one side occupied by a magnificent old cathedral and on the opposite side several buildings with large colonnades. Granada was one of the few cities in Nicaragua that was not occupied by the Sandinistas during the1980’s revolution.
We have ridden about 3300 miles so far and calculate that we may be ¼ of the way down on our trip, so we are going to include a mind report on our travel impressions up to this point.
Caveat: All of our impressions are tainted by our first world stateside minds in which we view things through rose colored glasses. In no way do we want disparage the way of life of the citizens of any of the countries we have traveled through. The first thing we have to remember is that the vast majority of the citizens of Latin America are very poor by our USA standards, yet most are hard working people who are trying to survive to the best of their ability. Saying that, we can’t help but laugh at some of the situations we encounter.

Modes of transportation:

We have encountered every conceivable mode of transport from the most basic of walking to ultra modern automobiles.
One sees people walking everywhere. They may be miles away from any town or any semblance of habituation. Yet they continue to walk through the mountains and often are carrying heavy burdens of firewood, corn, or in the case of the women carrying tubs of grain or other items on their heads.
We have observed men pushing wheelbarrows on the mountain roads with the wheelbarrows loaded with wood or produce. One of the wheelbarrows we saw had only a steel wheel. These are hardy people.
In the country most males about the age of about ten are carrying machetes. The machetes are not weapons as our prejudice likes to think, but are tools to be used. Machetes are used to chop wood, to clear the road side or to cut the lawn. Today we saw a roadside work crew of about ten men cutting the roadside of overgrown bush. We would not even think of tackling a job of this magnitude without a mower behind a tractor.
There have been yokes of oxen pulling wooden-wheeled carts, trains of pack mules, rancheros on horseback, three wheeled bicycle taxis, thousands of small motorcycles/scooters- one of which I saw four people on, three-wheeled baja buggy taxis, minibuses slightly larger than our minivans with 15-20 people and a large luggage rack on top loaded to the gills, and autobuses which mostly are old American school buses which have been elaborately painted and large luggage racks added. Pickup trucks are used as taxis and may have up to twenty or more people standing in the rear. Large cargo trucks are filled with cargo then have several men riding on top of the cargo. Remember any of these means of transport beats walking the many miles to the nearest town and often down a dusty or muddy dirt road.

Road conditions
We have encountered every imaginable road condition from dirt paths through landslides to super highways. Most roads are potholed and the asphalt surface where installed is rough. Some of the potholes are deep and wide enough to swallow the wheels on our motorcycles and as everywhere one pothole seems to breed others. Often we find ourselves weaving through the potholes to avoid damage to the motorcycles or to ourselves.
Overall with all its other problems, Nicaragua has the best major throughfare roads. This was also true in 2002. All the countries so far have had topes or tumultos with Nicaragua having the fewest and Mexico having the most. Topes is the word for speed bump in Mexico while tumultos is the word in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. These speed bumps are located in any area that requires reduced speed. Mostly, they consist on a pile of asphalt about eighteen inches wide and about eight inches high that stretch across the entire roadway. They are very effective. There are signs in some places announcing the upcoming topes, but many are not signed posted. One only has to jar their teeth really good about twice and then one begins to scout for the “sleeping policeman” as they are sometimes called.
Guatemala and Honduras have suffered many landslides as a result of recent flooding from hurricanes. Sometimes large boulders are in the road or sections of the road have simply slid of the mountain side. One begins to pick up local signals to impending dangerous conditions. Sometimes it may be a series of rocks stacked along the side of the road, sometimes it may be painted rocks across the road, or it may be a recently cut tree branch stacked in the road. These same signals are used to alert drivers that a vehicle may be broken down in the road or that there is an accident ahead.
Speaking of signals, we have learned to read the cities listed on the front of the autobuses. This is useful if you are not sure you are going in the right direction.

Traffic
You will be passed. It doesn’t matter the road conditions, the density of traffic, whether you are on a blind up or downhill curve, in a double yellow zone or crawling over a tope. You will be passed.
If a vehicle is moving slowly along the side of the road, it will pull out in front of you. In the towns one can expect a vehicle to stop suddenly in front of you and as you swerve to pass, the driver will open his door in front of you.
In addition to animals of every type grazing along the road sides, many times the animals will be walking unattended down either or both lanes of traffic.
With all of this seemly disorder, we have witnessed only two accidents, both trailer trucks which had run off the road and flipped over; and witnessed one dead horse on the roadside. Somehow it just works.

You will get lost. It seems the sign posting out in the country where there may only be one road is fairly decent. Inside the towns and large cities it is an entirely different matter. Sign posting is scarce or none existent in most towns. We have been lost in every major town we have ridden through. The GPS’s are useless in the towns because they do not have street level detail for this region of the world.
To be quite honest, traffic and road conditions are the greatest threat we face on this trip. It is not the narco-terrorism in Mexico, nor the corrupt policemen in Honduras, nor anti-American/Yankee go home attitude that is a great danger to us. In fact everyone we have encountered has been very nice to us and willing to help with directions when we have asked.

National Characteristics
This entire region is much more relaxed than when we were here before. Most have seemed to put the revolutions and civil wars of the 80’s and 90’s behind them. Reconciliation is evident wherever we travel. Maybe we as a nation could learn something from this as our own country is going through a bitter debate with the upcoming elections.
Observing the different national characteristics, we both agreed the Guatemalans are the most gregarious and the most curious about our trip. This may go hand-in-hand that their country also has the cleanest roadsides. Guatemala is the only country where we have seen wearing of a so-called national dress. This is particularly true of the Mayan women and their colorful skirts and blouses. The Hondurans seem to be the most reserved and certainly have the dirtiest roadsides. There are impromptu garbage dumps everywhere. The Honduran roadsides are rivaled by the trash on the Nicaraguan roads. It is not only the country roadsides which are littered but so is very parking lot. I am beginning think the Latin Americans have never met a garbage can they liked.
In Nicaragua we have encountered beggars for the first time, and many of them. So much for the socialist revolution Daniel Ortega promised them.
Manual labor
Earlier I mentioned the people are hard working. Much of this work is manual labor. We saw a man atop of a boulder half the size of small car with a sledge hammer. He was breaking the boulder into smaller pieces so it could be moved from the road side. Later we saw another man with a sledge hammer and he was working on breaking pieces the size of car tires into smaller pieces. We passed three men who were loading sand into dump truck by shovel. A group of men with picks and shovels were digging a trench to bury water lines along the roadside. Again we would not think of doing such without a power trencher or a backhoe.
Food
The food has been good and thankfully up to this point we have not had to deal with Montezuma’s revenge. In Mexico we mostly ate tacos. The tacos are different than what we are accustomed to in the states. The tacos are soft-shelled corn tortillas which are about half the size of our stateside tortillas. The tacos we had were filled with beef steak and are generally served with black beans and maybe rice. They are good tasting and cheap. From Guatemala on down we have eaten a steady diet of res (beef steak) or pork chops. In Guatemala, the res is served with black beans, goat cheese, and corn tortillas. In Honduras the black beans gave way to rice and the tortillas to regular loaf bread (we prefer the tortillas.) In Nicaragua, the rice has been replaced with papas (French fries.) Salads are served with the meals in most sit down restaurants, but we do not eat the lettuce. We have also avoided drinking anything that did not come from a sealed bottle or can.
Mentioning drinks, we have discovered that the Latin Americans have kept alive many of the old soft drink brands we long ago discarded. We have seen Upper 10’s, Teems, Lifts, Nesbitts, and Nehi’s.

Border crossings
There is not enough spaced in this edition to explain the border crossing in Latin America and especially the one we encountered yesterday crossing from Honduras into Nicaragua. We will make that another entry.
I did see this fine cock wandering between the border at Honduras and Nicaragua. I thought he may be an illegal alien so I documented him. And as I am a graduate of Jacksonville State University I thought he might make a good mascot for the “fightin’ Gamecocks.”
Amidst all of this seemly forgone era there is every indication we are in the 21st century. It seems every teen and most adults are talking on a cell phone and indeed I receive more bars on my cell phone here than I do at home. Most hotels we have stayed in have had Wi-Fi internet, and if they don’t the owner will point you to the nearest internet café. There are no smoking signs in most establishments. As Roger says, “The world is changing before our very eyes.” We count it a blessing that we can experience some of this change while enjoying our sport of adventure motorcycling.