Donde esta Dana?

Apologies for missing last week. I don't really have a good excuse, but I have more to write this week so all the better. Two weekends ago I opted out of my program trip because I didn't want to do any of the offered activities (ranging in price from $65-$95...no gracias) nor did I want to spend another weekend with the citizens of Blackout City. Instead I went to one of Costa Rica's many national parks with a friend of mine. The park was on the Pacific Ocean and was incredible. We spent 6 hours hiking different trails, one of which ended with a waterfall/swimmin' hole (my favorite) AND I saw two monkeys and a sloth. The monkeys here do not carry the Ebola virus, so I was very excited to see them.

The week was fairly uneventful. We had finals in Spanish classes (I am now in Intermediate 1!) and I went to the doctor and experienced the Costa Rican medical system. Although I didn't really, because my program director opted to take me to literally the most expensive hospital in all of Costa Rica. I told my Tico friend which one I went to and his response was "holy shit, the president goes there." I have seen time and time again that the general assumption is that all Americans have unlimited funds at their disposal. And while this assumption is not at all unfounded, I just have a problem with generalizations of any kind, because there is simply no way for a generalization to be right all the time. For example, my program director failed to mention to me that the doctor's appointment would cost over  $200 because "she didn't think it would be a big deal." And true, it wasn't as big a deal for me as it might have been for a lot of people here or for many people in the States, I would have appreciated a heads up at least. As the appointment depleted a significant portion of my funds, I think I will be eating a lot of eggs in the next two months...which is fine, I like eggs.

We had a 4 day weekend this weekend, so I went to Nicaragua with my amigas Robin and Kim. It was quite possibly the best weekend of my life. Not only is Nicaragua beautiful, and the people are wonderful and the general attitude of laidbackness is infectious, and best of all, the whole weekend reaffirmed time and time again that people are good, and that if you trust in that, you will get far.

This weekend, my trust in humans got me from San Jose, Costa Rica to Nicaragua to the town of Granada to the Island Ometepe, one of the least populated places I have ever had the pleasure of encountering and back over the boarder. Literally none of that would have been possible without the help of people who I will likely never see again in my life.  The series of events that contributed to the most magical weekend I have experienced are as follows:

We (a group of 7) left San Jose at 4am on Friday and arrived in Granada, Nicaragua around 12:30. We asked for directions to a hostel and got there without any problem. Friday afternoon was just spent walking around Granada. My friend Kim has family friends who own a bed and breakfast in Granada so Robin and I went with her to find them and they were wonderful.

The rest of our group left Granada in the morning on Saturday and we went to meet these friends for breakfast and afterward they took us to a market, which was wonderful (and cheap!) and after to a lookout point which overlooked a lake to the background music of a band playing lovely music, a mandolin was involved, need I say more? There were children playing and horses walking around, it was beautiful. Granada was super quaint and quiet. The buildings were colonial and brightly colored like different flavors of sherbet. There was a market in the town square and horse drawn carriages. The mode of transportation was either horses or bikes (I literally saw a whole family on a bike, with the dad pedaling, the mom and one kid sitting on the bar in between the seat and the handlebars and another kid on the handle bars) I did not know it was possible to fit so many people on one bike, I was going to make my friend Kevin try to give me a ride on his bike but we both decided that he would probably fall and both of us would probably a) get injured and b) look like idiots.

On Saturday afternoon we got a taxi and asked him to take us to the bus to Rivas (the port city to take us to Island Ometepe) This is where the trust in people begins. He took us to a lot with a bunch of old school buses painted different colors. He pointed to one and said that one went to Rivas. So we got on. Two hours later we were in Rivas. We got in another taxi and asked him to take us to the ferry. He took us to the port, where there were 3 ships. He pointed to the one in the middle and said that one went to Ometepe. So we got on.

The boat ride was beautiful. Once upon a time, Mark Twain went to Nicaragua and wrote essays about Island Ometepe. We are nerds and printed out the essays and read them to each other as the sun was setting behind the volcano. It was one of the most serene and peaceful moments of my life.  After the sun set, the moon was orange and barely lit up the shadow of the volcano. In the words of Kim, it was the exclamation point on our day.

When we arrived to Ometepe it wasn't late, but it was dark. We had the name of one "hostel" from a flyer at our hostel in Granada. All we knew was that we needed to go to Balgue (a "town" on the island) and then walk for 15 minutes. We asked someone where Balgue was, and they pointed to a bus and told us to get on. I should mention here that Ometepe was real rural - there was a whole lot of jungle and not a whole lot of buildings, restaurants, hotels or people. So we were a little nervous but listening to people had gotten us this far.

After we had been on the bus for a solid 2 hours and were three of five remaining passengers, a white dude and a breathtakingly beautiful Brazillian (and magical we would soon find out - like I actually think she probably can do magic) woman got on the bus. The guy was clearly a gringo too, so we asked him how to get to the place we were looking for "Finca Bona Fide." Much to our delight, Kurt replied "Oh! We're living there right now! We'll take you!"

So we followed them through the jungle for about 45 minutes (NOT 15 as the flyer had claimed) and finally arrived at the farm. The farm was not in fact a hostel, as the flyer had claimed but was more of a hippie commune. We would have never found this place ourselves in a million years. There were 7 people living there and they worked on the farm with Nicaraguans during the week and basked in the magic of the farm and Nicaragua on the weekends. Even though it wasn't a hostel, they were warm and welcoming and let us stay there and cooked for us. The place was run by a guy named Chris, he wasn't there, so we slept in his bed which was made of bamboo and covered by a mosquito net.

In Chris' absence, Camilla, the mystical Brazillian woman we met on the bus ran the farm, along with her boyfriend Mitch. Camilla moved with the grace of a fairy, and her smile was absolutely infectious. We determined that bees do not in fact make honey, but rather Camilla smiles and does some sort of spin and honey as well as everything else good in the world just appears. Mitch was originally from Boston but has spent the last 4 years being a vagabond. He had dreadlocks and said things like "that meal was really beautiful, thank you everyone for sharing in it." When we arrived and saw that this farm was more of a commune than a hostel we apologized for imposing and he said "there is literally nothing you could do to make me upset." I believe him. Both him and Camilla seem like those hippies who are just so at peace with everything in their world that literally nothing could shake their joy. We later played a game called "what could we have done to make them mad" the best things on the list were a) have a food fight with all of their organically grown food or b) steal the dog that lived there, who Mitch seemed to be in love with.

When we woke up we saw the breathtaking view of the lake and the volcano (seen best from the farm's treehouse lookout.) We hung out there all morning, relaxing, talking with the hippies, reading, writing. The only slightly negative aspect about the magical hippie farm was that the "bathroom" was in fact a hut with a hole in it and a beehive in the roof of the hut. Taking a poo was a rather nerve wracking experience with bees buzzing under me in the shit hole (literally).

In the afternoon we decided to trek to a hostel closer to the main road, as we had to return to San Jose the next day. After hiking for 3 hours, we found another hostel. On our walk down we were followed for quite some time by a stray dog, who we named Dana. She followed us for the better part of two hours. She was skinny, but not sickly, and somehow regal. We think she is on the upswing, we determined that if Dana was a person she would live in a down and out town and possibly work in a diner but had big plans she was saving up for. At a certain point we looked down and didn't see Dana, she probably went out to follow her dreams.

We spent the rest of Sunday afternoon playing in the lake and generally basking the in the magic of Nicaragua. The owner of our hostel informed us that there were two buses to the port in the morning. One at 5am and one at 9am. We needed to get back to San Jose so 5am it was. To be safe, we left our room at 4:55 (even though everything is late in Latin America), as we walked out the door we heard the bus driving by. I have never run so fast in my life. We burst through the gate of the hostel and I threw our key at the door of the office and we hauled ass. The bus must have heard us yelling or seen us flailing because he stopped and we got on. The next two hours we spent on the dirt roads getting to the port. We ran into our friend and savior from the day before, Kurt on the bus, and I think we overwhelmed him with our chattiness at 5:30 in the morning.

We got to the boat and at this time were famished but this was the only boat for 2 hours, so we didn't have time to eat, and there weren't really any places around anyway. So we got off the boat in Rivas and got a taxi and asked him to take us to the bus station. Our taxi driver informed us that one bus went through Rivas a day, and it came at 10:45 (it was about 8:30) and we didn't have reservations, so if that one bus was full, we would be stuck in Rivas. But, he said, if we paid him $20, he would drive us (about an hour drive) to the boarder and we could find a bus there. Again, we'd gotten this far listening to people, so we figured why stop our streak. So Luis took us to the boarder and during our drive, we had a great time shooting the shit with him. When we got to the boarder he said to us "Okay, when you get out a bunch of guys are going to ask you if you need help getting across the boarder, but you don't need them, I'm going to tell you what to do. Go to this building, pay $1, don't let them ask for more, after that go to this building, pay $6, don't let them ask for more and after that go cross the boarder." It pays to trust people. It got us across the boarder and back to Costa Rica. Once we were on the Costa Rica side, we saw a bus going to San Jose, hopped on and we were on our way back.  We also bought sandwiches. Turkey on white bread had never tasted so good. The sweet taste of crossing boarders.

Lesson of the weekend, people are good, people are helpful, people are kind. The world, with all of its problems, is a beautiful place. I think the hippies would be proud.