Day Two, Part Two

It looks like Jane is too busy with work to do the next post; so I'm going to fill in for her; and probably at greater length than necessary as usual.

We took the bus to Masaya for a few cordobas each, and very quickly were outside of the the oldest part of Granada. Here the shabbiness of all things came more strongly into focus; the closed court-yard houses and impressive government buildings of the old city either hide away or do not emhasize how badly the last few decades have treated these people. Something about more modern structures makes their decay scream for attention. Roads seem more potholed, garbage less collected, tourists far less obvious, everything needs repainting.

We hired a taxi that pulled up to the bus stop as we stepped down, as soon as his passengers were out of the car. The cab was a Hyundai Breadbox (not its real name, but that should give you an idea of its general size and shape), well dented and scraped. There were six of us in a vehicle designed for five again, but headroom is not a problem in this car. It is even narrower than the Gnat, for those of you who remember that late unlamented Festiva. On the way to the market in Masaya, our driver gave us a price to go to the volcano, and we arranged for him to meet us back at the market in an hour and a half. It should have been in two days.

Take some corrugated tin and nail it up to keep the rain and the sun off whatver tables, pipes, scrap lumber and beams take shelter under it or hold it up - and keep nailing tin up until you've covered maybe half an acre. Maybe more. Fill every square inch underneath with booth after booth after booth of every product imaginable, suspend them from the roof on cables or hooks, ropes and wires - everything that won't fit on the shelves and tables, leave crisscrossing aisles of two and a half feet or so to walk between, have no maps, no booth numbers, no directions, cram it with vendors and their children and their babies, and their dogs, import a constant stream of customers...and you will get an idea of how confusing we found things under that tin roof. The prices here are cheap even by Nicararguan standards, a leather belt $US 3.00, a turned wooden box $US 4.00. Ripped videos are $US 1.00 each, and they will put them on so you can see the quality of what you are buying. Shoes, clothes, rice, watches, toys, rice, slabs of unrefrigerated meat, chickens killed and dressed while you wait. Fish, wallets, purses, shirts, other clothes, haircuts, perms, pots, pans, souvenirs, things repaired, stereos, pinatas, icecream cones, sunglasses, spices, baskets, cleaning supplies, beans, candy, hammocks... you get the idea. We got separated from Geoff and Lay Mey, got lost and probably never saw 75% of the market and still came out with most of everything we needed in little plastic bags.

From the moment we entered, we had two persistent guides who wanted to 'help' us find things, and it took some firm words from Jane three or four times before they finally left us alone. I was ignoring them and that wasn't working.

There are no pictures of the market because we forgot to re-charge the camera's battery; this will account for the misleading dates on photos from the volcano because we used Geoff's camera there and I did not know that the date stamp was on and incorrectly set.

Our taxi was waiting for us at the appointed time and we all squashed in, with David sitting on my lap in the front seat - and we were not even out of the parking spot before a traffic cop wrote the driver a ticket for being overloaded. Then we left anyway, because the driver said that they could only fine him once, and the ticket could be now considered a pass. But it was going to be for more than the price of the trip to the volcano. After a some discussion, we stopped and put David in the trunk - relax; the Breadbox is like a little van - and here is the first photo of that adventure.

Off we went, and my opinion of the financial state in which most Nicaraguans live was not altered by anything I saw. We drove quite some distance to the volcano, which is a state park and the fees to get in are probably priced high enough that most locals do not go (unless there is an unposted Nica price.) We covered the cost of the taxi driver to get in, and he drove us directly to the top of the mountain. Here are pictures of the lava fields through which we passed; there is some vegetation growing over the rock but its rough structures would make it nearly impassable on foot.

At the crater... there is a reason for these signs in the parking lot...

...and it is this. When I first saw and smelled the gas coming off the crater, I named it the Mouth of Hell, which echoes what the Spanish priests thought of the place when they raised a cross there and put an end to the locals flinging children and virgins into it to placate some old hag spirit who lived down in the lava. The gasses are unpredictable, and the crater is potentially active at at any moment, and you might want to leave in a hurry. There are stairs built to the top of the peak over the crater, and by the time David and I and Lay Mey got to the top, the sulphurous fumes were too much to bear and we only stayed long enough for a quick picture or two. Jane had some issue with the sulphurous gas - the damned stuff seemed to cause a sulphite reaction - and we got her out of there as quickly as possible; if we had thought the whole thing through clearly, we never would have come up to the crater. **Jane's note, I would have, I just would have taken extra meds and a mask!! :)**

There is a museum at the entrance to the park, and we had a quick look through it; this is where I found out about the hag spirit.

Jane needed a new inhaler; the taxi driver found us a hole-in-the-wall pharmacy where merely from description and without a prescription we purchased a ventalin inhaler of double strength/ double dose (compared to that at home) and a vial of epinepherine in case of anaphalactic shock, for about $US 6.00. Why is it that former dictatorships treat you like an adult, capable of deciding things for yourself, and democracies like ours swathe you in bubble wrap and smother you in regulations and laws and bureaucracy, and pervasive nanny-statist clap-trap and insist that you can't take care of yourself? Jane has had asthma attacks progress so far that she ended up in emergency for treatment because a pharmacy at home that had sold her countless inhalers before could not give her another inhaler when she obviously needed it because the prescription had run out.

The taxi driver said he could give us a ride all the way back to the hotel, and we agreed as this would be faster than getting back on the bus... so he stopped and took the taxi sign off the roof, because he was not permitted to drive into Granada. This did not bother us in the least. He had said nothing about having to swallow the fine back in Masaya, and deserved a chance to get back whatever he could, and for his patience, trouble and excess distance covered, we paid him about double + tips what we had originally hired him for. We had had use of his cab for two hours, and it cost us about $US 18.00.

Back at the Hotel, we cleaned up and walked across the park, and stopped for the fireworks being set off in the town square. This was an eye-opener; there did not seem to be even the rudimentary safety precautions that we took all those years ago at Alice and DJ's neighbourhood fireworks night in place. There was nothing between the crowd and the mortars that launched bigger and ever bigger charges skyward. And the historic structures behind them? Nothing burned down, so it was all good. But I guess that's all part of what I mentioned above: fireworks are dangerous, so it's your business to figure that out and stay away. Which we did.

We went down a street off the park to Jimmy Three Finger's, a restaurante run by Jimmy himself, who is from Alabama and can cook up steak dinners that you must simply see and try to believe. I had 10 0z of filet mignon perfection, and regretfully declined the brownie desert at the end, although by the time I made it back to the hotel, there was room. Steak dinner and drinks for five, $US 52.00. Do you notice a trend here?

David took a picture of his dinner, both before and after.

Swimming thereafter, Flor de Cana 5year-old rum and cokes ($US 4.00 per small bottle) and sleep.