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| Isla De Ometepe, Nicaragua |
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| The Ferry to Isla de Ometepe from San Jorge ,Nicaragua |
There are many beautiful things about traveling, and for different travelers, different things are more iform the basis for decisions about where to go next. For me, food and transportation are two of those important things. Traveling in Latin American often involves a series of long bus rides across mountains and deserts, and perhaps this is why I am always drawn to places that can only be reached by boat. There is a simple romance in that exclusive access, and it is why I chose to live with a family and study Spanish for a week in Nicaragua on the Isla de Ometepe.
Isla de Ometepe is an island formed from two volcanos in the middle of fresh-water Lago Nicaragua. To get to Altagracia on the island, I took three taxis and a ferry. The town was very poor and rural and every family owned several chickens pigs used for eggs and meat.
My family was the same. They had twenty chickens, five piglets, a noisy dog, and a large mama pig bigger than most people. In the morning I often had to chase a chicken out of my bedroom, which I shared with a spider the size of a small sandwich. On the bed there was a mosquito net and on the wall a Christian calendar depicting scenes from the bible. The calendar had been turned from January. No roof separated the rooms, but a tin roof covered the bedrooms and dining room, where an empty refrigerator and a small wooden table adorned a small yellow-painted concrete room. For meals, we sat together at the table, but we only once ate meat. Instead we would eat rice and red beans, usually served with plantains and a block of dry white cheese. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Like many Nicaraguans, Carla and Winston were poor but beyond amable, calling me their son my first day there. They lived with their daugher, Carla's sister and her two children, her brother-in-law, mother and father.
"We don't have much money," Carla told me, "but we have the love of family. Sometimes, though, there is not much to eat and no work, so it is important we are together, that we are close, so we can share what we have."
At night we ate rice and beans together in the sparse kitchen made of concrete floors and covered by a wide tin roof. After dinner, Winston would pull a rocking chair up to the television to watch baseball and practice English. "Home---rooon!" he would yell and swing a phantom bat from his chair. His favorite teams were the Yankees and Rangers. Winston was short but strongly built. He had the natural erect posture of an athelete who looks both bored and forever ready to play a baseball or football game at any moment without needing to change clothes or shoes.
"The mayor asked me to play on our baseball team. But no, I can't," he said. "I used to play, but I hurt my knee." He patted his knees with his hands while rocking in his chair, looking disappointed in his body, and then resumed watching the Red Sox play the Atheltics until 7:30 when he'd get ready to go to bed each night.
In the mornings I went to another house for my spanish lessons. In Nicaragua it is traditional for the kitchen to be an open-air brick or concrete shack separate from the house, usually in a backyard filled with plantain trees. In the kitchen are stacks of wood for the stove, a tin roof, a round of lumber for a chopping block, and a metal duct to ventilate the plumes of smoke from burning wood and animal grease.
During my lessons tides of smoke fragranced with fried pig would pour into the open doors of the living room and my teacher, Eber, would stop the lesson to appreciate the aroma. We would rub our bellies and think about the source of the smoke, imagining fillets of of freshly-killed pork for lunch. Then we'd realize it was only eight-thirty in the morning ad we'd return to our lesson about the conditional future verb tense. Sometimes we'd hear the neighbor grunt and shout. Her chickens would fuss. Then a thwack, more fussing, another thwack, the sound of thin metal against wood, followed by silence. Eber, again, would stop our lesson and turn to me to say, "Chicken Soup."
After only three days I had fallen in love with island life. In the afternoons I biked to beaches and pools. I explored farms and forests and read books under red-flowered trees in the parque central. Friendships were formed by nothing more than a greeting. I went to bed at eight because that's when everyone went to sleep, and I woke up at six because that's when the roosters wake the pigs that wake the dogs that wake the people. I went to church at night and once cried quietly alone in the back because it was all too beautiful not to cry, the community, the children chasing the altar boys as if the procession were a game of tag, all the people sitting and singing and living life without the complications of mainland problems. For that moment, I got confused, and thought I was part of it, not just a gringo passing through, and I began to imagine my life there. It felt like time passed differently on the island, like there was no need for months or weeks, no need to turn the pages of calendars. Each day passed like the other, and it was easy to forget about the busier outside world on the other shore of the lake. Here you had family, coummunity, food, water, life.
On Thursday the spell was broken. In Costa Rica I had beans and rice daily, and now, in Nicaragua, I had my 20th straight meal of the same. Halfway through dinner I had to stop eating and explain I wasn't hungry. I wondered when the beans would end. I went to the kitchen to leave my dishes. Chickens were in the sink cleaning the plates. Teresa, the grandmother, was seated at a small table. She was washing another few thousand beans. I fled the house and went to the most expensive restaurant in town, a pizzaria. I excused myself from the next four meals because no matter how much I tried, I couldn't stomach the dry beans anymore. The block of cheese only made it worse, and no amount of kindness and affection from my family could change the more stubborn, reactionary feelings of my stomach. My fantasy of living on the island and teaching english faded. On Sunday, after hiking a volcano, I packed my bags and left on the morning ferry, not even staying for the weekly baseball game between the towns' teams at small stadium where animals graze during the week.
I started to think about Mexico. I started to think about tacos. Tacos with beef, chicken, pork, sausage, cow tongue, cactus, onions, cilantro, salsa, filled with anything and everything, but beans. I spent a few enchanting days in the colonial town of Granada, exploring Spanish churches, swimming in a volcanic crater lake, and taking a boat ride through sets of islands owned by a few Nicaraguan and international millionaires. I ate weird fruits in markets, but still I thought of Mexico and the culinary exploration available there. The idea of food became more interesting than geography, music, boat rides, or anything. I was, quite simply, interminably hungry. Only tacos could end this. The next day I got an a bus towards Mexico. Over two days the bus passed through Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, crossing five borders. I made several friends on the trip, all of whom were getting off in Guatemala City to go to the famous town of Antigua. I started to second-guess myself. Had I gone too far? Was I really going to skip Guatemala because of food. My friend Benardo, a Portuguse-born investment banker from London stopped my indecision process.
"It's all about making decisions, mate." Then he got off the bus to go to Antigua, too. I stayed on the bus. He was right, but also, I knew this was about more than a taco. Because food is culture, and after weeks of rice and beans, I was in pursuit of something new. Mexico represented a newness that the rest of Central America could not.
A week later I had eaten more than thirty tacos from restaruants and vendors on sidewalks or outside bus stations. In Mexico, the taco is small, a round tortilla the size of your palm and small portions of meat with onion, cilantro, and hot sauce. Mexicans order two or three at a time, and then order more if they remain hungry. In Villahermosa I ate nine tacos in a day, including cow tongue and intestine. Every taco was better than the one before. Every taco felt like the best thing I had eaten in all my life. I walked through the streets, the hood of my black rain coat pulled over my head, singing to myself my rendition of Limp Bizkit's "Nookie," I did it all for the taco, yeah! The taco, yeah! So you can take those beans... And I knew that if my friends had seen me, they would call me a dork, but I was pretty sure the Mexicans that overheard me thought I was very cool.
Outside my hotel, late night at night, was a taco stand set up in the rain. There was an umbrella covering the grill and the smoke of beef cooking in its own pool of grease stretched several feet into the downpour, like smoky fingers curling pedestrians in. I stopped singing my song. Then I pulled up a wet chair and ordered three more tacos with everything on them.
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| Parque Central of Altagracia, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua |
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| A typical street in Altagracia, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua |
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| Ojo de Agua, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua Locals say that a swim in the cool volcanic water will make you younger |
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| Men riding their horses in Altagracia. In Altagracia, modes of transportation, in order of popular use are: 1) horses 2) bicycles 3) motorbikes 4) cars or trucks |
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| Students parading into church to celebrate anniversary of their school Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua |
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| A street in Granada, Nicaragua |
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| These are super-tacos (more meat than usual) from a taco stand in Roma, Mexico City |
I have many more delicious pictures of tacos and people making tacos but one of my jump-drives won't open them. As soon as I figure it out, I will add them!
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