Nicaragua.
It's just as it sounds. Exotic. Wild. And a very long way from home.
Nicaragua is a fantasyland. It's a place which, in the past, I would never have thought to go. It just sounded too distant. Distant in a way that I knew it existed, having heard the word in geography class, but it seemed more like a place Peter Pan would visit. Not me.
But today I am here. Today I find myself far, far away in the largest of the Central American countries. I can barely speak the language - just enough to ask the essential questions like, 'another beer, please'. I travel in chicken buses overloaded with men, women, children, sheets of corrugated iron, wooden furniture and, well, even chickens sometimes. I embrace the all day sweat, because there is just no other way. And I drink the coffee made from the beans I watch the man meticulously rake out on the concrete floor, for the hot Central American sun to bake. And it's all good.
On a trip like this, carrying everything I own on my back, moving from place to place just to "see what they're like", and experiencing new cultures and ways of life every day, I try to picture where I am positioned on a globe; where I would pinpoint myself in relation to the rest of the planet. It's a crazy notion when contemplating this on Playa Santo Domingo, which is a beach on Ometepe, which is an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, which is the largest freshwater lake in Central America. Or when the heavens open and a tropical downpour 'scatterdots' the Pacific Ocean as I swim in it for the first time in my life. Or while I shower underneath a 40-meter waterfall cascading down the side of a dormant volcano. It's a crazy thought to think about where I am, while I am doing these crazy things.
I am in Nicaragua, and Peter Pan is nowhere to be found. For, while this place is magical, it is also very real.
