There are moments in the playing of music when melodies mix with blurred meanings and seem to extend beyond you and your guitar. There are people you meet in offbeat places that create not just lasting friendships, but enduring, revelation strewn growth. In my experience these people drink Cuba libres and even after four nights out on the town look at you like a riddle and wonder if another night of rabble rousing, complete with a post bar guitar jam in the streets, might be what good ol Dr. The Night is prescribing to bring on an acute state of bliss.

I met with a multitude of such musical and amicable moments when I turned up in Nicaragua in the spring of 2008, having just finished hitchhiking through Costa Rica. So it was fitting that my 2014 return played out the way it did:

Last month three Scottish medical students met on the 19-hour bus from Nicaragua and I showed up at the Backyard Hostel in Granada, Nicaragua at the recommendation of my friend Greg, who ran the Irish pub in town. My plan for the first night in the hostel was simple: 1) Shower 2) Smoke a rollie cigarette 3) Go to bed.

I aced 1) and 2), but 3) was thwarted by a lively throng of travelers seated around the bar. One of them, Marco had a broken wrist that didn’t stop him from playing a ukulele like a blizzard of singing snowflakes blowing the roof off a cello workshop. When I walked in with a guitar, I was strongly encouraged to pull up a chair at the bar, drink a beer and share the evening’s merriment.

Six years prior, when I showed up at the Oasis Hostel on the other side of town, it hadn’t been so different. I’d gone to my room, stored my bag, lay on my bed and began strumming away on my Baby Taylor guitar. Garry, a filmmaker from Canada half a decade my senior, had come to listen. After a few songs, he invited me out to a night on the town that everyone in the hostel was attending. While many people you meet along the way people on your Facebook newsfeed who you aren’t quite sure how you know them, Garry has gone on to become a friend I still keep in touch with today.

An excerpt from my passionately scrawled journal from 2008 Granada, Nicaragua reveals that this outing on the town with 15 or so hostellers (most traveling for long periods) opened a window of realization of the possibility that travel can continue to play in one’s life. I wrote:

Within each eye is a subtle twinkle, a slight glimmer that says, yes, I understand. I understand why traveling on unmaintained roads in chicken buses is infinitely more valuable than the constrains of a six digit salary. Everyone knows deliberately why they are here in Nicaragua. They know why a shabby hostel bed and a scurrying cockroach is better for right now than a comfortable bed in a temperature controlled room . . . Our group after sitting in the outside terrace of a restaurant went and sang our hearts out in Kereoke.

The bar at the Backyard hostel was serviced by a tattooed German with a shaved head and eager pour. There were two German girls, a few months in on the yearlong trip they were taking together. Then there was Marco and Marco. One Marco played the aforementioned Ukulele, the other polled the bar, “Should I leave tomorrow, and try traveling on my own, to see if I can do it, or should I stay here?”

He only had a few days left of his trip, and had something to prove to himself that if validated would inform his future travel plans. He was twenty-two. When I was twenty-two, though I’d had sleep in an alley in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile to validate a similar suspicion.

Everyone at the bar voted that he should try it—separate from the other Marco and his broken-bad-joo-joo-wrist—and have a go of the open road all alone.

“But I don’t speak Spanish!” he refuted that sentiment.

Everyone not only told him that this did not matter, but offered an anecdote about a time they had successfully navigated through a country without even knowing how to say “hello, I like what you’ve done with those hamsters” in the spoken language.

The bumper sticker of the conversation would go something like, “Language fluency is nothing. Attitude is everything! #Travel”

Then came the music that everyone demanded out of the Uke and the guitar at the bar. I have a jamming problem. My brother’s best friend almost went to prison because my brother and I jam so too much. If I’m to be honest with myself and share my introspection with the world, then it would be true to say that the thing I want most to do with my life is drink whiskey and smoke rollies around a campfire surrounded by whiskey struck friends embracing musical instruments like a Southern sheriff on the front porch clutching a shotgun.

 

So though on paper I was worn out as a Clydesdale sock, it did not prevent me from staying up with the jam session until the 5am sunrise.It reminded me of, well, 2008 Nicaragua. Perhaps it’s something in the beer here. In 2008, pne of the few times that Garry and I didn’t stay up playing music until sunrise was because our group of four had all fallen asleep in the entryway of a church in Leon, Nicaragua.

Following a familiar theme of my life, I was the last man go to bed. But not before a sighing romance began to blossom between me and the last woman to go to bed. It took me by surprise, suddenly finding myself alone in the bar with a half Cuban, half German girl who continued to get closer and closer as she spoke in softer and softer tones. But, more on that in the Travel Nicaragua Post.

Read previous more Travel Nicaragua posts:

1. Travel Nicaragua: Unrelenting Overnight Bus Hangovers

3. Travel Nicaragua: Sex, Love and Travel