"When my hangover relents and the speedo-wearing octogenarian disembarks the bus, my awareness extends beyond my own mind."

Travel Nicaragua: 19 Hour Hungover Bus Ride There

Dan, my roommate in Guatemala, rouses me just after midnight. He is going to bed, and in a few minutes, my taxi will arrive and whisk me to Guatemala City where I’ll catch a 19-hour bus to Managua, Nicaragua, where the streets have no name.

Unsurprising for Central American Travel, my bus is delayed several hours—several exhausting-I-wanna-lay-on-the-floor-and-fall-asleep-anywhere hours where my day-drunk buzz from yesterday’s pre-trip festivities creeps into the hangover I will carry over three international borders. The day before, having closed off all the freelance work I planned to do until my return, I had turned up at The Terrace Hostel in Antigua around noon, armed with my guitar and lunch turned into an 8-hour/13-beer jam session, which led to me playing a show for the happy hour crowd, which caused the owner to comp my beer weighted tab (every hangover has its past perks).

I am going to Nicaragua, but am also returning to Nicaragua, where experiences that I’ve carried with me for a tick over a half a decade first blossomed and showed me how to look at the world through the window of intrepid possibility. Six years prior, on my overland trip from where I finished college in Chile, I stopped for two weeks in Granada, Nicaragua, a place where music, travel, an angry octogenarian Spaniard and a gaggle haphazardly met and guiding friends all mixed into revelations that have settled subtly in the corners of my consciousness. I feel those moments today, and think about them as my bus speeds through the neon kaleidoscope of the ripe morning sunrise.

We all know what it’s like to walk through our hometowns and the reverent feelings of unanswered nostalgia these experiences spark within us. Returning to the stop-offs of our past often give us hints of answers to the questions we never stop asking: Where am I going? Where have I come from, who am I and why am I living this life the way that I am?

Travel Nicaragua: Through The Speedo-Wearing Doubts

On the bus, I drift in and out of slumbering laden with doubts. Financially, working as a freelance writer and musician, money must be shoveled out of a pile of literary rejections; editorial passes and the sustained resolve of politicians walking into Palestinian peace talks (without coffee, all would surely be lost). To afford this trip, I spent two weeks of tireless chipping away, waking up early, MIA’ing from Antigua’s nightlife and drinking coffee at ill-advised hours until I rounded up a thousand dollars from the cosmic galore of writing.

On the bus, I second guess if it would not have been more prudent to keep working, saving for an August music tour in the US, a fall living in Colorado, and a planned 2015 jump to Asia.

What am I doing?, I thought, traveling so far and long when I could have just traveled to personally undiscovered places in Guatemala without spending so much hard earned bread? Why didn’t I wait two weeks and travel with two friends making the same trip so that we could have shared cost and company?

Like friends who quote characters from The Family Guy, doubts and self-questioning will always be with us to a certain degree. It is not so much what Doubt says that matters, but what we say back to him. Doubt shows up sometimes, especially in the throes of a hangover. It’s best to laugh in the face of Doubt and remember Doubt is nothing more than an overweight, elderly, hairy man wearing a polka dot speedo, sporting a handlebar moustache, whose idea of a good time is running the length of the beach throwing sand into the eyes of startled, undeserving children. Only such a man could cause me to question a decision that was already made. For here I was on a bus, Travel Nicaragua!, was already in progress and now was no time to revisit the decision process that led me to Travel Nicaragua! 

Travel Nicaragua With Your Best Mentality Forward

I take a deep breath, look out the window at the greenery grinding by, and consciously push my thoughts towards this: You are already on the bus—from this point on, the trip will carry you onwards—embrace the past decision to take this trip, and make the most of it.

When my hangover relents and the speedo-wearing octogenarian disembarks the bus, my awareness extends beyond my own mind. The bus is sparsely filled, some Guatemalans headed to El Salvador, a few Salvadorans headed home, some Guatemalans continuing onto a trip to Nicaragua, some Nicaraguans headed home. Older women in bonnets sit up straight and look blankly for hours into the seats in front of them. The bus attendant in red leggings that matches red coat races back and forth on the bus, filled with the an energy which tells of her excitement about her job.

I befriend the only other gringos on the bus, a trio of Scottish medical students traveling six weeks through Central America on a leave from school. Not one of them speaks a lick of Spanish, so at the border crossings, I help them translate what is transpiring and at our stop in San Salvador, one of them buys me a muffin.

Welcome To Nicaragua

After 19 hours of sleeping, waking, reading, thinking, window watching and border crossing, our bus pulls into the station in Managua. The Scottish trio and I all have plans to travel to Granada, Nicaragua that evening, so we combine forces. Immediately upon disembarking the bus, a half dozen taxi drivers surround us gringos, showing us their car keys, telling in broken, demanding English why their taxi is the taxi for us. The Scottish trio looks to me, and I hold up a halting hand, “Calm,” I say, “You may be in a hurry, but I am not, I will get my bag and return to you.”

We end up sardined in Silvia’s taxi, a surprising female exception to the globally male dominated taxi industry. I translate our conversation for the Scottish trio crammed in the back. She tells us about her two kids, and about how much mierda she puts up with from male taxi drivers, and she allows us to smoke rolled cigarettes from her car window. I am not usually a smoker, but when I am in New York, or “hostel” traveling, I treat myself to a bag of loose tobacco and enjoy what the neuron tickling of nicotine can add to a sunset, a playa, a beach fire, a firefly filled forest at night.

At the entrance to Granada, Nicaragua we glimpse something as strange as it is disturbing—there is a naked man, lying on the sidewalk, his hands taped behind his back, yelling for, presumably, help from someone, presumably, anyone. My instinct is to jump out of the cab and help him. I signal Silvia’s attention, asking if we should maybe stop and call the police.

“He is just a crazy man,” Silvia says dismissively.

“But his hands are tied,” I tell her.

“Yes, they have done this because he is crazy.”

“Should we call the police?” It seems obvious that calling him “crazy” is an excuse to get us off the hook from doing anything but driving on.

I do not have a cell phone, and Silvia acts like she does not hear my last question. By the time it is asked and left unanswered, the unfolding drama is already outside of the reach of the rearview mirror and seems as distant in Silvia’s mind as Guatemala, left 19-hours ago.

We pull into memory-triggering Granada and Silvia drops the Scottish Trio and me off in front of Reilly’s Irish Pub Granada, a pub opened up by Greg, a friend from Antigua, a friendly face to welcome me back to a country I visited six years ago while a recent graduate just crazy enough to believe that a student loan funded overland trip across South then North America would lead me to exactly the life a young and naïve intuition knew existed.

The tedious part of Travel Nicaragua, arrival, is done and the two weeks I’ve slated for the trip will stretch to three.

Read other Travel Nicaragua Posts:

2. The Rum Infused Meanings in the Music on the Road

3. Travel Nicaragua: Sex, Love and Travel