Where does this story begin? There is no single story. Or there is but it is composed of endlessly interlocking chapters. Not just sequential but simultaneous. And each chapter is another story. Each of a person. And each person's story is about their relationship to the other people in their life, the other people in the larger story. Hence the interlocking, the building of something bigger from the everday interactons of individuals. Some people are characters in many of the simultaneous chapters. One singular person may even be the protagonist. The larger story is "their" story. Dominique Olney is that person for this story. But how then to tell HER story, as distinct from the others? There is no way to make that division. So shift a moment: perhaps it is Otilia's story, or Walter's, or Anna Maria's, or Eliseo's, Daisy's, or Carmen's? What moment starts the telling, what piece of ground, what chance encounter? How about Walter then, today? Walter is 16. He is a local apprentice and laborer hired for this project, the construction of a children's library and activity center at the upper mountainous edge of the city of Matagalpa. This morning he sifted sand and now Don Fausto, local carpenter, is showing him how to bend rebar into a perfect arch for what will be a welded decorative rebar window. Walter is all smiles. He nearly always all smiles. He works five days a week and with his older sister Daisy attends a special Saturday secondary (high) school. He is learning English, word by word, and clearly loves the chance to have an "intercambio" of English and Spanish with the visiting volunteers. Ten years ago it was unlikey he would even attend primary, let alone seconday school, let alone learn multiple trade skills and help support his family.
But this is his mother's story too, and his sister's. It is 1999. Anna Maria and her daughter Daisy are at the end of a long line at a medical clinic for disabled children run under the direction of an American nun. Daisy has a skeletal deformity that makes it very difficult for her to walk. She has other conditions requiring certain medications. But the pair keep getting cut in front of in the line, hours go by and they still are waiting and Anna Maria is too scared and unassertive to keep the others from passing them. Suddenly a white haired gringo lady appears out of nowhere and asks them how long they have been waiting. She accompanies them to the front of the line for their prescription. She talks to them in a natural and friendly way, asks about them and their life. Her name is Dominique. She has been doing some work with the organization, though is not affiliated with it in any official way.
Dominique has an instinct for the compelling need, and how to address it in a way that empowers rather than increases the dependency of the recipient. Anna Maria has four children. Her husband has left. She has no apparent marketable skills. She had a modest house but has had to sell it to feed her children. Now they live in a tin-scrap shack and eat spoiled produce leavings from the dump. The children collect bits of scrap metal to sell. A single one of Daisy's pills costs the equivalent of a day's wages. The house itself is a hazard, a gust of wind could send rusty metal flying. Dominique wants to help, but she is opposed to the idea of simply giving away cash or building a house FOR someone without extensive participation on their part. Many programs do this sort of thing, and not a single bit of the cycle of poverty changes. The midsets of lack and powerless dependency on the rich ones stays the same, generation upon generaton. But Dominique knows where she can get a donation of wood with which Anna Maria can build a properly sturdy little house frame. A first step. But there is a condition. Anna Maria does not own a parcel of land. The organization with the wood says no land, no wood. But from Anna Maria's wheelchair-bound neighbor they learn of a city program that provides small plots to disabled people, upon which to build homes. So accompanied by this neighbor, they go to the city office every day to inquire about getting a plot. Every day they are told there is nothing available. Everday, for 6 months straight, they return. Finally one day when Dominique is there with the wheelchair neighbor, she simply decides to keep talking to the functionary until something happens. She knows it is not a matter of there not actually being any land available. Rather it is a matter of engaging with a system of petty corruption in which the parcels really only go to people who know people. Outside of that you have to be some kind of extraordinarily squeaky and persistent wheel. So Dominique just talks and talks and talks at the guy for hours, about her life, about whatever comes to mind. Then at one point she mentions how she would like to visit Bluefields, a city on Nicaragua's Carribean coast. Suddenly the functionary comes alive. Oh, Bluefields! I'm from Bluefields, let me tell you all about Bluefields! Lively conversation ensues. An hour later and the red tape is cut, the papers are in hand. Anna Maria has her land.
She still doesn't have any reliable work though. She is too proud to go into other people's homes and do their wash. She needs to go into some kind of business for herself. In her only instance of providing an actual hand-out, Dominique arranges with a nearby grocer for Anna Maria to come once a week for a supply of rice, beans, and corn, so her children can eat while she learns to generate an income. It takes money to make money though, so Dominique gives her a small loan to get get going with a business of making and selling tortillas. She repays the loan, and today her business is still thriving. It is a modest income by anyone's standards, but it is her own.
The house, though sturdily wood framed, was still essentially a shack. Solid brick walls would be nice. So with just as much money as she could afford, Anna Maria bought three or four individual bricks per month for several years, until there was enough to build walls. When that time finally came last year Dominique arranged so that a mason would come and, rather than simply build, show Walter and his older brother how to do it themselves. Which they did, and learned a trade skill in the process.
When Dominique first met him, Walter was a wild and frightened child. He wouldn't come near anyone, male or female. Gradually she earned his trust. She saw to it that he started attending primary school. Theoretically any child can attend public school in Nicaragua. But for a child like Walter there are enormous barriers. The uniform for starters. You need one, period, or the teacher will send you home. The books and materials for another. If you can't afford them, the teacher may sell you photocopies of the book piecemeal through the duration of the year (paying much more in the end than the book would cost all at once,) but this is really just a form of petty corruption on the part of teachers who themselves are paid a pittance. So Dominique made a deal with Walter that if he attended and passed primary school, she would make sure he got the basic materials he needed. At one point she says, Walter was walking beside her and telling her all about volcanos and other things that were very exciting to him. Then in practically the next breath he said that he hated school and didn't want to go anymore. To which Dominique said, but Walter, where did you learn about Volcanos and these other things? Wasn't it at school? And he said yes, but he hated math and how it made him feel stupid, and he just didn't want to have to go anymore and do all that math. So Dominique confided to him that she had hated math too, and that if he came to her with his math homework she could help him figure it out, and that if he finished primary school, but only if he finished it, she would take him on a trip to visit the Maderas Volcano, with a lake in its crater. With this motivation he completed primary school two years later, and was extraordinarily excited and happy on the day when he got to go to the volcano and hike to the lake inside the crater.
After all the travails of his primary school years, Dominique didn't expect that he would want to go any further but in fact he did. The financial and logistical challenges of completing secondary school are even greater, and after attending a pilot secondary program initiated by a previous government but abandoned when its director ran off, Walter now attends a private "colegio" (high school) Saturday-only accelerated program down the hill from Dominique's house in Matagalpa. The tuition is very low by North American standards but well beyond the means of a poor family here, so Dominique pays for the monthly fee with Walter providing for his books and materials from the money he earns during the week.
His sister Daisy works at the project site assisting the caretaker/cook Otilita in helping to prepare daily lunch for the duration of the construction. Otilia's 21 year old son Eliseo is the other project apprentice. Like Walter, he is also all smiles and eager to learn English. and attends the same secondary school program. Dominique met Otilita in 1999 when Otilia was working in a yogurt plant run under the same American nun as the clinic for disabled children. The yogurt work was basically oppressive and patronizingly managed though, so in 2003 with a micro loan from Dominique, Otilia went into the first of several small businesses for herself. She repaid the first loan within 6 months. When Dominique bought the parcel on which to build the library/activity center, she needed a caretaker to live onsite in the existing small house. Although the center is primarily for the residents and children of the community of Jicaro (up the mountain), she decided that she needed a non-Jicaro resident to be caretaker, because if a Jicaro family was chosen the others would wonder why they were not, and it would seem like Dominique was playing favorites. People are people wherever you go. Otilila happened to already live just across the road nearby, but up 150 steep mountainside steps. She had recently decided she needed to move somewhere more easily accessible. So she was the natural choice. There are more connections. All of it connects. I could go on and on but now hopefully you get the idea, and Dominique has written most of it down herself. The center itself is coming into existence as the embodiment of these Dominique-fostered connections and stories. The library building will be called La Luna y Las Estrellas (The Moon and Stars) and the Center overall will be named Basurarte (roughly "Art from Trash".) There will be regular classes and workshops for the Jicaro kids, and the grounds developed as a permaculture demonstration garden. Treasure from the things, the people, the stories long cast aside but very much alive.
Yesteday I paid a visit to another dimension. It might have been the 15th century or perhaps it was simply a place and a life outside of time as we ordinarily know it. How did I get there? Pretty simple, I walked for about an hour up past the library project site, up and down and up and up, from the upper edge of the city of Matagapla through the very small community of Jicaro on the rough dirt road through the Guanacaste trees, turning off finally on a path up the mountainside to an ancient earthen house, the home of four elderly sisters who ply the ancient craft of hand-thrown pottery. Dominique, the Project Jicaro visionary and organizer, is good friends with the sisters (as she is of many people in Jicaro) and pays them a visit about once a week. They range in age from 77 to 94. Another 94 year old sister recently died. They have always lived here.
Every day they work their craft. They collect pure clay from the local mountainside soil, brown and rich red. They have a perfectly dome shaped wood-fired kiln. They grind their corn on a 3-legged carved stone tablet like the ones I saw in the pre-Columbian archeological museum displays in San Jose and Granada. Their pottery is luminous, platters and bowls and lidded jugs so perfect in their red earthen simplicity that I can't even describe them. Twice a week, even at their age, they carry their newly made pieces (often on top of their heads) down several steep kilometers to the city to sell them at the market.
These sisters are the last in their community to practice this craft. No young people have wanted to learn, to be their apprentices. It is hard, all that hauling clay, collecting wood for the kiln, working long patient hours and days to make the pieces themselves. And everything down the mountain is more or less in the shining, sugary modern world now. Even the sisters have a TV, discretely draped with a white cloth in their cool earthen living room. So what they do may be lost. If so, Jicaro will cross a very real line. A line, a thread of the fabric of the multi-century, multi-epoch identity of the community. To stand in their house is to feel, to be in, another world. It sounds cliched but I don't know how else to put it. Another world and another history. Watching them carefully handling and crafting the wet clay into plates, the kitchen fire smoldering, the earthen plaster smooth on the walls of the cool dark house interior, rough and chipped on the sun baked exterior, the chicken wandering through clucking, the Virgin Mary looking on benevolently from the living room altar. And how can I put this without sounding either trite or patronizing? They were the most shiningly beautiful women I have just about ever encountered. They had a Presence, something intangible but powerful that made me almost start crying as I sat at their work table watching them and molding a childish little cup with a piece of the clay they indulged me with.
As I left back down the mountainside, my first thought was, these women are a national treasure. They are a kernel of the true wisdom, of the life that endures and that will outlast our frantic machinery and peregrination. And yet if they die without passing on their craft, then for this particular community something very tangible will be lost. These skills will someday have to be relearned through some other channel. And they WILL have to be learned, as our age of psudo-magical gadgetry comes to its end.
One of the main purposes of the cob library is to be a center for classes and workshops of various kinds, mainly for the Jicaro kids but also for visitors. Dominique hopes that she can have the sisters do a workshop on pottery making based from there. It would be a start. No one has ever initiated such a thing with them.
A lot of our knowledge is intangible and innate, the kind you get from the whole matrix of influences: familial, cultural, environmental, cosmic. But other things are very particular and must be taught explicity. Those things we need to hold onto, and where need be recover or learn from those who have not forgotten.
I finally got to the city of Matagalpa a couple of nights ago, and have now spent two daytimes out at the Jicaro Library project site, up out of town. I don't have time to write much right now, will pen a larger dispatch about the project later. Yesterday was the first day of actual cobbing after completion of the foundation. It's a lot of work cut out for us in the next few weeks. I am in Matagalpa staying at the home of Dominique Olney, the project organizer. She is a French retired schoolteacher who lives in Britain when not here. Very nice lady, has that magic combination of vision and practical do-it-ness. Also here are 3 other people from Portland. Otherwise at the site it is locals of various ages. The kids in particular absolutely love cob like I have never seen before. The two local hired apprentice guys are friendly and eager to do anything they are set to, but are averse to stomping cob with their feet. They say they will mix it with shovels. It seems to be all about perceptions, and what looks like something women would do versus what men would do.
Do I have complaints about travel in Central America? Sure, plenty, it is impossible not to come at another place and culture without the judgements that are bred into you. Some I have mentioned before: the trash everywhere, the madness of the drivers, the sense sometimes that the locals want nothing more than to fleece you, Gringo, personally. Another thing is the food. Some food here is good. Lots of fresh tropical fruits. Fresh fruit smothies and juices available everywhere. Various tasty local fried corn or plantain based things you can get at stands.
But as far as sit-down meals go, they don't don't have cuisine as such in Central America. In fact all they really eat is fried chicken with (or without) rice, beans, tortillas, and sometimes plantains. That's it, 3 meals a day, 7 days a week. The chicken is replaced at breakfast with a small slab of bland white cheese, at other meals occasionally by stringy beef or tough pork. I am not exaggerating for the sake of entertainment. That really is all they eat down here. But better that than some of the versions of other ethnic food you run across. Tonight I learned again (after learning for the first time last year in Guatemala) to never order self-described "Mexican" food south of Mexico. It will be much worse than the Mexican food we are used to in the U.S. The thing is, North America has lots of Mexican immigrants who know how to make their food, but no one migrates from Mexico to Central America so items like burrito, quesadilla, even nachos, are dim and insubstantial memories of what you would find at any decent taqueria in a U.S. city. It's not just a matter of it being different local variations. There are no Mexican immigrants in Central America, hence no remotely plausible Mexican food, period. Now to contradict myself immediately, you can occasionally find fairly decent tacos, but anything else forget it. The burritos will be sad little things with limp lettuce, a few shreds of meat, and no guacamole. The "nachos" will be sub 7-11 level quality of chips and sauce. The sour cream will be a liquidy version that comes from a plastic squeeze bottle.
The other thing they can't make to save their lives down here is a decent loaf of bread. Pretty much the only bread they eat (and they do actually eat it) is a sub-Wonder Bread brand called Bimbo. Do they know how appropriate the name is? Vacuous, empty of any substance, very white. My guess is they don't do bread very well because their indigenous tradition is the hand-made maize-corn tortilla. Those they do very well, but personally I get tired of having them at every meal.
Ice cream can sometimes be very good here. Vegetarian cuisine is nearly non-existent. And I doubt there are more than ten Vegans in the entire isthmus, apart from expatriate New Agers at San Marcos Atitlan.
Hey, its a different America here than in the Portland bubble. That's why I'm here.
I just realized the title of this entry could be considered a bad dual-language pun.
I just spent an entire hour writing what was surely the best dispatch ever, only to have the computer freeze up and die literally one second before saving. Okay maybe it wan't the best entry ever, but I will never be able to replicate it. Chalk it up as one more lesson in the necessity of always saving multiple times during a writing session.
The entry was about the island of Ometepe in Lago de Nicaragua, and about discovering the perfect intersection of Permaculture and ecotourism. Lake Nicaragua is the 3rd largest freshwater lake in the world. Ometepe is a pair of big volcanos, Concepcion and Maderas, connected by an isthmus. I stayed three nights at a place called Finca Magdalena on the slopes of the Maderas Volcano, and two nights at a beachside place on the isthmus called Hotel Buena Vista. Both had private rooms for 10 dollars a night, though the ones at Magdalena were pretty rustic.
Finca Magdalena is a plantation owned cooperatively by 24 families from the nearby village of Balgue. It used to be part of the vast landholdings of the Somoza family (who owned an area of the country they ruled that equaled the size of El Salvador.) After the revolution of 1979, the Somoza holdings were distributed to the campesinos who used to work and live on them in a basically feudal arrangement. I spent awhile chatting with Juan, the manager of the hostel-restaurant-guide service that the Finca now runs. He says the transition to local ownership went well enough in itself, but that the trade embargo imposed by the US in 1986 (because we didn't like the leanings of the Sandinista Party) made it hard for awhile when only Japan and a few other countries bought small amounts of their produce. They grow coffee, bananas, and other crops. Since then, they have come to sell much of their coffee to the Canadian market. About 9 years ago they started taking in visitors. They have since gradually developed it into a thriving ecotouristic enterprise. In 2004 they started doing bonafide Permaculture, and occasionally offer workshops where (like other such workshops) you can pay to learn Permaculture design principles and do a bunch of work. Thus Finca Magdalena has discovered and is developing itself at the edge where permaculture and ecotourism meet. They practice organic agriculture, that is primarily what and who they are, but they also provide rooms and meals in an old converted barn, and guided hikes up the volcano.
Juan (from what I could tell with my lousy spanish) appears to genuinely see this is as an opportunity for people of different nationalities to meet each other and have a true window into Nicaraguan life. He says it can help create solidarity among people of different places (and that "together we are stronger") because it is through interactions with real people in real places and communities that actual understanding can arise. Idealistic, but true enough. At one level it is true that it is a commercial interaction, but at a place like this it is of an entirely different order than what you encounter at a place like Monteverde, Costa Rica. The equation is simply different. They serve tourists, but they are cooperative owners if a real and organic agricultural enterprise. The true local culture is not only intact but strengthened. It is perhaps the ideal intersection of ecotourism and permaculture. Such a thing is possible. Monteverde type places are a sham, simple exploitation of a resource. This place is real.
Ometepe in general still maintains its balance because it is an island, and the infrastructure is rough. It seems both very laid back and hardworking at the same time (once you get past the usual shills at the dock.) There should be a word for that. Riding on the local bus down the island road on a Sunday afternoon it seemed every village was out en masse playing or watching soccer, or coming and going from same. Transport, by order of frequency I have seen it, is bicycle (often a guy riding with his sweetie sitting sidesaddle on the crossbar, sometimes a babe in her arms,) foot, horseback, motorbike, pickup truck, and old bus. There are only a few non pickup-truck autos. There are also taxi-shuttles for tourists who wish to pay mucho to get somehwere quicker than the bus.
One day I got a bright idea and rented a bike to ride completely around the Maderas side of the island. It was a great way to see a piece of Nicaragua that is WAY off the tourist path (once you get past the last hotel on the rough dirt road, no more gringos.) Except: Bike frame too small because they don't have bikes for tall people in Central America at all. Road atrocious. Heat Blazing. A couple of the hills just about fried me. They weren't even bad as hills usually go, but with heat and the rocks of all sizes and ruts (making it impossible to cruise down the downhills) I was wiped out at the end. But hey, I went where I'm sure not 1 tourist in a thousand ever ventures. Very rural. Many houses with grass roofs. The usual pigs and chickens wandering around. NO cars, only foot, bikes, and horses. The kind of place where dogs sleep in the middle of the road.
Near Magdalena was another permacultural type of place called Finca Zopilote. I had intended to stay there my first night but they were full when I arrived. Zopilote is smaller, and owned by an expatriate Italian. It seems very Euro uber hippie. Everyone there appeared to be in baggy cotton and sandals. Whereas Magdalena, being a localy owned cooperative feels Nicaraguan and has a broader clientele of more than ONLY hippies. Not that I hate hippies. By some very loose definition I am one.
Now I'm in Granada for a couple nights. Very similiar to Antigua, Guatemala, though not yet quite as far along the gringofication path. Next up I head to Matagalpa to help build a cob library. That is good. I'm tired of being a tourist. I really truly am.
Time to send a dispatch, says my little internal conscience-clock, the one that remembers that all these friends and family said they loved my dispatches last time and are certainly expecting more like it this time. Or at any rate my mind SAYS they expect more like it, and after all, making pithy journalistic observations and reflections is one of the redeeming factors to the whole enterprise. Otherwise is it not just another silly Gringo traipsing his self-indulgent way up the Gringo Trail, lusting after the new and neato, forever chasing the next (and this time guaranTEED authentic) fascinating sight or town or encounter, or revelation of WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT?
Yes, all that. But what can I do? I'm one of those people afflicted with the need to travel. I have given up objectively good things for it. There's this planet, you know? And I got dropped here and I want to see it and understand it, to some small degree. And other people's pictures and story books aren't enough.
So anyway, I just got to Nicaragua after several initial days in Costa Rica (and 4 buses and a taxi today.) Like on my Guatamala trip last year, I scarcely know where to begin. My thoughts are revolving around the still hazy form of a BIG NOTION. Not THE big notion, the one you could read and retire from reflective thought forever. That big notion you can't get from reading anyway, and everyone has to stumble upon it by themselves. No, I just mean a smaller notion about the intersection of ideals and reality, plans and experience, and specifically (narrowing it down to what I've done so far on this trip, and intend to do) permaculture versus ecotourism. In the last couple of years (as most of you know) I have gotten really into natural building and "permaculture" broadly defined. I built a cob hut to live in. I've associated with lots of people who are doing things permacultural and cobby in the Northwest. And in my travels I've developed a desire to seek out and observe and report back upon not just pretty natural sights, but inspiring natural-building and permacultural projects and people wherever I go. Because the world is chock full of them, and they are doing the work that will literally save the human enterprise. I have no doubt of that. The planet will still be a chunk of rock circling a star, but without what these folks are doing, the practical research and knowledge and teaching they offer, the human experiment as we know it is over. It's over anyway, but I mean really over.
So imagine how delighted I was at the coincidence that the proprieter of the hostel-pension I stayed at upon my arrival in San Jose, Costa Rica, turned out to have worked for years for Permacultura Latina America, the Latin American branch of Bill Mollison's Permaculture Research Institute. I learned a lot of fascinating first hand "inside" stuff about permacultre. Dirt, even, I'm afraid to say, and I won't relate much of that except to say that no organization is immune to internal politics and personality. As many of you know, the term Permaculture was coined some time ago by the Australian Bill Mollison as a conjuntion of "permanent" and "agriculture." He then, and still, means by it a very specific methodology of using perennial plants and trees, specific to a given bioregion, to create a truly sustainable overlapping harvest of edibles and other useful crops. I won't give a whole permaculture tutorial because I'm not qualified, and there's lots you can find out on the web. These days though, the term (probably because of its sort of genius generality) has come to mean lots of things to lots of people. There's no doubt a core meaning for most practiocioners, but it doesn't necessarily mean "practiced in the trademarked and Bill Mollison approved methodolgy of the Permaculture Research Institute." Nevertheless that's what Bill Mollison, bless him, wants it to mean. Unfortunatley it is too late. The horse is out the gate. The term has a life of its own. When I say that I'm interested in visiting permacultural projects and seeing what folks are doing, I'm referring to the broader "unofficial" sense. For example Ianto Evans, the guru of cob building from whom I learned cobbing, practices what I myself would call permaculture, but it is not official Permaculture. Nevertheless, the official folks and those trained by them are doing lots of awsome things, and Maria Elena told me about a number of great projects in Latin America (mostly South) which I may check out in future travels. If planes are still flying.
But my actual contact with nature SO far on this trip has been of the ecotouristic variety. Ecotourism is a weird thing. Take a beatiful natural place in some impoverished backwoods locale. A few wandering Western travel junkies "discover" it. Fast forward a few years: there went the neighborhood. And it is not just a few places. I'm discovering that pretty much the entire "Gringo Trail" through Latin America can be classed in two ways: places to gawk at exotic human and architectural heritage and places to gawk at exotic natural heritage. And all the excresence of commercial tourist trappiness that springs up to service and milk the authenticity-seeking masses.
That's my reflection after 2 days in Monteverde/Santa Elena, Costa Rica. Monteverde "exists" as a destination because there is primary cloud-forest reserve. Genuine tropical high-elevation jungle replete with monkeys and sloths and Quetzals, and mainly just sheer foresty beauty. Once you get past the traffic jam of tourist shuttle buses, and a hundred garish hotels, and all the shop window tour agencies and coffee chops and pizza parlors, and four different companies offering zip-line cable tours of the forest. And every little thing costs money, big money at that. The cheapest zip-line tour is 40 dollars. I guess that's cheap compared to in Hawaii. At least that was my justification for actually going on one. Yeah, it was pretty fun. The tarzan swing was better than the zip lines though. And when you're doing the zip lines you can't really even pay attention to the forest itself. The best part really was just being on the platforms up in the trees. They (the company called Selvatura, in case you ever go) also had a 3K canopy walk with multiple swinging bridges across ravines and such. That was pretty nice, but not worth the price compared to just taking a hike in the woods. But even just entry to one of the Reserves is 15 dollars. Not so bad, but you will be accosted multiple times by tour operators wanting to take you on guided walks, night-hikes, the serpentarium, the insect exhibit, horseback rides, ATV rides (yes), you name it, for another 15 to 100 bucks a pop. Just say no. Or yes, whatever. All I'm saying that there is a line, and places like Monteverde cross way over it.
And yet... it is better than a strip mine, right? Or clearcutting? Yeah. People like me are able to contribute monetarily (through our spending) to communities that are cash-poorer than the ones we come from. Good for me, good for them. But there´s that line: beyond which communities like this one become pathetic caricatures of the authenticity the original travelers came looking for, their people unconsciously playing the role of smiling slave to a moneyed overclass. Places need to be viable. People need to live well, and harmoniously with their surroundings. That's what permaculture is about, though. Not ecotourism. The Monteverde level of ecotourism is a diversion from what really needs to be done. Diversions are not wrong in and of themselves. But this one is just a latter day playing out of the old colonialist pattern, only now instead of Spanish gold-mongers it is Gringo liberals (sorry, but its so) looking for a fix of the good green from the high hills. But when the place aspires to and attains, from its incidental natural beauty, a level of prosperity measured in the sheer number of SUV's and Yamaha dirtbikes zipping back and forth, well, something is off kilter. But hey, I shelled out just like everyone. Pot calling the kettle black and all that.
Ah, enough ranting. Tomorrow I'm off La Isla de Ometepe, a legendarily beautiful island in Lago de Nicaragua. Another obligatory stop on the Gringo trail. Rivas, the town I'm in tonight is immediately different than Costa Rica. Costa Rica is very conventionally prosperous by Central American standards. Part of that (unfortunately) is that you don't see many people riding bikes. Here in Rivas, Nicaragua though, although there are still plenty of shiny cars, there are a lot of folks on bikes (sometimes 2 or three on the same bike) as well as a whole fleet of pedicabs and even horse-drawn taxis that do not seem intended for the tourist trade.