Nicaragua here we come.

I know I am not really qualified to say this, but for all the scaryness the name seems to conjure in us Americans, Managua does not seem to have much of a bite these days. And probably never had all the meaness that conservative war mongering pundits wanted us believe in the first place. But hey I was only 11 years old and what did I know then and what do I know now, for that matter.

Tree lined avenues. Glistening new malls. Helpful taxi and bus drivers. Passable tourist infrastructure. We only stayed a night and saw just a fraction of this huge city, but it made a nice first impression anyway.

We are quasi living with our friend Jen, in this terriffic colonial home only a few blocks from the central park in Grenada. The house has an inner courtyard with flowers and open to the stars and bats, and that´s where we are sleeping just under the overhanging terracotta eaves. I opened my eyes yesterday morning and focused on a humming bird. The place is mostly unfurnished and I like to run around on the ancient tile floors and pretend I am in the Russian ballet, which after published would again kill any chances for my ever getting elected to public office. Poop. We have a nice hammock and a few chairs, and the beds of course. Jen, who we worked with at the orphanage, is renting this place for just 90 dollars per month from some New Yorker. Our share is $2.50 each per day.

Grenada has all this old and enchanting architecture, with five bold cathedrals and streets lined with the most diverse doorways. Our place, for instance, has five sets of doors, each 12 feet high made from wood, that line the exterior walls to the street from our corner building. Beautiful. And there are tons of these, and I have tried to catch a bit the magic with my camera.

Jen is volunteering here in the schools, and to keep ourselves busy a bit, until Jen can join us on a longer adventure next week, Heather and I have started volunteering for two hours per day at the Hogar de Ancianos. The home of the ancients. Old folks, you get the pictures. Sister Sonja wants me to do some exercise with them, but mostly I have been giving some sweet old ladies arm, hand and back messages, and Heather and I just chat it up with the fellas: the best we can anyway because it´s in Spanish, and they don´t have much teeth and hear poorly for the most part. One of them is 102 years old. Nice. Another told me he has 18 children. I told him Heather is pregnant with my ninth kid, and with my young age that seemed to impress him. Today, Heather was sitting with a woman who was singing the most delightful songs.

Three days ago, we joined two San Franciscans here on vacation and went to Lago De Apoyo for a day, a crater lake surrounded by forest with howler monkeys and with clear water the color of a blind blue eyed Husky dog. Refreshing swimming and ice cold babyruth candy bars.

Tonight, we are meeting some new friends for pizza. Grenada has a decent tourist infrastructure too and lots of decent restaurants, and cheap, three bucks for pizza. We are also going to see some documentary, which hopefully my Spanish will not totally fail me and allow for some bit of understanding and enjoyment. This afternoon, Heather hopefully is going to get another ultrasound. We tried to get one yesterday at another ultrasound clinic, but they told us they were not actually getting an ultrasound machine until next December.

Next week, Jen is going to join us in traveling a short distance to the Pacific, the San Juan Del Sur area, which is only a handfull of kilometers from the Costa Rican border. If it is nice and the waves don´t scare the shit out of us, we will stay for the week, and then return to Grenada for another week.

Vamos a Nicaragua

Before we even get on the bus, I´m reminded that this journey, as all bus rides go, will be memorable. The taxi driver chases down the bus, Matthew scrambles out to see if they have any open seats for us since we don´t want to stand knee-knocked for the next 3 hours. We throw our bags below and hop aboard. The guy collecting the money, isn´t allowed to make change, so the driver is driving while pulling bills out of his pocket, looking for change, navigating the wheel. In less than 15 minutes the money collector pulls out a briefcase and with the bravado of a young minister fires of an infomercial on the attributes of natural medicine, tinctures of avocado and lime to reduce blood pressure, the importance of drinking water, etc. culminating in the sale of a few books to bored passengers.

Later we come to a halt on the side of the road. Women circle the bus singing out ¨mangoes¨, ¨coca¨, ¨agua pura¨. They echo back and forth and people are buying up like kids at a candy rack. More folks pack onto the bus, some standing, but not many, for today, we are on a ¨fancy¨ bus that has a bathroom, solely for peeing (which has us both a little worried).

¨Beep, beep, beep, beep¨ hammers out the driver as we truck along honking at bikes crossing our path, the slow chicken bus that we´re passing, the vacas (cows) scattered across the road that are now running with the herd over the asphalt. There´s a different series of beeps that the driver employs when he spots a friend or fellow driver. Those beeps always are a bit softer, shorter, easier to take. But still, one must work the honks and swerves into one´s slumber if you want to attempt to catch any shut eye. We swerve closely avoiding going off the road. Sudden breaks pull from me a quick anxious look through the front window, often revealing an unsuccessful pass calling upon the quick reflexes of all drivers.

In the middle of nowhere, a man steps upon the bus with a huge basket in his arms selling galletas, tortillas, fried pork skin - all the delicacies to tempt one. I´m always wanting the likes of a sundae vendor, but none yet aboard. And then again, after Matthew´s earlier foray with typhoid, we are wimps when it comes to most street vendors, but everyone else buys up. When they´ve eaten or drank their fill, the windows open wider - the plastic, the styrofoam, napkins, all, are tossed out the window crashing on to the earth, the black tar, or carried to the wind. You would think with this frequency that there would be snowdrifts of trash on the sides of the road, but notsomuch. Having been impressioned by the crying Indian commercial of our youth, our mouths still hang open in shock, wanting to say something, whisper something to a young one, phrases run through my head, one´s I think might not sound so offensive. And then you get the stares back as we crush our trash and bury it in our backpacks rather that throwing it to the wind.

Another guy gets on the bus, pays for a ticket and immediately start selling B-12 vitamin injections. People are taken by his compelling story of healing with this medicine, but once he pulls out the syringe, the method of administration, he loses all takers and they hand back the packages. He does make a few sales of a green skin salve, which is purchased by my fellow passenger and then quickly suggested to me that I use some to rub on my face to help my pimples (gifts of pregnancy), which of course, I willingly do and spread around the green stuff.

So, all this was just yesterday. Today, we awoke at 3:00 a.m., got to the bus station at 4 and left on the bus at 5:00 a.m. By 6:30 we were at a bus stop break, getting coffee, using the bathrooms, and then the bus driver tells us to forget boarding the bus. Seems there is a protest happening today. A demonstration of farmers, townspeople taking the main highway to protest mining that is contaminating the environment. So far, we´ve been here 7 hours. Maybe we´ll be able to leave tonight on the bus, but really no idea. Buses, 18 wheelers, are crowded down the highway as far as you can see. Their occupants rest underneath the riggs, their heads supported by an empty coke bottle. But here I sit, after a bit of walking, having found an internet cafe to pass some time and do one thing I´ve learned best in Central America - to just peacefully wait. At least we have plenty of food, and possibly ice cream.

Healing Up

I landed in Guatemala with a broken, barely hanging on big toenail. Other parts of me bore similar characteristics, but this one was of the physical type that could be bandaged, buried in a shoe and forgotten about. Wasn't until Rio Dulce, the orphanage, the heat that dragged me to pull off the shoe, the plaster and welcome it to the freeing sandal. Immediately the kids spotted it, pointed, made disgusted faces calling it "feo", ugly. Several showed me their more ripe missing nails, others wanted to know what had happened, my story, but I didn't really know. Now, 6 months later, it's all anew, bright, shiny, bleached out by the sun - healed.

And now we are in Utila, Honduras, the cheap diving isla of the world surrounded by coral reefs and aquamarine sea. The ferry ride over was hairy, making many riders take full use of the plastic barf bags handed out, but not me, in the splashing, gut-wrenching seas I felt right in my glory of the usual nauseated state of my being over the past month and embraced the fact that I was much less green in the face than my husband and most others in the boat. We've rented an apartment on the point where we are surrounded by surf and constant ocean breezes.

Our sublime mountain house in Chajaneb combined with early pregnancy sent me a bit over the edge. Ten days of constant rain, the soaring keeness of my canine nose, the aversion to most food- even Matthew's hot new pizza rolls, the waif of mice droppings between the walls, the ill-plumbed Central American bathrooms that swell the house full of sewer gases, the ever present nausea that made me want to tear through my skin to the outside of my body and just run.

Even now I can barely think about the house in Chajaneb without gripping tight to a saltine. There were sweetened moments wandering in the hillsides up mud-covered paths that twirled between rows of corn and coffee plants. The way the clouds hung low letting your whole being disperse amongst them. Or those crazy rides to town, standing up, holding tight to a single metal bar, packed into the back of a flatbed industrial-size truck full of over 50 men, women, babies, children, chickens, turkeys, baskets of vegetables, tortillas, maize. As we tumbled up and over the rock roads, hillsides, bright green valleys all planted with crops woven in lines and patterns that mesmerize like the Mayan cloth weavings.

And now on Utila, life and my body feel a bit easier, a little less heavy minus the breasts which could now do a decent plump add for an implant surgeon. At the apartment I can keep all the windows wide open, am constantly wrapped in breezes and when a wave of nausea knocks at me, I can plunge into the tepid water for relief- really all quite nice. It helps, but traveling at this point in pregnancy is a drag and makes one want for the familiarity and comforts of home, but hey island paradise ain't bad. Often I want for Matthew's jumping around lightness and bodily strength, his good humor and ability to stay awake beyond 9 PM. He's been a great sport of it all and I'm ever so thankful for him. Every day he goes snorkeling for hours, finding spotted eagle rays, sandcastles of coral formations in brilliant colors, dog-size puffer fish, and schools of sergent majors surrounding and swimming with him, the big fish. He is in sheer delight and claims he could carry on with days like this for the rest of his life- but for now, it's one more week of island bliss and body recovery for me, then a way too long 17+ hour bus trek to Nicaragua.

Buses, baby and babylon.

Whether it is an unwarranted sense that I´m tired of writing or just don´t want to be bothered, I can see that our blogs have become fewer and smaller in length. Forgive us, I´d say, because we want to tell you our sappy and happy stories but often just don´t feel like wandering into an internet cafe. It just isn´t or does not jibe or seem appropriate with our general vibe at the time. Expats. Humph.

It is official, we have the plane tickets, and we will be coming home on September 7. We´ll spend two weeks trying to arrange health coverage for heather and the baby in Asheville, that is if the great satin George didn´t axe that program while we were gone. We will hang out and see and mooch off of friends and then, hopefully, do a world wind tour of Maine, Indiana and California and possibly if the pocketbook sees favorably come through North Dakota and Seattle. Ah, money, burn it if you still have it. I will join my comrades in labor at the beginning of November.

After we left those impossibly verdant slopes in Chajaneb, Heather and I reluctantly returned to Guatemala City to do what all good citizens of civilization do, battle with the bureacracy. It seems that visa laws changed on June 1, for what I could only make out was little more than a money making scheme. The hassle, or so we thought, would be waiting three days for them to process the paperwork. But in the end, we found a decent little hotel and spent time seeing the ornate National Palace, fountains and cathedrals. All in a all, it went pretty fast except for the times when Heather´s nausea was overwhelming. She is tough, though, and besides the moments when I´ve already become shamefully jealous of the strength, care and time my new offshoot requires, my beautiful wife fared pretty well.

From Guatemala City, we traveled over five hours by four different buses to Copan, Honduras, a tiny colonial town with cobbled streets, whitewashed walls and tile roofs and if I may say so, a bit like an Epcot Center exhibit. Almost too perfect for Central America. Anyway, all of it in a green valley nestled by miles of corn fields, shadowed by the Rio Copan, and home to Copan Ruins, a 1500 year old Mayan homestead and our reason for traveling, of course, there.

Lodging was fine, 10 dollars for a clean room with two beds and a fan, with a shared bathroom. The food in this town was generally horrible, as it seems the case with all the towns where there will be lots of gringos. Try as they might, you just can´t make three thousand years of corn tortilla technology into a Philly steak and cheese. And you know it will be bad, but you are sick of tortillas and want KFC, and so you sucker in and curse the gods for this bad food after.

The next morning, we walked the two klicks to Copan Ruins, an ambling path past fields pregnant with tall grass and horses. The ruins were not cheap, 10 bucks a person and that didn´t include the price of going into the archeology tunnels or the museum, which we did not do. They were not needed.

We have been to four major Mayan ruins this year, and while yes they are separated by hundreds of miles, thinking about it last year I couldn´t but imagine they would mostly be the same. Stone, carvings, pyramids, same time different burg. How wrong it seems I was. They do look a lot alike, but they all have different pervialing feeling. Hard to explain, really. Chichen Itza, in Mexico, was dominated by a single gigantic and wide pyramid, much like they look in Cairo, and it seemed to affect you in a fatherly, motherly way. Protecting and snuggling you. Tikal seems to rise out of the Guatemalan jungle, like a warrior general and most of the temples, at times, feel like they are pressing down on you. I can´t say I was scared, but I felt uncomfortable. Tulum felt like the Mayan Club Med on the shores of the Carribean. And Copan, was less about structures and location, but the fantastic carvings. Hundreds of faces and hyrogliphics, beneath mountain like Ceiba trees. It was soothing, like a neighborhood. All these ruins had, at times, thousands of people living there but this was the only place it was still obvious after two milleniums.