The alarm clock chose to remain silent again but luckily, we awoke at 05:30 hrs. During the night we both heard a scrabbling, gnawing sound that we preferred to attribute to the occupant of the next room rather than to a large rat!
We hurriedly packed our gear, woke up the doorman and walked around the corner to the bus yard. There was a big queue for the only bus but luckily, they were hopefuls rather than ticket holders, so we got straight on and paid C$5,000 Córdoba’s for our luggage.
The bus left promptly at 06:00 hrs. with surprisingly few standing passengers. It was hot and cloudy but the sun somehow managed to stay in view. The scenery comprised of brown hills that looked like a vast procession of giant brontosauruses (dinosaurs).
We passed quite a few well-organised, neat-looking co-operative farms in the wide flat-bottomed valleys. We went on through huge, steep-sided valleys with the road clinging to one side near the top.
We drove through Estelí, officially Villa de San Antonio de Pavia de Estelí, which is a city and an active commercial centre in the north and known as "the Diamond of the Segovia". We saw a lot of political murals including the initials FSLN and a red 7 overlapping a black 7. We were familiar with Sandanista symbolism from The Clash Sandanista album. The Clash obviously thought that they were heroes.
The FSLN overthrew Anastasio Somoza DeBayle in 1979, ending the Somoza dynasty, and established a revolutionary government in its place. Having seized power, the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, first as part of a Junta of National Reconstruction.
Following the resignation of centrist members from this Junta, the FSLN took exclusive power in March 1981. They instituted a policy of mass literacy, devoted significant resources to health care, and promoted gender equality, but came under international criticism for human rights abuses, mass execution and oppression of indigenous peoples.
A US-backed group, known as the Contras, was formed in 1981 to overthrow the Sandinista government and was funded and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1984 elections were held but were boycotted by some opposition parties. The FSLN won the majority of the votes, and those who opposed the Sandinistas won approximately a third of the seats.
The civil war between the Contras and the government continued until 1989. After revising the constitution in 1987, and after years of fighting the Contras, the FSLN lost the 1990 election to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro but retained a plurality of seats in the legislature.
We also saw quite a few bullet holes in walls. The road was good and there was evidence of lots of improvements, such as pipes being laid. There were also a lot of efficient looking ranches and horsemen looking as if they were straight out of the movies. Most of the countryside was planted with crops or supporting grazing cattle.
We got to the low urban sprawl of Managua at about 10:30 hrs. and transferred to a pickup truck to the centre, costing us C$50,000 Córdoba’s, which dropped us off at the Hotel Intercontinental. We set off on foot to find a cheaper hotel which accepted Córdoba’s.
We walked across a windswept park and stopped for a Coca Cola and peanuts at a kiosk. There was a lot of open space and a wealth of damaged concrete tower blocks that looked like a set from “Full Metal Jacket”. The scenes of desolation after the closure of London's Royal Docks were a miserable sight for some, but the perfect setting for scenes from Stanley Kubrick's disturbing 1987 film. Stanley Kubrick used Beckton Gas Works in the East end of London. A manufacturing plant of Coal Gas until 1970 on the banks of the river Thames. Kubrick had buildings selectively demolished in places to make the buildings appear scarred from war. Signs were erected on some buildings to make it look like an area of Hué, a Vietnamese city. Managua was similarly war torn, but for real.
Local people stared down from the top floors of these cement husks. We walked around the old central palace. The National Palace is one of Managua's oldest buildings, undamaged by the 1972 earthquake. It was commissioned by President Juan Bautista Sacasa in 1935 and built by architect Pablo Dambach, who also built the St. James Cathedral. For more than 50 years, the National Palace housed the Congress and was still standing despite recent conflict. It was now dominated by portraits of Augusto César Sandino.
In the centre of Managua, a huge statue dominated the road with a half-naked soldier holding aloft a rifle with the FSLN colours flying from it. Apparently this statue was made from melted AK-47s shortly after the Sandinista triumph in July 1979.
We continued down through the deserted windy vacant blocks to the railway station. We failed to find the Hotel Royal and flagged down a taxi to take us to the Hotel Chapito. He charged us C$6,000 Córdoba’s to drop us off at a seemingly deserted green and white building on a corner.
We discovered that this was indeed the hotel and paid C$26,500 Córdoba’s for a room with two beds comprising of straw palisades covered with nylon wheat sacks in what seemed more like a stable. We were issued with a sheet each and, after our passport details were taken, we set off to the restaurant cum garage on the corner for chicken and rice.
Afterwards we walked through the howling wind to a discreet door which led into a pleasant restaurant which sold La Victoria Beer for C$8,000 Córdoba’s a bottle. Apparently on a scale of 1-10, La Victoria is often rated two notches lower than Toña but it is a softer beer that many prefer over its competitor. Served cold throughout Nicaragua, La Victoria at 4.5% abv is tasty and perfect for quenching a strong thirst.
We found it agreeable and sat and drank as the wind plucked at our tablecloth and strange fruit was blown from the trees around us. Managua, due to its tropical climate, varied topography, naturally fertile soils, and abundant rain and water sources, boasts a great variety of flora. Many different types of trees, some of which are not found elsewhere in the world, appear, including chilamates, ceibos, pochotes, genízaros, tigüilotes, royal palms, piñuelas and madroños (Nicaragua's national tree) surround the city.
We were chucked out when it closed at 14:00 hrs and we returned to the windy hotel courtyard to shower and sunbathe. Later on we went around the corner to a hotel bar for a few more beers, following a meeting with Kevin and the coffee-picking brigade.
Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution became a romantic liberal cause celebre in the 1980s. When a plea came for international volunteers to pick coffee and other crops, there was a practical way for people to become ‘brigadistas’ and help the cause. British and Irish brigades of volunteers came to Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The brigades helped fill a labour shortage created as the US-funded Contra rebels attempted to oust the leftist Sandinista government, which itself had seen off the repressive Somoza regime in 1979.
At his farm cafe in Estelí, in the hills of northern Nicaragua, Dave Thomson chuckles as he recalls the Irish people who came here more than 25 years ago to help harvest the coffee. “They picked abysmally. I used to explain to them how they had to pick coffee. I used to tell them it wasn’t important how much you picked: the important thing was to do it well.”
For the coffee-harvest volunteers it wasn’t a case of quality over quantity because they picked slowly, sometimes harming the plant in the process, he says. “So, a lot of damage used to be done, and very little coffee used to get picked. And it often cost more to have a brigade up in the mountains than it could pick.”
We got back to the hotel at 18:00 hrs and lay on our beds for ten minutes before deciding to go out again and walk into the town centre to the Post Office and Telcor building. The Instituto Nicaragüense de Telecomunicaciones y Correos or The Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and Postal Services (TELCOR) is the "Regulatory Entity" of the Telecommunications and Postal Services, a state institution, which has the functions of regulation, regulation, technical planning, supervision, application and control of compliance. of the Laws and Norms that govern the installation, interconnection, operation and provision of Telecommunications Services and Postal Services.
Declan tried to ring home but after a long wait got no answer. On the long walk back we stopped off at an expensive looking restaurant for an excellent steak dinner and half bottle of rum with orange juice. This cost us C$108,000 Córdoba’s each.
We found our way back to the hotel, more by luck than judgement and went to bed merry with alcohol.
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