travel

i love traveling, i hate getting there. so, i wasn’t exactly thrilled when i heard we’d have a 12 hour bus ride from san salvador, el salvador to managua, nicaragua. come to find out, riding on the tica bus was living in the lap of luxury in central america. the seats reclined. there were movies. border crossings were absolutely the easiest they could possibly be. prior to our 5 am departure, we’d heard going to managua to catch a bus back to léon was backtracking. instead, we could get dropped off at this small town along the way and hop on a local chicken bus for the next 2.5 hours to léon. nate and jessie, ever the hard core budget travelers, were game. and by default, i guess i had to be game too…

so, 10 hours into our trip, off the gringo tourist tica bus and onto the side of the road we went. we stood there for a good 20 minutes before hopping on the chicken bus, during which i had several, “dear god, i hope this all works out” moments. first, for those of you who haven’t traveled in central america, chicken buses are truly a sight to see (these are the painted old school buses from the united states). there is a driver and an ayundante (helper)—and those guys fling your packs onto the top of the roof like nobody’s business. so on we went—only gringos on the bus. luckily for us, perhaps because it was saturday, the bus wasn’t that full. after the ayundante scaled the back of the bus like a monkey (yes, while the bus is moving), he collected our money. i thought it was 25 cordobas (1 USD= 23 cordobas), so i gave the ayundante 30. he told me it was 35. i jokingly asked him if that was the extranjero (foreigner) price—there’s often a price for locals and a price for foreigners. the guy i sat next to told me that was the price it cost everyone to get to léon.

his name was elvie. he had been on a chicken bus since 12 that day (it was around 3 pm) and he was taking the bus into leon to meet up with a friend and then head to managua for an interview at a call center on monday. elvie is from a small town near the honduran border. he currently lives with his grandmother so he can help heard the cattle while her sons are away. he is 25, went to university, and studied english for 4 years. he wants to go back to school for another degree in international relations, but then, he swears, he is done with school (yep, i’ve said that before too).

his interview on monday is with an electronics company and he needs to demonstrate he can speak good english (his english was fantastic so he shouldn’t have a problem there). he asked me, rather self-consciously, if i met him in the united states if i would know that english wasn’t his first language. he really wants this job in managua. he said it was good money and he could make about $500 USD per month (nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere behind haiti). we talked about a host of things for elvie to practice his english: why michael jackson’s coffin was all gold (i didn’t know that), if i liked the rapper akon, how he loved to travel, the names of volcanoes we passed, what he thinks of the new nicaraguan president, and if it is polite to ask a woman how old she is. and before i knew it, we were in léon.

traveling (not tourism—i’ve discovered there is a big difference) really makes you face yourself. your fears. your assumptions. your biases. lets be honest, i was scared to get on that chicken bus. but making decisions out of fear really is no way to live, or travel for that matter. and maybe that is why mark twain had it right so many years ago—“travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. broad, wholesome, charitable views of the world cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

so, if you think about it, send up some positive vibes, prayers, whatever your thing is, for my new friend elvie’s interview today. hope it all works out for you, buddy.