I am a very deep sleeper, so deep that emergency situations often go unnoticed by my unconscious body and mind. For example, fire alarms. Or, my best friend heaving and booting all over herself.
When I found out in the morning, it made no sense. We had eaten THE SAME THING for dinner. Anyway, I went to the front desk to get her some more bottled water. I also asked for a coconut, because in the absence of civilized medicine, coconut water is a fabulous way to replenish electrolytes. The hotel people were super helpful. Natalie lent us her private room while she left for the day to climb the volcano. Laura and I set her up in Natalie's room and I checked on her a couple of times before I left to meet Cassie and Thomas for our adventure. I kind of abandoned her because there was nothing else I could do for her, and I really didn't want to sit around the hotel all day, and she wanted to be left alone, but it turned out that she had really not wanted me to go and had been really scared because she had never been so sick in her whole life. I'm not great at anticipating people's needs. Sometimes people need to verbally hit me over the head with what they want from me. I don't pick up hints real well. And Laura is *subtle*. So she unfortunately ended up feeling really hurt and then I ended up feeling like a shitty friend. It's hard to have two such totally different operating systems in a crisis.
Cassie and I walked down to Thomas's house with Jorge, where we sat around on the porch with Thomas and Leia, his pregnant free-range dog who is even better behaved than Casper. Raoul and Jorge made a delicious breakfast for us all, the most delicious food I ate in Nicaragua, and they wouldn't even let me help wash dishes to thank them. Cassie is a little bit of a sour whiner, which I resented, but I liked hanging out with Thomas so much that I tolerated her. He thought she was just great. She loves birds and is a bartender in London, and has a crippled snake back home. She doesn't like Ometepe, which offends me, and she is extremely thin, which triggers my voluptuous inferiority complex.
We walked to the place where they rent horses, and, lo and behold, there were three horses for three friends! Cassie and Thomas had never ridden before. I assured them it would be grand, and that I was experienced and would protect them. I went up to one of the horses and did the little horse greeting, blowing gently into his nostrils. He jerked his head up at mine, as if to hit me in the face with his skull. This is a horse who wants to be the boss. So, I took one for the team and rode that guy because I have the most experience.
Cassie got a fat old mare who had a little filly with her. When we went off for the ride, her filly followed us and no one made to stop her. She was the most joyful little creature who just leaped around and pranced the whole journey, following mom. Thomas's horse had no personality. Leia came too.
We went exploring on the island, which meant we didn't really know where we were going and so we got lots of dead ends. We had to open and close lots of fences, so I tried to be generous and get off my horse and deal with the gates. Unfortunately, every time I tried to swing back into the saddle my horse tried to buck me off. What an asshole. But I found that if I brought him up alongside a big volcanic rock, which offered themselves to the purpose in abundance, I could use it as a mounting block and he'd be pretty chill.
Then there was the time when we practically bushwhacked up a really steep hill and got bitten by lots of ants and at the top there was a string of barbed wire. If someone got off the horse and lifted it, the other horses could pass through. Thomas lifted because I couldn't find any big rocks, and Cassie, mom, and baby got through. My horse didn't want to go. Finally after lots of agitating in circles, he went for it. Then there was the split-second realization that my horse was very tall and the barbed wire was not very high off the ground, so I had to drop back in a radical improvised limbo onto the horse's back as we went through. It was very exhilarating and impressive and I felt like Harrison Ford.
Thomas found the experience totally inspiring and now he wants to buy a horse and ride it through the Darien gap, Panama's uncharted jungle wasteland of narcotics smugglers and Columbian military. He'll probably die, which is too bad.
Laura stopped throwing up but was still extremely ill. The next day I went to the clinic to get her lots of drugs, which were, amazingly, free, and I got to use all my Spanish words to tell the doctor what was wrong. Then I hung out with Thomas and Cassie. We decided to go out for pizza at Zopilote, an eco-hostel down the road. My stomach was not doing so hot. By the time we got to Zopilote, it was doing really badly. In fact, it got so bad that I decided to home, which was a pain in my ass because it was a 45 minute walk through the dark. It was totally safe, but it's just that I didn't have a flashlight. Not to mention the fact that I threw up and then felt dehydrated and dizzy and had to walk uphill through the dark while I felt like I was going to collapse AND my mouth tasted like vomit acid which was burning my throat. Bad night.
Laura was darling and got me blankets and a bucket (two things I never thought to ask her if she might like) and then I curled up with a terrible chill. I woke up again and threw up, and then Laura came in with some medicinal tea that Jorge had made for me from fresh baby guava leaves that he went outside and picked. Seriously, Jorge is the fucking coolest dude. I don't know if my body was just satisfied that it had emptied the offending matter from my stomach, or whether the tea fixed everything, or whether God pitied me now that I had learned my lesson which was that food poisoning is horrible and having someone to talk care of you makes all the difference, but I was better after that.
The next day Laura was well enough to travel, as was I. Our stomachs were both...funny. Our intestines were both....crampy. Our poops were... anyway. We were not feeling our normal selves but at least we were not sick any more. We headed off for the Pacific side of the island, a town called Merida. On the way there, we walked to an eco-commune where I had thought about living. It was very sustainable and spiritual and non-violent and natural. But I have to say, neither of us were that impressed. It looks great on paper, but nothing about being there called to me to stay. The people were sort of boring or mean or stressed, and it felt hot and boring and overwhelmingly claustrophobic. Its such a hermetically sealed community, they really don't get out, and that's what I'm already living and it sucks. Yes, it would be better if the people and I had the same mission statement, etc, but still. I gotta get out more.
In Merida we checked into a nice hostel with a dock and delicious coconut ice cream. We met two unspeakably cool travelers who were incidentally here to take an ecovillage building workshop for the next month at the farm we had just been at. Ari and Dannii were young, vibrant, vivacious, enthusiastic, and totally sweetly in love. Laura and I fell head over heels in love with them and wanted them and wanted to be them. I went swimming in the lake, and Laura stayed on the dock reading me the Hepatitis C riot act. Then who should come by but Thomas and his friend Marlo! This was funny because the day before Laura and I had run into him on the way to Merida. So I said goodbye to him, altogether, three times. That's a lot of goodbyes. Anyway, Marlo was very taken with me, and we chatted a lot, and then I made a mistake. I said, si dios permite, which means, God willing, because that's what people always say around here, and this inspired a God speech. Marlo was enchanted that I was not an atheist, although I insisted I was not Christian, and he prosthelytized to me for about 20 minutes, and Thomas did nothing to save me from the story of the parrots and the man with a machete and they all talked to God and I nodded, wide-eyed and miserable. I think I need a new policy for these situations. Maybe I will not use the word God any more, even in sayings, and also if someone wants to talk about God I will say I don't want to talk about God that's not something I do.
The hacienda was super lovely, but unfortunately the smell of burning trash was inescapable. Laura and I still felt sick every time we ate, and the smell made us way sicker. We decided maybe we would go to the other side of the island, to start our trip back home, but we found out that because it was Sunday there was only one bus and we had missed it. So we found another place that also burned its trash but for some reason it was better even though it was less nice and kind of isolated. Laura liked it a lot. Then she wanted to find somewhere to buy cereal. We walked around a lot and asked people who looked like they had stores. The first lady said, "You can eat at the hostel". The second lady said, we don't have cereal. I asked where you could get it. She said, "Afuera", which basically means, over there. Which, because she made no effort to point or designate further, meant nothing. People are VERY indirect in Latin America, which drives me crazy. We went to a further store and Laura had me ask for cereal. The lady brought me a little corn and chocolate instant milkshake packet. Laura deliberated for an embarrassingly long time and then had me ask if there was fruit juice. I asked. The lady said no. I gestured, I see you have apple juice right there. Yes, she said, but you asked for fruits juice (fruit cocktail). We have apple juice and pear juice. Oh, the language barrier! Laura thought for a few minutes and then said, no, I only want pineapple juice. We went back to the hostel. Only to find out the hostel has a full restaurant! We ate and felt sick, but then we lay down and played "Kill, Marry, Fuck" with all the people we had met on our trip.
We were running into serious money problems at this point. A) We extended our trip by 3 days. B) There is only one cash machine on the island, in Moyogalpa, which we couldn't get to by bus because it was Sunday C) The one cash machine only accepts Visa cards and I have a Mastercard D) But really neither of us could withdraw money, even though Laura has a Visa, because neither of us remembered to call our banks to tell them we would be traveling to Nicaragua because E) There are no international phone cafes except in Moyogalpa or Altagracia which we couldn't get to because it was Sunday.
So we had to have an intricate and elaborate money plan based on all sorts of potential costs and cash withdrawal opportunities. We talked about it for probably an hour and it was agonizing, but at least we knew what we would do NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED. The next day we began our journey at 5AM, and went back to Costa Rica, and stayed at a posh San Jose hostel with money in our pockets and food, squirming, in our bellies.
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