I doubt we drove fifteen minutes from the border at El Espino into Nicaragua on a beautifully paved highway before we stopped to check out some river tour possibilities.
We did eventually get up to the canyon but first we rested. I got worn out running around the customs post and I needed an early night.
We are well past the range of what you might call normal campsites. Daily life here has a delightfully anachronistic air sometimes.
Regular sites with electricity plug ins, sewer dumps and hot and cold showers and toilets with seats and rolls of paper…? Fuggedaboutit! Roybin our host invited us in.
The concept of RV travel is understood and catered to in Mexico but not down here. We parked in front of Roybin’s parents house.
He lives in the nearby town of Somoto with his wife and two kids and works at his parents place organizing tours and meals for the visitors. Roybin putting our Starlink dish on the roof of his parents home that more resembles a home from 200 years ago.
You think we live in a small space but conditions in rural Nicaragua are not exactly 21st century.
Lucky for us, the space age visitors, they have an outhouse which we used. This is why we have a porta potty and not the normal RV flushing toilet with a tank. Easy to empty anywhere and emptying it doesn’t bother me.
The canyon tour was for the two of us old farts walking up the river and floating back. A couple of bus loads of Dutch schoolgirls showed up for the climbing tour. Suddenly the place was swarming with near identical blonde teenagers with alabaster skin and minimal clothing. We took off with Wilson our guide.
We chatted as we walked up the river bed toward the canyon. He lives with his grandfather in the village where he was born.
There has been a lot of rain in northern Nicaragua lately and the river was up a bit so our riverside stroll turned into a scramble, a wade and a muddy slog by turns.
I wondered if Wilson might have preferred being on the Dutch schoolgirl guiding tour. He shook his head. They were going rock climbing up the canyon and he wasn’t keen. We continued to walk and slog and wade.
There’s some sort of a trail there somewhere.
Eventually we reached Eddie and his zebra painted boat. We got a ride across the river and the boat was propelled single handed through a set of rapids upstream to meet us closer to the canyon.
Effie’s assistant got the boat upstream. This is a complicated operation it turns out.
Then Eddie took the oats and propelled us hard against the current into the canyon till even he could go no further.
After all that we got into inner tubes and floated back down, through the various rapids past the trail of tears onshore and swirlies down the Coco River like leaves down a drain.
It was a Disney ride with none of the certainty of the outcome!
And the mile long walk uphill to GANNET2 and an impatient Rusty inside very glad to see us.
Layne had chicken but I wanted an odd offering: a baked potato with smelly Nicaraguan white cheese and sour sour cream. Delicious.
There is a sort of retired Englishman who spends his winters here helping the locals and their economic development. His name is Bryan and he is noted in the iOverlander app as someone you might meet. Sure enough:
We talked about England and travel and his two daughters who live in the States as he is now divorced from their American mother. One of the pleasures of travel is meeting people, and Bryan is an example, who are all over the place geographically who help me feel at home on the road.
The PanAmerican Highway toward Estelí.
