Nicaragua

“How am I? You’re in Nicaragua and I miss you. That’s how I am.”

Indeed – driving the hilly but surprisingly smooth road between Managua and Esteli in a stick-shift SUV, staining its new-car smell with the pungent, nutty aroma of a Drew Estate cigar; weaving around brightly painted school buses with villages’ worth of cargo strapped to their roofs, the smoke-farting dirt bikes loaded with two or even three people, the rusty trucks loaded with cut logs. Driving across the bridge marking the entrance to the North Country, seeing the lower halves of the telephone poles and trees painted red and marked, in black, with the letters of the local Sandinista faction.

Pulling into Esteli in the late afternoon, veering from the Pan-American Highway onto dirt roads winding through kilometers of shanties and one-story homes whose stucco still bears the bullet-scars of the country’s civil war. Kids and stray dogs and chickens playing outside, men in horseback in white hats trotting past. We were camping for the week at the nicest hotel in the vicinity, which also featured a bar and restaurant. By ‘nicest hotel’ I mean a roof overhead and running water. Leading up to the front door was a truly magnificent stoop made of old rough-hewn stone, the kind of elevated perch where you could sit for hours on a Tuesday night and watch the street action, picking up the occasional pebble to dissuade the dog sniffing in the gutter from getting too close.

There is such a thing, by the by, as eating too much goat. A staple of the local cuisine, better-prepared than in the Dominican Republic, washed down with bottled water. We were there to profile the cigar-makers who had established their factories here, in the center of Nicaragua’s tobacco-farming areas – but what sticks in your head afterwards, as you steer the car back to the epic shantytown of Managua at the end of the week, speeding by flaming tires on the median, are the little details. The American films dubbed in excitable Spanish on the tiny TV in your room. The air-raid siren going off at six in the morning everyday, summoning the whole farming community to work, and then screeching again at noon to announce lunch. Workers lined up in front of the photographer’s Avadon-style white screen, holding their hammers and bunches of brown, fragrant tobacco, ready to have their picture taken. The berserk, rattling cab ride taken one Wednesday afternoon. Children standing by the side of the road, holding out sticks bending under the weight of bright birds sitting quietly as they wait to be sold. Standing in front of the gate of one factory and seeing a group of horsemen charge by like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel, their horses’ hooves throwing up bursts of dust.