My first night in Leon I met a Dutch girl named Maarje who is doing her Masters degree in Nicaragua and was visiting Leon for a little vacation. She and I took the bus to the beach the first day intending to kick back and be lazy (and get out of Leon‘s intense heat). But as often happens, we got there and almost immediately found a tour that seemed like too much fun to pass up. It was a boat tour on a river in a protected area called San Juan Venado, a mangrove forest on the coast. I’m going to tell you up front that if I learned anything from the tour it’s the following: always ask a lot of questions when you are agreeing to a tour in Nicaragua, never assume anything, and still after all that, expect the unexpected.
Our guide was 45 minutes late, so we sat in a hostel waiting for him, wondering where he could possibly be (there’s not much going on in Las Penitas). But finally he arrived on one of those bicycles that’s so old that the peddles don’t quite get the message that the biker is peddling. He dropped the bike off with the hostel caretaker and started walking with us. He led us down the street a ways, through the little town, across a part of the beach that was spotted with large puddles that the ocean left when the tide went out, and finally to the mouth of the river. After a while, Maarje and I began to wonder whether there was any boat at all. But after about a 15 minutes walk, we came around a little island of trees and there was his boat. As soon as it came into view he pointed to it and said “arbol.” For you non-espanol speakers, arbol means tree. The boat really was a big old tree trunk carved out, with bark still hanging from its sides. At one point in the trip, I caught myself subconsciously picking at the bark. Bad idea. I was sure the poster we saw in the hostel had a picture of a big, gleaming white motor boat.
We climbed into the wobbly tree, the guide started up a sputtery motor and off we went into the mangrove forest. Now Maarje has a lot of experience on the water. Three years ago, her parents quit their jobs in Holland, sold their house and started sailing around the world. Maarje too was a sailing instructor before going back to school. I was OK with climbing into a tree and wandering into the wilderness with a sputtery motor until Maarje said that the motor was making a very questionable kind of noise that she had heard before. She said this a little too late for me to change my mind about the trip, but not late enough for me to be able to say, ‘it’s OK we’re almost home.’
The mangrove forest was beautiful but we noticed that there were large chunks of “forest” where only the trees on the shore remained and much of what had been inland looked like it had been cut. I read somewhere before I got to Nicaragua that deforestation is becoming a problem here and I wondered if I was witnessing that. So much for protected forest.
We sputtered up the river for about an hour seeing lots of birds and then decided that we had seen enough so asked the guide to turn around. It was then that he decided that he had just seen a crocodile further up the river. We went to investigate, but no, there was no crocodile. He had cut the motor, and when he tried to start it again, it wouldn‘t turn over. After a few tries, he gave up, stood up in the wobbly boat and walked to the front to get to a little bag of tools, picked out a wrench and walked back through the wobbly boat. Oh Mylanta. While he tinkered with the engine, Maarje and I started discussing what one should do if stuck in a mangrove forest for a night. A night with a tarantula began to seem like child’s play. It was also at about this point that we noticed the guide using a 2 liter plastic coke bottle, cut in half, to scoop water out of the back of the boat.
No need though for such grave discussion. After a few minutes, the motor started again and we were on our way back down the river, Maarje and I both agreeing that we would not do or say anything that may cause the guide to cut the motor again. We made it most of the way back before the motor gave out again. At that point, Maarje picked up our sole oar and began rowing us back, but the ocean current meeting the river current just drove us to the shore, still in the mangrove forest. After a few more minutes of wrench work, the engine started again and carried us all the way to shore. When we pulled up, we said a thank you that meant more ‘thank you for bringing us back today and less ‘thank you for the lovely tour.’ Incidentally, the spot on the shore where he pulled in was lined with palm leaf shelters where people were chopping and sorting wood - could it have been wood from the protected mangrove forest? Hmm. We paid an entrance fee to get into that protected forest. Makes one wonder what exactly that money is going toward - machetes?
Before catching the bus back to Leon, Maarje and I ordered big hamburgers and sat in a little palm tree pavilion watching the sun set. It was a good way to wipe out the mental picture I had of me sleeping on a bed of mangrove leaves with crocodiles, snakes, and Lord knows what else in the same forest.
I don't really have any nice pictures of the mangrove forest because for most of the trip I was too worried about tipping over in our wobbly tree to take out my camera. I did however, get the following picture:
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Our Tour Guide, his Questionable Motor, and the Tree
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