Moyogalpa

They are curiously clever and exceedingly devoid of soul. They make a racket at inconvenient hours. They speak as much Spanish as I do but roll their R's with more authenticity. At least one is eager to grab a hold of you in its leathery talon. It is an uncomfortable offer and possibly a threat.



We walk up and down a darkening street and peek into one empty restaurant after another. A lone soldier cradling a well-worn shotgun stands sentry at an otherwise unremarkable intersection with a small bank office. In one restaurant the lack of business has resulted in a small group of idle townspeople gathered around the owner/cook lady in the dining room. I mistake this for a group of local diners and suggest we eat there.

A group of local diners is both the most trusted and the most misleading indicator of restaurant quality to the independent tourist. It assigns upon the local populace a level of discrimination that we mustn't assume, based upon some fantasy about folk taste and authenticity and blah blah. This is so even when the group of local diners are actually eating. Ours is a phantom group that disbands when we sit down and they lose their core, the owner/cook lady, to our table and then the kitchen. Fortunately she is nice, the food delicious, the dogs affectionate (and hungry for your food), the roof incomplete and constructed upon living trees, and the maybe-ten-years-old daughter of the lady all up in my face with a talk-to-the-hand response to my request for the bill.





I don't remember Moyogalpa as a particularly beautiful place, but it is beautiful at times.



We are out of focus, which is appropriate. We have just spent twelve hours going from San Jose, Costa Rica to Moyogalpa, Nicaragua on the bus and on this boat. The autofocus prefers the background, as it is stunning and less sweaty.

This would be the second of four full days on the road going from one place to another. The third will be a bus-to-ferry-to-taxi-to-foot-to-bus-to-taxi-to-bus-to-taxi tribute to mechanized transportation. Covering long distances in an unknown land is a fantastic thing. We are moving through space and time. In the morning we are in one place and in the evening we are in another. We have either further escaped from home or moved closer to its comfort; we can measure our progress precisely against a map.