San Juan All the Way

It was too perfect: at the very end of 155 miles of paddling, finally arriving at San Juan de Nicaragua, I get out of the kayak and walk up to the riverside hotel, dripping and muddy and wearing a ridiculous spray skirt, and join right in with a Mexican song that I happen to know playing on the radio:

Tambien mi dijo un arriero
Que no hay que llegar primero
Pero hay que saber llegar

Which translates roughly to

Also a mule-driver told me
That you don´t have to arrive first,
But you have to know how to arrive

But of course, if I´m going to talk about that trip I should start at the start not at the end -- if going down a big slow river doesn´t merit a chronological narrative, what does?

Day 1: San Carlos to Boca de Sabalos

Trip-start exhiliaration. I am floating in more ways than one as I leave the muddy beach and cruise past town in the mellow dawn. For one, it is simply great to get out of San Carlos. The glow lasts all the way down to a known holding spot called Santa Fe, where I pause to troll a few passes for tarpon. None are showing, and none are biting. After I leave Santa Fe a headwind comes up that will be my constant midday-afternoon adversary. I settle into the hammer-and-anvil feeling that you get when the current is pushing you one way and the wind another. Not that there was enough current to please me on this 32 mile day, four miles of which were spent in more bootless trolling near Boca de Sabalos. I am good and tired of paddling by then, but to not troll that same spot where I hooked up last year, a spot which has mythical status in my teensy little world -- impossible!



Day 2: Boca de Sabalos to Boca de Bartola

Two solid days of trolling at Sabalos (not counted here as travelling days) are planned into my intinerary, with the idea that I could catch a tarpon, get that out of the way, and then paddle the rest of the river in peace and euphoria. It is not to be. I do not get a single strike in 20 miles or so of trolling time. And friends, even Shadbourne Gilmore can get worn out on trolling without a little bit of reinforcement. Resultingly, I am glad to get going downriver, where I splash through the rapids at El Castillo and have a nice river shrimp lunch while watching the turists see the sights I already saw last year (I think El Castillo is pretty heavily overrated, but I am a guy whose ruins cherry was popped at 19 by Macchu Picchu). When I get bored paddling, I enjoy watching the big spaces between the afternoon thunderheads, which is like looking through an airplane window but with fresh air.



Day 3: Boca de Bartola to Boca de San Carlos

More delightfully unexpected rapids push me halfway to San Carlos, and keep me clipping along until the wind comes up. I´m told there is a hotel in this Costa Rican town, but when I check it out, I am looking at the equivalent of the worst dark, depressing, poopy-smelling fleabag room where I used to sleep in earlier days as a trekking dirtbag. No problem, I am prepared with a hammock and tarp, and I head downstream looking for two appropriate trees that are A) not completely choked with vines and jungle flora and B) decently removed from the sandbar habitats of crocodiles, which have started to appear regularly.



The only spots that satisfy the criteria are on the ranchlands of the Costa Rican side, so it is there that I stop and set up. Camping out on my own is very, very delightful after being pampered at the Hotel Sabalos and Refugio Bartola, and I love the feeling of reclining in the clear grassy riverbank with a bit of rum, and watching the full moon rise over the impenetrable wall of jungle on the Nicaraguan side of the river. The background sound of birds and monkeys is thick and riotous in the early part of the night, and then when it clears out a bit closer to midnight I hear one particularly beautiful bird call that is like a plaintive descending scale. Pretty enchanting in the moonlight, and probably the peak moment of my river trip.



Day 4: San Carlos to Sarapiqui

My next stop is also in Costa Rica, only this time it will be in the lap of luxury at Cabinas de la Trinidad. The place is run by a meticulous old Tica who must have been quite a beauty in her time. Like at Hotel Sabalos, I am the only guest (there was one other couple at Bartola) and I get royal treatment with complimentary REAL coffee for a change, instead of the instant stuff that Nicaraguans always use. Having watched spider monkeys and capuchin monkeys from the kayak as they flew around in the canopy, I finally spot my first howler monkeys here at the hotel, probably because they are habituated to humans. You hear them all the time, morning and night on the river, but they are very hard to spot. When I´m on my way out the next day, they do something that infuriates me: they climb into the branches over my launch spot and start pissing and crapping all over the area! Intentionally, I feel sure! I probably should laugh, but I know it´s going to be a long day and I´m anxious to get going. For a few monkey turds that float on the surface, big fat carp-like fish rise up and take like trout take grasshoppers. Idea: brown balsa popper, plain without feathers, the Monkey Turd.



Day 5: Sarapiqui to San Juan de Nicaragua

Like day 3, the current helps me through about ten miles of the morning, and then deserts me completely. The very last leg of the trip comes after a confluence where 80 or 90% of the river goes down the Rio Colorado into Chile, while I´m left with a very shallow, slow 10% for twenty miles. Also, the notion of the Indio-Maiz jungle reserve seems to break down here, and there are people sitting in front of their little farm shacks along the way, mutely gawking at the gringo as though he were a two-headed space alien. After years of being an outsider in Japan and elsewhere, this still annoys me. But the day has treats in store. Eventually, I begin to hear the breakers of the Caribbean coming over the freshened air, and they crescendo into a very cool moment of beaching the kayak and climbing over a sand dune to see the whooooole enchilada spread out before me. Like I told some guys, to see the wide open sea after a week on a jungle river was quite ¨emocionante.¨




San Juan de Nicaragua itself is, among dreary, filthy, impoverished sites of human habitation, truly the holiest of holies. Its location has been moved a few times, and its name changed twice already, and if it was ever worse than now, I don´t want to imagine it. The Nicaraguan socialists seem to have sensed the need for intervention, and have poured money into projects that all are brazenly announced with big placards placed in front of the sites, signs which go so far as to announce the amount of money invested: ¨Nicaragua Avanza! Proyecto para Agua Potable. Costo: $2,600,000.¨ ¨Nicaragua Avanza! Proyecto para Sitio Turistico. Costo: $190,000.¨ Yet, you notice that power is only on for three hours every day, and the piped water is so unreliable that the locals hoard it in plastic barrels, and especially that the Tourist site, a big concrete monstrosity labeled ¨Brisas del Mar Bar and Grill¨ has no bar and no food and contains only one rather addled looking fellow who spends the entire day listening to a radio held up to his ear.

You´re going to think I´m making this up, but, while my head was dancing with maxims of trade liberalism, I actually MET a group of government functionaries. Or whatever you call them. They came to town in their own private motorboat, and stood out much as gringos do -- they were well dressed, well fed, and goofy. I watched as they took a bunch of pictures on the dock, including a set shot where the subject jumped up in the air and was photographed with waving hands. Eh? I ran into them in the better of the town´s two restaurants and asked where they were from. They´re from Nicaragua! They are a group of lawyers and engineers tasked with deciding how the national funds will be spent. They are touring the area, assessing sites. As I listen, I realize that these are the very guys that make me lean toward economic liberality. I always ask, ¨who are you going to trust to make all the decisions on what to produce, and how much of it, and where investment should be concentrated -- in some bunch of humanly error-prone government goobers like the Soviet trade ministry, who fucked up not just their own massive country but much of Europe, too?¨ And here were the goobers, joking around and having a fine time in San Juan de Nicaragua. Their sense of fun was infectious and I couldn't not like them. At one point I almost got offended, thinking that the chief lawyer was mocking gringo-accented Spanish; but no, he explained, that was how the crazy Costa Ricans talk! I´m sure they had some good laughs at my expense as soon as I left. And I do hope they build the airport they were talking about, as it may be the only way I ever get back to San Juan.

At any rate, it was a trip. I´m very glad I made it. I wish I´d got a tarpon, but what the hell. I don´t wish it bad enough to spend a few more days trolling, and so I have arranged to be heading home from Ortegatown this very afternoon. I´ve barely left the hotel room, where I have feasted well on Champions League highlights and movies. I´ll get the pictures up ASAP.

Viva Nicaragua! and California. No hay que llegar primero, pero hay que saber llegar.

Fice and Rish

Remember this dialogue in The Old Man and the Sea?

"What do you have to eat?" the boy asked.
"A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?"
"No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?"
"No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold."

If you have read the book (and if you haven´t, do) then you know that that there isn´t really any yellow fish with rice. The old man is salado, and hasn´t caught a thing for 85 days. Yet it is comfort enough for the two impoverished fishermen to regularly perform this lovely ritual of pretending that the fish and rice exist, until it is so meaningful and suggestive as to be nearly symbolic.

Fish and rice-ism has been a part of my fishing imagination for many years, since long before I myself became an old man. I read the book, and I thought I got the meaning. During my years in Japan, the significance of F&R grew deeper for two unrelated reasons. First, the obvious reason, is that Japanese love to serve a simple meal of a whole or split salt-broiled fish and a bowl of white rice, with perhaps a few insignificant pickles on the side. From the start, this struck me as lovely and pure like Santiago´s fish, except of course it was real -- rich, oily delicious, and edifying. And then one day, to humor my girlfriend of the time, I went to a Picasso museum in Hakone that displays numbers of the artist´s handmade, hand-painted plates. And next to almost every plate, there was a photo of the hearty old fellow sitting with a smile of deep satisfaction in front of a plate with a fish skeleton on it, picked clean. Picasso got it, just like Papa.



One of the great delights of this past week in the Solentiname islands has been eating my fish whole, usually within a couple of hours of reeling them up to the kayak. The fishing was pretty good, so I ate pretty good. I threw back at least one rainbow bass that might have gone five or six pounds, and a few of three or four, but the first two and a half pound fish of the day was invariably a goner. I threw in a few pairs of crisp-fried mojarras for variety (or the cook Telma did, after I handed them over) and feasted more or less like an extremely lucky old man.


Fish and rice is healthy, and I think I am already feeling and seeing the benefits of it in my physical well-being. Aside from a bit of pickled chile and some fried bananas and steamed chayote, all I ate was large helpings of fish and small helpings of rice, which in these parts they measure out carefully in a cup and then mold it onto your plate. Breakfast was rice and beans and eggs -- perfect fuel for a dozen-mile day of paddling. I worked up to an 18 mile circumnavigation of Isla Mancarron and had a lovely little adventure out of it.


Though probaby my biggest adventure happened just yesterday, when I was forced to wade-fish while my boat dried out for packing. I waded and floated with my PFD out to a little submerged reed island and promptly caught a 2-3 pounder for dinner. I hung this poor sucker off a flagpost sticking up out of the rockpile (which is there to help boats to locate the shoal) and proceeded to keep casting, catching a few odd fish and a few times diving in after my rockbound lure. On one of these lure rescues, I noticed an odd triangular thing apparently floating nearby. What the heck is that? And then the triangle opened up, and chewed a few times, and I realied that one of the local freshwater crocs was swallowing down a fish not a hundred feet from where I was standing! Yikes. I´d seen these guys a couple times from the kayak and got slightly freaked out, but in this case I was truly concerned. If you wanted to goad an old lizard into a fight, then hanging up a dead fish and standing around up to your waist in the water would probably work well. But of course I wade-floated back to shore safely with all my feet and fingers, so that I can now type the tale here.

While paddling around Mancarron I made a strange catch: a cleverly submerged, illegal set net. the locals tell me that these are really harming the quality of the hook-and-line fishing, and I considered cutting it up with my river knife. But at the time, I had this odd feeling that someone was watching me from the trees onshore . . . so instead of destroying some old Santiago´s net, I went ahead and checked the length of it for any fish, of which there were none, live nor dead. But all this got me thinking about a great aid project for the area: a serious scientific survey of the fish populations, with a report recommending regulatory practices. People will say, probably rightly, that poor hungry islanders will not let regulations get in their way, and that the money to enforce them will never appear. But Never is a very long time, and anyway such a report would be at least as useful as the abandoned recycling plant created by one agency, or the ongoing groundwater well project by ACRA. If I can find a way to promote this idea, it could be a good use of my lovely months of unemployment, which are now a mere two weeks old and going great.



Not that paddling and fishing are bad uses of time. I haven´t cast a line today, but tomorrow I start down the San Juan with a big tarpon rig on the deck. Mmm, sabalo chorizo and rice . . . whether real or imagined, I go to find it soon!

Repeat Offender

One year has past; one year, with the length
Of one technical writing contract! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from Lake Nicaragua
With a soft jungle murmur. --Once again
Do I behold these tarpon jumping in the river
That on a wild and secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more wild Nantucket sleigh rides; and connect
The landscape with the Caribbean Sea.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, in this uncomfortably hot internet cafe in San Carlos . . .

From those opening lines of Tintern Abbey I conclude that Wordsworth was, as I surely am, a repeat offender. Remember the kid who always said, whether it was tobogganing down the hill in winter or diving in the pool in summer, ¨let´s do it again!!!¨ ? I am that type, and that´s why I am here again in San Carlos, ready to head out to the Solentiname islands (again) for a bit of bass fishing and paddling conditioning before heading (again) downriver in my kayak.

Here is my rap sheet, my list of offenses repeated and aggravated over time:

• 3 times to Peru; knocking about, trekking with backpacks, and climbing snow peaks, respectively.
• 3 times to Argentina; catching fewer but bigger fish each time, and finally running the Rio Gallegos in an inflatable kayak.
• 4, 5 times into the Alaskan bush chasing trout, grayling and salmon
• 2 times to Nepal to trek around
• 2 times to Nicaragua to paddle and fish (current!)
• 2 times to Baja to paddle and fish (throwing in the next plan, just for good measure)

Though I am delighted to say that I did not go ahead and violate the wise old saying of the Japanese, ¨A wise man climbs Mt. Fuji . . . once.¨

Of course, the point of going down the hill again is to see if you can do it a little faster, or a little better, or if maybe this time you end up breaking your neck like your Mom warned you would happen. In that vein, I´m going much further downstream on the San Juan this time -- all the way to the Caribbean, if things work out as planned. It´s understood that there will be some delays on the way to troll about and cast for tarpon. I would really, really like to (again) hook up with a big old tarpon and have a Nantucket sleigh ride. Last year´s ride remains one of the clearest memories of my life´s joyful moments. I remember that night I couldn´t get to sleep, I was so full of adrenaline and excitement, even hours after landing the fish. I think that such an experience could provide an effective antidote to a growing condition in which I am at times too plagued with ennui to get out of bed in the morning . . . .

In one of his travel essays Paul Theroux commented that the worst part of travelling in remote parts isn´t danger, as most people think, but rather delay -- the interminable waiting around in the heat for this boat or that plane. At the moment I am killing time prior to boarding a slow boat out the islands. It should get there in time for to do at least a bit of fishing from the dock, but it probably won´t. I occupy about half my time reading Phineas Redux and the other half contemplating the correct actions to take if/when my next Nantucket sleigh ride slows down and becomes a San Juan tarpon anchor. Try backing up to shore with one-arm paddling, as I did once (unsuccessfully) with a big striper on the bay? Carry a decent-size club with me, and try to knock him out at the gunwale and drag him in? Hm. Obviously I have some more thinking to do on this. Fortunately, I have time for it.

Saludos desde Nicaragua!