¿Que nota, maje?

Too relaxed to take advantage of plentiful free time fit for a seventy-two hour, visa-resetting border hop to Costa Rica, my flirtations have expanded to visa violations. From my directory of (potential girl)friends collected in Estelí, to Marvil and Juan of quesillo-serving fame on the fringe of Masaya's parque central, to the neighborhood kids and couchsurfing.com saints hosting my cousin Jamie and I in Ocotal; from the streetside fritangas feeding my current protein-binge with bicep-building platters of gallo pinto, plantains, cabbage salad, tortillas, and, of course, meat meat meat that cost, at the stomach-and-wallet-elasticity-testing-extreme of $2.50 to cups of arroz con leche for a quarter, a bottle of Flor de Caña and a Pepsi at a discoteca for $6, cantaloupes for US$0.50 to $1, I've managed to lose myself in Nicaragua as fully as I have in this sentence.

With León-based trekking outfit-cum-social aid organization Quetzaltrekkers, Jamie and I passed the last few nights camped on a secluded beach on Nicaragua's most northwestern point, hiking Volcán Cosiguina yesterday in the heavy coastal heat and eating a delicious, bloodbath of ceviche that consisted of diced tomato, onion, and a fresh clam smashed and pried open and then hacked into chunks, all tossed and "cooked" in lime juice, still swimming in beet-colored blood. It was fun. Despite the easy hike I'm exhausted. And stoked for running water and showers and fritangas and beds; and ground littered with shattered liters of Toña and concrete-napping bolos instead of sandal-piercing, nail-length thorns.

And girls.

True, the boasts of northern Nicaragua's male population that it's women are the country's finest are Steph Curry precise -- Estelí, Ocotal, and Matagalpa are places where the karmic-consequence for the minds (uncontrollable) perversions at every passing Nica is heat that leaves you with embarrasing pitstains. But hating on the rest of the wide world of Nica's would be like saying I only date SI Swimsuit models.

Lastly: Usman: Rickey Hendson inducted into 2009 hall of fame

¡Viva Sir Rickey! (If you're confused about the inclusion of this ever important update, don't fret.)

"En la selva urbana...,"

...Eddy's words lingered in the air as he glanced at me with that sly smile, "haces lo que quieres." Somehow, of course, Chase, Eddy, and I were discussing (the lack of) Central American laws regulating what we in the US would call "sex with a minor", debating the merits and karmic deductions associated with the crime that suddenly is not a crime. First, let's be clear: we're not perverts. Also, none of us are George Clooney-suave, so the leap from a pocket notebook scribbled full of telephone numbers to bed is a Grand Canyon-sized chasm (that, sadly, no amount of consolation crotch-pumping can power one across).

Estelí, Nicaragua, where I've been stalled for three days, is a medium-sized city with a several kilometer main strip lined with tiendas hawking pirated DVDs and knockoff shoes (i.e. "Four stripes" -- Abidas). Prices are cheap and the people are charming (with the exception of the religious fanatic who kept insisting God would castrate me -- replete with snipping motions with his fingers while his hand hovered over his crotch -- for coveting women and my use of the internet, which he'd never used because it's full of "sex", ), so that there's little to do is hardly a fault. I'm content stalking the streets with robotic singlemindedness (I'm missing only the ring-and-drawstring centerback), armed with brief phrases to float at every passing female not carrying a kid -- "Hola" and "Adios" -- looking over my shoulder to see if they're looking over their shoulders we pass. That I have another NC-bred admirer of Morenas with whom to charm Nicaragüensas silly with good ol' Southern gentlemanliness, blooming blush across even the most perfectly browned faces, is enough icing to make up for all the cake I'm not eating...Because 1/2 liters of delicious Eskimo® ice cream cost US$1.25. (I did encounter, however, a reposteria that sells excess cake icing in 8oz cups for a quarter. I know it's disgusting that I'm struggling to surpress the impulse to return.)

¡Viva Obama!

OK, so this has absolutely nothing to do with travel or anything really, but it's hilarious. For all I know, everyone may have already heard these clips, but I'm a bit disconnected from the world, you know?

(Thanks for the link, bro. Classic stuff.)

Some words...followed by an idea for discount cribs

Kickin' it in Comayagua with my new friend Eric was a great time. A kindrid spirit (aka closet fatty) in pastry pursuits without weight gain, he's showed me around Comayagua while we walked between ice cream shops and reposterías. The only way my time in Comayagua would be improved would be if I could say I'd accidentally dropped an -a from my friend's name.

Comayagua is another mountain-encircled gem, with 60,000 citizens big enough for big city luxuries like malls, expansive markets, and gangs. But it's also small enough that you recognize people day-to-day and daytime danger is minimal, maybe nonexistant. And while there's a definite lack of street food vendors, the inner-market comedores are cheap and delicious while retaining sufficient mystery as to the sanitation of preparation. Plus Honduran enchiladas (perhaps my favorite food in the world) and baleadas cost mere pocket change at almost any restaurant. Yep, it's kinda like heaven.

My favorite image from Comayagua is a lady on the sidewalk, perched beneath a sun-shielding umbrella, crouched amongst a collection of squeeze-bottle chilis and ceramic dishes filled with salt, cutting and bagging chunks of fruit to sell, her infant child scuttling about at her back, clawing at the bars of his blanket-bottomed crib: the stolen grocery cart in which mom transports her entire operation.

The problems with conscience

A conscience is exactly the kind of handicap that can interfere with many professions and pastimes. Gang member for example. Like when a Peace Corps volunteer related the story of a friend riding a San Salvador city bus when a heavily-tatted, shaved-headed banger snuggled up and proceeded in English:

"See these tats?"

"Yep."

"Know what they mean?"

"Yep."

"Now you're gonna empty your pockets without making a scene."

"Yep."

Five dollars changed hands but, with a stretch of road remaining, and both parties in jolly moods for the opportunity to chitchat in English, conversation ensued.

"So, where're you from?"

"The US."

"What're you doin' here," snarled Mr. Salvatrucha.

"Umm...volunteering, trying to help the people..."

In the long pause the sneer evaporated. "Oh."

At the next stop, when the aisle flooded again with people vending snacks from fruits to cookies to ice cream cones for "una cora" Mr. MS-13 whipped out the $5 and procured snacks to share with his victim.

Isn't MS-13 kinda cute?

(If you're esily disgusted, now's a good time to move to the next post)

Likewise, a conscience makes you a pathetic sex tourist, concerned with the two things sexcessful booty bangers never consider: broken hearts and broken condoms.

Mom and dad, really, would it have been so hard to neglect us as young'uns, fostering an upbringing morally bankrupt?

My Valentine

Why is she asking me for a regalo? "Si," I stammer, "Uh, voy a dejar un regalo cuando salga." Patricia and her friend laugh, trade fives and a fist bump, and one of them squeals, "¡Un bebe!" I'm watching the faces of Patricia's 10-year-old kids, but nothing registers, no disgust disrupts their smiles toward me. "Somos amigos," I insist again, having already turned town a request to be Patricia's boyfriend, nevermind that we've talked for a total of ten minutes in our lives and that I'll be leaving Comayagua within days. To say nothing of the fact that Patricia is thirty, has kids at least ten years old, and is shaped like a cream puff. That she has no education, sells tortillas and bags of green mango chunks spiced with chili and salt for a living, and is openly propositioning me for sex in front of her kids.

She says she'll be my girlfriend even if I leave tomorrow. I have her phone number.

We're sitting on the curb and she keeps brushing my thighs with her fingertips, which is actually less comfortable than when she stands and starts gyrating her gelatinous jiggler at the level of my face, rotating like the food carousels she's obviously raided one...million times too many. I swallow a terrible prediction for her adorable daughter's fate, but stop myself from washing it down with another sip of water, sipping being a nervous tic, when I recall Patricia's lips sharing the bottles rim.

(Later, instead of spending an extra seven Lempira (US$0.40) on another refillable bottle, I'll rinse my bottle with a substance that advises swallowers to contact the nearest undertaker upon ingestion, as backpackers will momentarily forgetting that I'm not stricken with the poverty I so regularly observe.)

Ahh, shit, on the other hand, in Patricia I could've had a Valentine's date for the first time.

Sometimes I don't want to be bothered with titles

The more agreeable temperatures in Alegria's altitude allowed me to retain fluids, quickly shifting my urine's color from desert sunset orange to clear. With that healthy boost I returned to running, resuming the calf-and-quad killing hill training that has characterized my every run in El Salvador. And when I say hill training, I mean that in the most literal sense. Hill training. A single hill. As in I'm way up in the mountains, so running means flying down then climbing back up. Like 22 minutes straight up. By the end casual observers think I'm running in place. Jabba the Hut slithered by yesterday and looked like a comet in comparison. (What he's doing in El Salvador I'm not sure. I was too out of breath to inquire. Or care.)

From Alegría it was time to investigate Perquin, an old FMLN stronghold near the Honduran border, an area afflicted by ghastly military attrocities during the civil war. It's another tiny blip on the map, nestled high up in the mountains...blah, blah...but with an interesting Museo de la Revolución. (I didn't make the hike to El Mozote, a nearby village that was the site of a wartime massacre, but I plan to trek it with an ex-guerilla guide when I return.)

Perquin is notable for a few other things. We hung out with Peace Corps. volunteers gathered to translate for a group of kindly geriatrics working for Eyecare, enjoying free pie, beer, and wine for our whiteness, thus the assumed association with people affecting the lives of more people than pupusa vendors. We also discovered that not a single person in Perquin -- not even the tourist police or tourist information office -- understands the bus schedule. After waiting for two hours for a bus that, quite simply, never came, someone casually advised, "A veces, cuando el bus esta corriendo tarde, lo no viene aquí.."

Oh.

So we ended up stuck in Perquin for another night, which was far from a tragedy; rather, another "last chance" for pupusas, a circumstance, I'm convinced, was willed by Lord Pupusa so I could stumble and gorge myself upon pupusas de res. With at least four other pupusa variations rumored to be smacked out nightly in remote corners of the country, I'll be back to hunt before long. But first I have to zip to Costa Rica for a few hours to reset my CA-4 (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras) Visa for another 90 days.

Yesterday morning the bus to Marcala, Honduras decided to show, so we endured what I imagine feels like a four hour earthquake while crammed inside a tight metal closet as we traversed the 50km stretch from Perquin, El Salvador to Marcala, Honduras on a fully-packed chicken bus. The unpaved mountain pass cost a bit more than usual, perhaps, but I attribute that to the fact that the bus driver has to buy a new bus after every trip. The border crossing was the only interruption in the trip, a stampless excuse for border officials to extract an unofficial cash sum from any passing foreigners. Technically, all CA-4 border crossings are free. But on Friday the 13th it cost $3. Hardly worth disputing and feeding the Central American legacy of disappeareds.

In Marcala lunch was devoured and another country's tasteless Pilsener was chugged for a pocket change $2.75. Then I connected to La Paz, told Emma I'd terrorize her cute, single friends in Chile, and ended up in Comayagua. Fresh of the bus and girl-travel-partner free, I was basking in the well-kempt beauty of Honduran city babes. Trying to find a hotel I fell into conversation with a mango-vending 30-year-old with a litter of kids, whose husband has bounced sometime in the last year, and she insisted I take her number within a few sentences of revealing that information. If the kids call me "Dad" the next time we cross paths I might have to cut short my stay in Comayagua, which, regardless, is but a short stopover for baleadas and enchiladas hondureñas on the sprint to reset my Visa.

Show me your pupusa

Chasin' the pupusa again like every gooey bite holds the potential to elucidate secrets of the universe, all I want is a solution to Suchitoto's paralyzing heat. Even standing in the shade my sweatfalls feed the puddle spreading at my feet faster than I can replenish essential fluids. But even dehydration-induced deliria can't distract from the sole purpose in making Suchitoto a late addition to the El Salvador travel itinerary: pupusas de arroz. The rice flavor and more durable construction, how they tend to fragment instead of fold, make these whitish-brown, meat-, bean- and/or cheese-filled discs entirely distinct from their maíz-made cousins.

And how are they? Well, I spent three days in Suchitoto's hellish heat, where sweating is as much excitement and the most vigorous activity you'll see during the sunlight hours. (Though the mix of guys and girls gyrating in partner with their own images in the mirror-walled discoteca makes for amusing nightlife.) As the sun retires, carts and comals and jugs of curtidos, squeeze bottles of salsas and short benches around little wooden tables dot the streets and central square, firing up $0.25 pupusas for all passerbys.

Suchitoto is a silent town of culinary highlights on the beautiful Lago de Suchitlán. Besides being a pupusa-fiend's must-visit, the paletas artesanales (handmade popsicles) are a revelation, especially in the desert heat: the paletas are thick, creamy treats made from everything from sapote to oreo to moraqueso (blackberry cheesecake) to canela. Simply the finest, most refreshing treats I've ever licked.

With Emma, my rum-powered Irish partner in hangover lazyness and food-tourism -- which means our between-meal gaps consist of hours of conversation concerning the next meal, or recollections of other foods we've eaten around the world (and Emma is quite well traveled) -- I've accomplished little during the handful of blissful days since we departed Juayúa. (I remain alone, however, in my passion for "sex tourism," Emma having quickly deduced that strolling, curve-flaunting Central American women are just as responsible for the drool dribblets discoloring the front of my t-shirts as any pupusa mamá.)

Yesterday we finally mustered the energy to mount a bus toward cooler mountainous climes, settling for a few nights in quaint Alegría. It's yet another charming Salvadorean town where the citizens remain unjaded by tourists -- but where we were taken advantage of for the first time in El Salvador, being charged $7.25 each for the type of plato del día (plus licuado) you can find in any Salvadorean market stand or bus terminal for less than $2.50 per plate. Needless to say, I wasn't served the entire cow, plus pound of rice, wagon of tortillas, and garden of vegetables I'd paid for. The only way such a meager meal would cost $7.25 in any comedor is if a $5 bill was served on the side (maybe substituted for a single tortilla).

Living in Juayúa is akin to abusing my digestive tract

Having chicken bussed across crater-littered Central American highways for nearly five months, I'm relatively unchanged. A shade browner, the giant squeeze bottle of sunscreen I lugged from the states the same back-straining deadweight in my pack; and armed with a Spanish language vocabulary sufficient to keep myself fed, sheltered, and swarmed by quickly obsessive females. The kind who begin battering you with lunacy after a week, "¡Eres mi amor!", every time you scurry to the bathroom to relieve the intestinal pressure wrought by ingested parasites a chorus of sobbed "¡Te extraño mucho!"s breaks out in the next room. (To be fair, that might be a simple defense mechanism to drown out the offensive sounds rumbling, tumbling from your gut, invading the apartment through wafer-thin walls.) Those unstable sirens who, mere hours after your first encounter, are comfortable crying in your presence; gushing over your (perceived) sincerity and their luck in stumbling upon the one-in-one-hundred exception to the cruel male rule; singing you love songs in front of the bubbling fountain in central park.

On the other hand, as long as I can suppress comments to the effect of, "Wow, you're really pretty...ummm, insane," I'll at least get a lot of Spanish conversational practice. The cash I save on these free lessons will go a long way in the red light districts across the region.

As it is, I was going to leave Juayúa this morning, but a round of fountain-front tunes and tears convinced me to stay another day. My stomach is sputtering too -- making any rough bus ride a dangerous proposition -- due to any combination of digestive tract abusing factors:

• Since arriving Thursday night eating twenty-four full-sized peanut butter, banana & honey sandwiches (including 20 over the course of 5 consecutive meals, between meal snacks constituted by grease-dripping pupusas and chocolate cake) on combinations of white, wheat, and french breads.
• Taking local advice and drinking tap water.
• My Salvadoran Super Bowl bonanza, substituting a many-pound stack of pupusas from Pupuseria Esmerelda for the usual plates of burgers, nachos, and beer -- downing tres papusas revueltas, an additional one each stuffed with a single ingredient: flor de ayote, pollo, y queso, and something absurd called a Papusa Loca, essentially a maíz-frisbee stuffed with every papusa-loading option (including papelillo, the lone ingredient I'd neglected to involve in the rest of my gluttonous papusa order).

Or, who knows, maybe when Barry and I were splashing around in Pacific at Playa El Tunco, laughing as we slapped water towards each others faces, "Hepatitis, hepatitis," I caught a few contaminated droplets.