I feel like dying

The way Tegucigalpa climbs and crowds from the valleys to the peaks -- crooked wooden planks strung with plastic sheeting fluttering in the wind like flags of poverty, the rusted red of tin roofing cutting swaths between foliage, as bunched as Brazil's infamous favelas -- looks entirely improbable.

It's the type of extreme density that makes more sense in a plane-bound metropolis, hardly so here where steep slopes jut so suddenly and sharply, houses affixed precariously to precipices as if secured by tacks, where it looks like The Hulk raged under the land, trying to punch his way out.

But Teguc was just a blip in a long day busing from Estelí, Nicaragua to Siguatepeque, Honduras, a nondescript city where I passed the night on the way to La Ceiba. La Ceiba is a grungy northern port city on the Caribbean coast, where the population is a diverse brown and black, Latino and Garífuna respectively, and panhandlers can pester you in Spanish or English. Ceiba is Honduras' party capital, where beer flows freely and girls six-to-sixty, fit to flab, can bust out the Punta, the traditional ass-physics-defying Garífuna dance. The Garífuna celebration of God's generous endowment of rump. Awaiting me in Ceiba was La Feria Isidra y Carnaval de la Amistad en La Ceiba, a wildly popular annual festival that hops barrios nightly, culminating tomorrow with the city center Carnaval.

Nightly Ceibeñas and the visitors packing out every hotel stream to the designated barrio, where beer tents and busied aproned women waving skewers and spatulas prod and flip smoking slabs of carne and chorizo on oil-bathed grills line every street, funneling the hordes doing their best to spill as little beer as possible in the storming swirls of humanity swarming and sidestepping their way between any of the various stages scattered across the barrio's intersections. One advancing army -- los rockeros -- hellbent upon seeing someone reproduce amusingly accented Metallica classics. The opposing flow, more agile, avoiding collisions with grace and shimmying hips, gravitates toward thumping basslines, reggae and reggaeton, where smooth-moving masses of dark brown and blacked skinned Ceibeñas groove, sweat glistening, in clothed and standing simulations of sex. I join the white-teed, twisted 59fifty-capped admirers along the edges. Rhythm and booty. My dry eyes alert me I'm not blinking. If I turn around, I can enjoy professional, scantily clad dancers doing 360° revolutions, thrusting their midsections in and out, opposite the movement of their cocked arms. Air sex. Then they're back to back(side)-to-crowd, when preposterously sumptuous posteriors flap faster than Hummingbird's wings.

If there's a good place in the world at this moment to risk contracting HIN1, malaria, or AIDS, it's probably La Ceiba -- for the feria-driven influx of Central Americans, the Caribbean coast location, and proximity to San Pedro Sula, respectively.

Accordingly. La Ceiba: almost dying and going to heaven.

Coke Floats for Redemption

I've been spending my last few weeks bouncing between Masaya and Estelí, Nicaragua -- in the former invading the humble but cozy dirt-floored homes and kitchens -- spaces your hanging clothes would find suffocating -- of my adopted families; in the latter, trying to work my charm so I can flirt with creating my own (i.e. striving to arrive at that delightful point where it'll be necessary to pray that prolonged exposure to heat doesn't proliferate undetectable lesions in sheer rubber prophylactics).

Masaya, besides being a treeless incinerator, is the home of some of my best Central American friends. I breakfast in Everth + fam's market comedor, then spend my afternoons lounging with Marbel + company, gobbling up homemade comida tipica -- i.e. torta de pescado: dried, deep fried fish -- gulping down tistes and chichas. I drank ant-and-dirt-specked sap scooped directly from a machete-hacked tree trunk, the so-sweet chicha. The Powerade bottle refilled with milky white Chicha that I'm lugging around will have to wait the fifteen or so days it takes for heavy fermentation to soften the sweetness. ¡Sabrosisima!

Everth, wife and child escorted me to Catarina, a chilly pueblo 8km outside of Masaya, set on the crater rim overlooking la Laguna de Apoyo, deservedly known for its mirador. They then proceeded to treat me to a tipica platter costing half the month's rent for their concrete enclosed patch of dirt.

How do I repay the kindness heaped upon me, the undeserving karmic abyss disguised by a nice smile? By introducing the world to Coke Floats.

The Fritangera and the Cañon

The Cañon de Somoto is a cool excursion. The kilometers-long rift runs through mountainous northern Nicaragua, the cool waters of the Rio Coco running through the slit below the cliffs. The Cañon offers a lazy afternoon floating in inflatable rafts (pulled by Nicaraguan men for a few bucks) or swimming in the refreshingly cool waters (which, unfortunately, requires your own exertion). It's way better if you're accompanied by your Nica-kissy-cuddly of indeterminate age. I'm still almost sure she's 19. Since she's pure morena and I'm pure gringo, we've been endowed the superpower of restoring everyone who sees us to infancy. Which means they forget it's impolite to stare. And stare. Since Luz Marina is older than 14, it's a given that people assume we're married, and our canyon guides inquired such.

Keeping cake close to my heart.

So I keep doing this thing where I eat an ungodly amount of cake, feel near-comatose as my pulse plods, veins running thick with icing, and promise myself I'm not going to ever do that again as I sink into sleep with a bready-brick in my stomach. Every next day, enchanted by twenty-five Córdoba cuts of fantastic layer cake that would leave Fat Bastard begging for a doggie bag, slices that standing side-by-side would dwarf Shaq's shoes, my willpower crumbles and I end up tempting shoulder dislocation hauling another hunk the twelve blocks home. And the repostería also makes giant donuts -- at least the size of the rims on my old Geo Prism -- that it smothers in a thick yellow cream dotted with raisins. These donuts somehow weigh even more than the cake, as if the secret ingredient is some undiscovered ultra-dense baking element from planet pastry.

What else? Well, all this flirting with diabetes usually takes place after my nightly bout of Thanksgiving-style gluttony. A recently discovered frintanga that completely hides its dinnerware beneath mounds of gallo pinto, cabbage salad, and whatever so-cheap-as-to-be-practically-free side item(s) I've elected to eat that night; side items that are essentially a fingernail's worth of something, say a mixture of chicken and rice, deep fried until it's fist sized. Or bigger.

That C$5 enchiladas are delicious deep-fried pockets filled with said rice and chicken. They look exactly like, though are probably less healthy than the "fruit" pies/turnovers you can buy at any Seven/Eleven, the empanada-looking crapsnacks that are stacked on shelves in either the traditional waxypaper bag or the more modern cardboard box. Regardless of the style of packaging, you'll recognize these treats for the huge grease stains soaking through the outside.

Dad, you can postpone that dentist appointment. I think we shoud go ahead and preemptively book be in for the gamut of major heart surgeries.

Cocksucking in Public

Few things are as surreal(ly arresting) as a two-year-old dressed in a princess' flowing white stroking the sticky, blood-saturated nape of a maimed gallo cradled, lovingly, against the chest of her father. Her white dress already spattered with splotches of deep red for her proximity to the ring of violence. Her sister, pigtails spilling over her Winnie the Pooh backpack, sports speckles of sangre on the backside of her hand, catching flecks flying from the frenzy below while she grips the top rung of the ring.

Los Gallos De Oro was the scene of my first pelea de gallos. Cockfight. Cross from Central Estelí into the rougher barrios across the Pan American. Don't flash your camera. Walk down some dirt streets and follow the squawking. Hand twenty Córdobas to the bruisers posted at the door and step inside. On the left are wife-beater donning men crowding card tables, fists clinching crumpled Córdobas, a bottle or smoke in the other. Next the bar and fritanga, doing quick service distributing cervezas y enchiladas.

A scale with a dangling horn-shaped depository, constricting enough that a gallo slid inside can't fidget and disrupt it's weighing. Further back -- past the long urinal whose curtain cover can't contain the rank odor of stale piss; past the walls of crates stacked ceiling high, from which emanate clucking and such -- the ring. Very professional. A 20' X 15' egg shaped pen, constructed of heavy wooden posts and sturdy chain link fencing. A swinging door opens at one end, decorated with a Victoria beer poster. Plenty of long, fluorescent bulbs hang overhead, illuminating the pit.

Man swarm in the ring, encircling other men equipping each gallo with devastating weaponry, some jagged, bladed impaling piece affixed to one leg. The doctors of death carry leather wallets that unzip; unfolded, both inside flaps are fitted with a range of these puncturing attachments, carefully arranged and fitted in foam like drill bits. One is removed, fiddled with, replaced and another selected. A precise science of death.

All around there's hootin' and hollerin', bills changing hands. The gallos, one leg each fitted with implements of death, hit the ground, testing their new, improved leg. Once again they're swooped into the air, introduced to each other by the arms of their trainers, necking aggressively but pecking nothing but air.

The pen empties but for a few, and one of the remaining jingles his bell. The gallos are loosed, neck feathers fanning. They posture around on tiptoes then WHOOSH, the gallos merge into a blur of fury, feathers flying out, men inside the ring and out jostling for position, views constantly obscured as the in-ring judges circle, crouch and stand. Half the crowd is shouting, some joking and sipping Toña as bits of bloodied dirt decorate their clothing. There's a pause, a moment of distinction, then the gallos recombine, a fluttering, jumping mess.

Really, when one considers the way gallos battle, it's a pretty fucking cool way to fight. Always trying to kick your opponent in the face. I like that idea. Though I'd hope somebody aiming his boot at my brain wouldn't be intent on puncturing my jugular with a well-placed flash of a militarized ankle. There's the interactive spectating, dodging scattering bullets of blood. And education. The math in gambling. Even better, practicing probabilities calculating percentage changes a trainer contracts Salmonella, for the questionable hygiene in the preferred method of cleaning and refreshing a battered gallo between rounds -- sucking and licking their heads, spitting out the residue. There's nothing stranger than seeing a bloodied cocks head with those crazy, what-the-fuck's-going-on-Tyler-Hansbrough eyes completely disappear inside a human mouth.

There's also nothing so brutal as witnessing true to-the-death. When one gallo can neither stand nor flap its wings, only tilt its beak to try to deflect blows raining down. Then the head starts to bob, pecks to the top of its skull bouncing its chin off the bloodied dirt below. Eventually the head sags to the dirt, falling to the side.

Then the fritangera fires up the grill.

Auto Hotel Chepito

"¿Cuanto cuesta la noche?" inquired the female voice outside Hospedaje Chepito's doorway.

"Setenta por una, cien por dos," replied Yorlenis. Again.

Conferring whispers hissed outside, an intermission long enough that I had time to wonder what period of stay the voice had intended the first time it had asked prices. The door swung outward and a woman and man passed inside. I was concerned about what had happened to their luggage. Maybe they had been robbed too, the barrios aren't safe at night. At least he managed to defend his bike, I thought.

Chepito's rooms are situated along one long corridor, a line for hanging laundry running the center. You can hear people breathe through the walls.

Soon we heard panting and screaming. It didn't sound like they were reenacting the robbery I assumed had relieved them of all their belongings. Maybe there were ghosts because soon the two exited the room and the hotel, bike in tow.

At least for more couples stopped by late at night, all absent luggage. Soon the moans and groans and exultations emanated from their walls too. Yesterday morning, even at 7am, anyone sleeping "late" awoke to a woman receiving some sort of punishment she seemed to enjoy.

And somewhere in Estelí there's a skinny Nicaraguan on his bike, scooting around looking for a hooker to adorn his handlebars. As I'd say, Peddling for P...well, you play with alliteration.

Time for a Baho movement! (Nilbog)

Fresh off a banana-leaf-lined-hushpuppy-style-serving-basket heaped feast of Baho -- all that long-boiled to disintegration-soft spiced yuca, plantain, and tomato, hiding skewer-length hunks of fatty beef, topped with cabbage salad and a tomato and onion chili -- and coconut cake, it's time to relive a few weeks of, well, nothing.

My time in Estelí can be summed up in a few sentences. Situps (which make the bed creak loudly, convincing my neighbors through the unclosed-at-the-top walls, I'm sure, that I'm involved in another vigorous bout of morning masturbation), pushups and a run when I awake. Daily breakfast (gallo pinto, huevos y platanos maduros fritos, con crema, queso, y un cafecito) for C$25 at Super Las Segovias. Returning to Hospedaje Chepito to deposit a Frosty in the freshly-cleaned men's toilet closet (the consistency may or may not be related to my decision to save a few bucks by drinking tapwater). Internet. Short spanish study. Stroll to the public market to buy bags of tomatoes, mangos, or a melon, and every other day a liter of milk; the daily lunch rotation, for vitamins, you know? Maybe sip rum and play cards with the cool folks I met in the Hospedaje, Ryan and Sarah. More likely, flirt with the 19-year-old fritangera I'm currently half-linked with, which rewards me in more ways than just extra gallo pinto. Like Spanish practice. Or the semi-date to La Casita that cost a whopping $4 including cab fare, food and drinks. For dinner, always fritanga hopping -- though I finally tired of the nightly greasebath and took a break for as long as it took me to go through a jumbo bag of wheat bread's worth of peanut butter and banana sandwiches (a few meals).

Estelí being a world renowned hotbed of fabricas de puros -- the expansive tobacco farms expanding from the cityish center filling the twentysome factories with plenty of strong smelling harvests for their highly regarded products -- I toured a cigar factory. A week later my eyes are still watering from entering some of the rooms (barely) filled with tobacco. But I did smoke a fat stogie that was one of the "throw-outs". Not that I'd be able to appreciate the difference.

Semana Santa encompassed my week in Estelí, though it was much quieter than expected. There were a few processions of candle-bearing devotees leading crucified Christs through the streets, and a big church night or two, but I witnessed none of the alcohol-fueled fury I grew so accustomed to during Guatemalan ferias. More than anything, Semana Santa appeared a weeklong excuse to avoid work. With less teenage girls selling bootleg whatevers on the main drag, I had nobody to excite with a smile and "adios", so I adopted an adorable 9-year-old Nicaraguan, Milagros, as my honorary little sister. Her family was, in typical Central American fashion, exceedingly sweet, and because I was chatty and, especially, because I made quick friends with Milagros and her older brother and sister, Joseph and Karin -- lots of half-understood conversation, fistbumps and handslaps -- I was fed freshmade gallo pinto and bread, and then gifted a pair of fOakley's on my way out. Yep, I miss my little sister.

Finally, edging slightly closer to bored after a week of doing nothing, I hopped a bus to Matagalpa, another of the larger northern cities. It's much more city-looking than Estelí, with more of a packed urban grid than Estelí's one forever-long packed street, with Matagalpa's barrios spreading out of the center and climbing the surrounding mountains. I met a cute Nicaraguan lawyer who spoke some English, though her constant refrain of "Yeah" and headnodding whether I was telling a story or asking a question undermined her claims of understanding. Every breakfast I ate in one market comedor, where the handmade tortillas were the best I've had in Nicaragua, and the younger server-cook took advantage of the gringo presence to learn essential phrases in English, perfect for attracting extra clientele (i.e. "I hate you"; "You are fat"; "You are an idiot"; "You are boring"; "You are a hypocrite"; and "Eggs.") Daily for dinner I ate a few feet worth of fresh baked pan sencillo layered with honey and peanut butter (leftover from the Estelí binge), and four to five bananas sliced lengthwise.

And I enjoyed the fuck outta the tiny TV I splurged for, those $7.50/night nights. I was mezmerized by all sorts of terrible movies and softcore porn on Cinemax later at night. And I got to watch Troll II, one of the best worst B-horror-movies of all-time. And, get this, not just once. As soon as it ended on one channel, it started on another. Got my fill of Goblins, I did. Went to an organic coffee farm, Selva Negra, further up the mountains too, but that was rather uneventful. The brakeless, breakneck, hitchhiked truckbed mountain descent was exhilerating however. Matagalpa was also noteworthy for the mobile hot dog carts in the park, similar to those ringing parks across Nicaragua, plastered with painted icons who, previously, had managed to hide their hot dog addictions from the public. Spider Man swinging through, snaring a hot dog in his web. There's Winnie the Pooh hoisting a giant hot dog over his head, like some sort of trophy. Winnie's pork friend, Piglet, is noticably absent...or maybe not so absent.

After admiring the hot dog carts, especially the ones decorated by the inexplicable Nike checks, for a few days, I decided to take the watch-me-do-nothing show on the road. Next stop, Jinotega. A beautifully set valley city encircled by peaking mountains, significantly smaller than Estelí or Matagalpa, its Nicas exhibiting that same natural northern beauty. For people that must have something to do, there is a steep ascent to a peaktop cross posted hundreds of meters over the town, above the cemetary, certainly an essential mirador as the skies streak orange and pink and cloudy wisps slide from sight. (A 50/50 combination of sprinting and panting the upward struggle is recommended for those who wish to enhance the reward of Hotel Mendoza's Baho.)

¿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.)