Bondo Planes, Bottlecap Boats: Getting There/ An Ode to Norm

“Dude, that’s bondo. That’s totally bondo.”

Norman, Dr. Kathy’s 19 year old nephew, and I are standing inside the boarding area for Costanena contemplating the plane that will be taking us to Big Corn Island. It is boxy and smallish, patched and riveted together with different sorts of metals and sporting what looks suspiciously like a large patch of Bondo holding the tail on. To say it looks old would be an understatement. It looks like something Snoopy’s World War Flying Ace would be flying. I really wish I had a leather cap and goggles.

Or that I was sitting on a goddamn dog house with a talking bird pretending to be about to fly this thing and not actually about to get on it.

In describing the plane to Andrea, the other vet tech, Claudio said something to the effect of “they are old planes, old Russian planes, like sixty years old, that Russia didn’t want any more so they gave them to Nicaragua. Because Nicaragua takes everything”.

My trepidation is over-ridden by the fact that I am so glad – so fucking glad – to have made it to the boarding area. Last year I made it to the airport; I even made it onto the scale and had a boarding pass in my hand. However before I could board a huelga – a strike – on Big Corn Island shut down the airport there as the fisherman started burning tires on the runway. Instead of going on this trip last year I spent three days sitting in the Managua airport, babysitting seventy five pounds of medical supplies the team was waiting for and watching flight after flight get cancelled.

This year was another near miss as Costena very nearly blocked us from our flight – all nine of us – for nonsensical Nicaraguan bureaucratic bullshit. How I understand it is thus: Donna had bought our Managua/Corn Island flights online and we had online tickets, printouts from the website.

No bueno.

Costena flies to a bunch of different places in Nicaragua, all of whom are selling tickets, none of whom seem to have any connection whatsoever to the other offices. The website is connected to no other entity. Thus the only way to really get on a plane, completely regardless of what the website says, is to go buy a ticket – a handwritten one – at the airport.

No handwritten tickets, no board. In theory we could walk our printouts over to the Costena office, two doors down, and exchange them for handwritten tickets but the office opened at 7. Our flight left at 6 AM. And the ticket counter people were just not having it. After endless discussions it was decided that seven of our nine people would be allowed to board, thank God for Tom’s endless patience and Claudio’s ability to deal with this crap. The two left behind would be sent on the later flight with Donna and Lilly and all our supplies that had randomly been denied due to weight. The first two draft picks for staying behind were me and Dave, the large animal vet from the States. I volunteered to be a good sport. And I have a relationship with the Costena airport.

At the last minute though, weight and the possibility of future bureaucratic fuckups saved my ass: Claudio, the Nicaraguan tech with his native Spanish and uncanny ability to unravel these situations, would be staying with Dave. At the last minute I am handed a boarding pass and pushed through security.

As the Bondo-plane lurches, gathers steam and speeds up Tom turns around and tells me 'hey Finn, you might actually make it this time'. Don’t curse me, I tell him. I’ll believe it when we get there.

The plane flies low over the country, low enough that we never really lose sight of houses and cars beneath us. We fly east, over the interior of the country. After a bit you see no roads, no real towns, just the tiny dots of cattle in fields and the faint lines of dirt roads. A lot of Nicaragua, interior Nicaragua, is agricultural and untamed bush. The fields are laid out in meticulous grids, like crop circles with their precise irrigation lines cutting through. I take picture after picture. Oh, Dr. Suess said, the places you’ll go.

The plane touches down first in Bluefields, on the Atlantic coast, for a moment. From above it looks like a picturesque fishing village, a postcard. From what I’ve read it’s a frontier town, buried under crushing poverty, inhabited mostly by English speaking Creole and Miskito and forgotten by the government and aid agencies.

After ten minutes we take off again and head out over the ocean. Twenty minutes later we drop into Big Corn. The perfunctory swine flu screening in the offloading area and five minutes later we are piling the gear we managed to get on the plane out the door, looking for a cab, two cabs, and headed for the ferry dock.


I will not sugarcoat: what I see of Big Corn looks like a shithole. I know there are pretty parts of the island – I’ve seen pictures. But what I see in the four kilometer drive between the airport and the ferry dock can only be described as a godforsaken pisshole. Ramshackle buildings and barely paved roads and litter everywhere. Scabby stray dogs look at us balefully as we drive by, as if wondering why we’re passing them by. Despite having two cabs our driver shoved all our baggage into the trunk of his hatchback and left it open. Every time we hit a pot-hole, which is often, the trunk swings down with a whump and the whole lot of it threatens to dump onto the ground. The ferry dock, such as it is, is not a dock as much as a single deck out onto the ocean with two or three large rusting fishing boats and what appears to be an ancient twenty person uncovered motorboat sitting dangerously low in the water.

Meet the panga, the boat to Little Corn Island.
The elderly, decrepit fishing boats look like the goddamn Love Boat next to it. I look covetously at the cabins on them. The panga looks more and more like an upside down bottle cap with an engine on it. Jesus Christ. Have I mentioned I can’t swim? And I’m packing a laptop? Are you shitting me?

Norman comes over and looks off the dock at one of the fishing boats. “Oh, that isn’t so bad”. I point at the panga. That’s ours. He looks at it with an expression of disbelief.

“Oh shit.”

We have an hour to kill in Big Corn. Tom, Andrea and Meg wander off to get food. I try to find a Coca Cola Light. Terry and Norman wait with the bags and the others go to explore. I look around a little bit. It’s dirty and kind of dusty, with only one nicer-ish restaurant by the docks. The rest is shacks housing pulperias and the odd house and home.

Almost no one takes cards and by the time we figure out how to get to the only cash machine on the island it’s time to board. There’s no cash machine on Little Corn. Cash-wise, I’m fucked. Thank god Casa Iguana on Little Corn comped our casitas.

Boarding the boat means making a jump down from the piling into the bottle cap. This requires a bit of timing as the boat moves towards and away the deck with the ebb and flow of the waves. I don’t feel good about this.


Sit towards the back, an overly talky ex-pat from Costa Rica tells us, otherwise it gets rough. The back is about ten feet from the front so I’m unsure of how big a difference this is really going to make but the two guys herding us into the boat are loading the back rows first anyway. I get squeezed between Terry and Tom, clutching my laptop in its supposedly waterproof case and hoping for the best.

If you read Moon Handbooks guide to Nicaragua they make some comment about the panga drivers liking ‘speed records and big air’ or something to that effect. What does that mean? It means the minute we get the ropes off the boat takes off like a bat out of hell, going so fast the front is actually higher than the back by a good seven or eight feet. You can’t see over the top of it. We are literally skimming over the waves, almost surfing them.

Scary shit.

As the boat gets into deeper water we start to bounce off the waves – the front goes higher and then we are slammed around as it dumps into the trough. Bam, bam, bam, up and down. Water is pelting us from the sides. Every now and then we go into a wave so big the engine goes silent as it’s lifted out of the water – the whole thing essentially going airborne. Those quiet moments are followed a second later by epic slams as the panga falls back into the trough of the waves.

Holy fuckballs. There’s no way this piece of shit is going to make the thirty kilometers of open ocean across to Little Corn.

I’m jesus-mary-and-josephing. Kathy looks like she’s going to puke. Tom is completely Zen about this – he leans over and again mentions that he thinks I might actually make it to Little Corn this year. The more the little boat slams around the more I doubt this.

At some point in time Terry and I get so freaked out that we get punchy, joking around and laughing so hard we’re both crying. I am so going to volunteer building stucco houses next year, I tell her as the boat slams down again, soaking us. Fuck this shit. Nice little stucco houses. Some place dry.

Against all odds the boat makes it to Little Corn and then it’s a jump up onto the dock. Somehow I manage this, clutching my laptop in it’s now moist bag, my sunglasses coated with salt. Once safe and confronted with dry land all I can think of is how I really want to do that again. It’s like the best roller coaster you’ve ever been on in your life, made even more exciting by knowing that, unlike real roller coasters, there’s a genuine chance you might actually die.

But Tom was right, I made it this time. Despite a bunch of near misses and some seriously dubious transport, my feet finally hit Little Corn Island

Photo notes and then some other notes:

Photos 1) Dr. Kathy T & Norm walk out to the plane 2) Dr. Tom patiently waits by our stuff while the Costena folks check everyone else in and decide what to do about us. There are no photos of me waiting patiently because I was either outside smoking, pacing, or surreptiously trying to take pictures of people wearing surgical masks. 3) Agricultural areas east of Managua as seen from the plane. 4) Dropping into Bluefields. 5) The only shot of the panga I have which came out really screwed up, light wise. It's the only one that came out like that leading me to believe it's FUCKING POSSESSED. 6) on the panga with about eighteen other people, looking wistfully at fishing boats docked nearby. Grey hair is Dr. Terry, guy in glasses is unnamed guy from East Germany who kept popping up all over Little Corn island and was perfectly nice except for he started every sentence by saying "RIGHT, RIGHT.." in the loudest possible voice which was highly disconcerting. 7) The promised land: Dock at Little Corn with fishing boat coming in. 8) Norm chills with a recovering Mama dog in the second clinic room on Little Corn. (below)

A note on chronology: things are going to get kind of out of whack here as I have some Granada stuff I didn't get a chance to post before we left. So there'll the odd Granada interlude in the midst of Corn Island stuff. I just wanted to at least start putting Corn Island stuff up. Also: my computer is overheating badly, dying after about twenty minutes so posting is a lot more slow going than I had hoped. Add into the mix constant and persistant power outs - we were mostly out yesterday - and things are going to be coming up slower than expected. That's also why I'm not being great about answering my emails, I can only real work on my laptop in twenty minute spurts.

A note on Norm: I could do a whole blog entry just about Norm. He had no vet tech experience, had never left the country before and was a 19 year old chef from Detroit. His aunt, Dr. Kathy T, invited him on this trip. He rapidly became one of my favorite people in the world - if I could adopt him as a little brother I would. Norm is universal. No matter where he went everyone loved him and he fit in like a native, despite not speaking a word of Spanish. He cooked with the chefs at the resort. He played baseball and basketball with the islanders. He danced at Cafe Nuit. He chatted up everyone. At one point during clinic I looked outside and saw him holding up a little kid by the ankles and screaming "give me your lunch money, give me your lunch money" while the kid squealed with delight. Honestly. He spent hours playing with the island kids. He was a great ambassador for this project in terms of integrating with all the concerned groups and amusing the hell out of everyone.

All hail Norm.

An Ignomious Beginning:A Non-Dog Related Prelude With Irrelevant Photographs.

(Just a quick note: there is no clinic stuff in this entry. Today has been sort of an orientation day - I haven’t done anything clinic-y aside from showing up at Donna’s house to find no one home)


Don’t Worry Kids, There’s Enough Houston For Everyone.


No matter how early I check in I get the shit seat. I have shit seat karma. I don’t know what the hell I did in a past life to deserve this but I am now wedged precariously between two very large women, one in the aisle and one next to the window.

Two things you should now about me:

1) I am very leggy. Not in a sexy way, in a “I don’t think that woman has a torso” 34 inch inseam sort of way. Mutant giraffe leg girl.
2) I am claustrophobic. No, I’m not going to urinate on myself or freak out and be led off the plane in cuffs. It just stresses me out.

Being crammed into an aisle seat, the best possible option, stresses me out. Being crammed in the middle seat between two large women, a mother/daughter duo with thick Texas accents, on very little sleep and with dubious plans on where I’ll be staying tonight, sends my stress o’ meter through the roof. I offer to switch with one of them so they can sit next to each other but the mother refuses. “She likes the window” she twangs cheerfully, “and I like the aisle, so we do this. Don’t worry, we’ll just talk over you!”.

Twenty minutes into the two hour flight from Denver to Houston I want the both of them dead. An hour in, while I’m trying to sleep with my iPod on and my hood pulled over my eyes one of them taps me on the shoulder. “Your cookie….are you going to eat it?” She twangs sweetly and points to my food tray. I just hand it to her. Honestly? Really? You’re asking strangers for food? Have at it.

I’ve never been so glad to see Houston in my life. When the plane drops through the clouds and I can see little houses and cars, it’s the fucking promised land. Forget Nicaragua. Houston, and it’s promised escape from being the meat in a Large Twanging Women sandwich, is Mecca, Utopia, my own personal holy land.

Unfortunately, however, there is more Houston than is good for anyone. Usually once you start seeing signs of life, of little cars and freeways, and people, the runway is in your very near future. Here not so much. We fly over suburbs and more suburbs. Water. Some more houses. A bevy of industrial parks. Either the pilot is lost or Houston is not a city but rather an animate, living thing. An amoeba of a city, stretching amorphously in every direction, spreading itself across the landscape, growing exponentially with every minute.

Or, you know, my perspective could have been skewed. But I lived six lifetimes in that final thirty minutes. Six cramped, annoyed lifetimes of strange thighs pressed up against mine.

It’s a long road home.

Pig Fever

It pops up for the first time in the Houston airport: signs posted on glass doors, a picture of a woman coughing with a dire warning about swine flu and a list of vague symptoms: fatigue, fever, cough, sore throat, having a pulse and breathing, feeling a little peakish, etc etc etc. If you have any of these symptoms, the sign warns, stay in your hotel room and call a doctor. Do not go out in public.

It occurs to me that Houston might be chock full of hotels packed with people with the sniffles, all of whom are sure they’re going to die very soon. Must be a big boon to the Marriot and doctors who are willing to make house calls to hotels.

While talking on the phone to a friend two people walk by me in surgical masks. A second later Mickey Mouse walks by. I put the same amount of importance on both of these things. The world is an odd place. People do strange things. People like to have things to be scared of and the media likes to create them. People also like it when people in enormous mouse costumes wave at them. Go figure.

By the time the plane drops into Managua it’s dark out. I don’t have the opportunity to swoon over the sight of the metal roofs and traffic circles. I could be landing anywhere. The first sign something might be amiss is a strange form we’ve been handed with our customs declarations on the plane. In broken English it asks if we have any symptoms - the same vague list as the flyers in Houston. I’ve been seated next to a sweet Danish man and a woman who’s there as a medical volunteer. None of us are stupid, we check ‘no’ next to every single one. The we confer snidely about hysteria and how much the media loves a good pandemic. Swine flu was so three weeks ago. *

The three of us are still making swine flu jokes when we disembark to find every single person on the jet way wearing a surgical mask.

You can’t get anyone in this country to wear a seatbelt but you can get them to wear surgical masks? What? Since when did Nicaragua start giving a shit?

Through the rabbit hole, Alice, we’re going through the rabbit hole.

Instead of just walking to customs, like I’ve done a billion times, we are instead herded into a long, nonsensical line in the hallway to customs. When the line rounds the corner I see a lot of men in white lab coats and surgical masks and a thermo-imaging camera with a big screen behind it. Each person has to stand on a rug in front of the camera and a bright red silhouette of yourself with your temperature in Celsius, flashes on the screen. It’s like a cross between Ghost Hunters and getting a new license at the DMV.

I notice big fluctuations in people’s body temperatures but the men in lab coats - at least one of whom looks to be about fourteen years old - just wave everybody through. They’re huddled together chatting amongst themselves. The youngest one takes off his surgical mask and plays with it, swinging it on a finger.

When we get finally get to customs there are more long lines, more surgical masks, including some military men packing big weapons. If you sneeze do they shoot you? Everyone is dead shocked. Managua is the capital of the wave-through customs people. Now there are at least a hundred people standing in lines and the customs people, instead of taking your five dollars and glancing at your forms, is interviewing every single person.

The Dane times it on his watch - every person is interviewed for an average of three minutes. There are at least thirty people in front of us. By the time I get through this I’ll just turn around and get back on a plane to Denver. Sometimes a couple goes up at the same time, filling us with hope: this will economize time! The Dane clocks them - couples come in at seven minutes. In short, we’re fucked and hoping everyone is single.

Sometimes the world isn’t fair. Today it isn’t fair to my new insta-travel friends. As we’re commiserating in line a woman appears behind the masked customs officers desks brandishing a sign that says “Finnegan Dowling”. My shuttle driver. I step out of line and from the other side of the barricade get her attention, point at the line and make that helpless “What can you do?” shrug. She talks to one of the customs guys and I’m pulled out of line and waved over to a closed line. One of the customs guys comes over, looks at my paperwork, stamps my passport and waves me through. I wave goodbye to my plane friends, still marooned in the never-ending line, who wave back with murder in their eyes. By the Danish man’s calculations they have about two hours in line ahead of them.

In twenty minutes I’m out, in the shuttle and on the way to Granada at last. We drive by the Pharaoh casino, La Colonia supermarket, the mall where Linda and Alan and I went. The past few months have been crazy. There was a Bad Relationship, a relationship so riddled with drama and angst it more resembled two people trying to keep a sick goldfish alive than anything romantic. I had my semi-annual battery of medical testing, more stressful than I let on but everything came out clean. A health crisis with my much beloved, completely satanic corgi mix Mercy. I haven’t had time to get excited about coming back. It seems the days just flew by until yesterday morning when I woke up with a packed camping pack and a stern note to myself to buy batteries on the way to the airport.

Driving through Managua, finding myself on the Carraterra, passing the familiar love hotels** and roadside restaurants, none of the bad goes away. It just gets easier. Distance equals perspective. There’s something somewhere between relief and excitement in the back of my throat.


We stop at an On the Run for water - I’m parched, dying***. The woman behind the counter is wearing a surgical mask but I’m getting to the point that I don’t even notice them anymore. There’s a group of twenty somethings buying cans of Tona and plantain chips, talking amongst themselves. When I got home last time it took me a while to get used to the background hum of strangers speaking English again. Killing time in Houston I told a friend of mine I was afraid I was going to have culture shock. The past eleven months is the longest stretch of time I’ve been away from Nicaragua in three years. You won’t, he said. And I don’t. I have Background Chatter Shock.

Lilly doesn’t have a room this time so I’m at the mercy of a new hostel, one I picked at random at the last minute because it advertised free internet. Lie. I should have remembered that most hostels here advertise free internet and don’t have it. But it’s on the Calzada, close to Donna, three blocks from my old house, close to my neighborhood. The women shows me the room. It’s the size of a closet and a bit cobwebby but clean and with it’s own bathroom. Ten dollars a night. Done. I check the bed for scorpions. It’s never happened to me in Granada but after my last night in San Juan Del Sur with the nest in the window, I’ve sprouted a new phobia with accompanying OCD.

Paying for the room, requesting it, my Spanish feels gummy, thick, coming out of my mouth. Speaking it at work hasn’t helped me retain the basic things you need to get by in daily life. My accent blows, my grammar is laughable but I get through. I am thoroughly humbled but I have a room. I fall into bed and pass out.

The last text I sent from Houston airport was to Jon, my old roommate, adopted brother and close confidante from the house on Calle Santa Lucia. He’s in California with his family, will be back in Nicaragua next month. We tried to hook it up to cross paths but with my work schedule and his family stuff it wasn’t doable. I want to be going back to our old house, I text. I want you and Alan and Linda there. I turned my phone off before he had time to reply. This morning is bittersweet. It’s like I’ve gone back in time but everything is different, rearranged. Later today I’ll walk up to Calle Santa Lucia, see Lilly, find Donna, go by the clinic, get ready for the trip to Corn Islands on Monday. Now I just orient. I go to the Euro Café, where I’ve had a million Diet Cokes and written a billion blog entries. The guy who owns it recognizes me. You’re back, he says.

Yup.


I’m back.

Bring on the scabby dogs.

* Lest you all think I’m somehow superior or above all this, please see blog entry from last year: In Which A Quick Glance At The Tuberculosis Poster Convinces Finn That She Has Tuberculosis, Thus Filling Her With Mortal Fear And Dread.

** Love Hotel, also known as Auto Hotels: Okay, so most people in Nicaragua live with their extended families, three or four generations in a house. As you can imagine, this does not allow for, errrrr….intimacy. Hence the ubiquitous Love Hotel. These are roadside hotels with completely walled in parking lots (so no one can see your car) where you can discreetly rent rooms by the hour. It’s not as creepy a concept as it would be in the US. I’ve never been in one but I did meet two young, strapping Australian guys on a surf tour who did not know what a love hotel was, checked into one and were mortified when they were handed a stack of clean towels and condoms. Apparently nineteen year old Australian surfers do not appreciate their sexuality being called in to question. Me, I would have thought it kind of a tip off that they were asked how many hours they wanted, but what do I know.

***On The Run is the exact same thing in Nicaragua as it is in Colorado: an ultra modern, brightly lit convenience store with well laid out shelves and clean bathrooms. It’s like an island of Non-Nicaragua in Nicaragua. That said, last time I was here I used to sneak up to the one in Granada all the time to have a little gringa-fest of air conditioning and fountain soda.


(Photo notes: I did absolutely nothing today that could be illustrated with a relevant photo and I was afraid to take pictures of the mask-wearing workers yesterday, though I wanted to. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me into the country if they thought I was mocking their pandemic. Or the military guy would shoot me. But an entry without pictures would kinda suck. Everyone likes pictures, even if I take horrible ones. First shot, house near Parque Central. Second, cathedral near Donna's house. Third, funeral carriage near Parque Xalteva, final, street dog outside of Euro Cafe)



*****Some big-time kudos: to Val Arie, Carol and Jack, the woman from Malaysia who’s elephant card occupies a place of honor on my dresser, to everyone: thank you for sending me back. I am enormously grateful I cannot even begin to tell you. To my sista-from-another-motha, the ever diabolical Sheena, queen of three woofs.blogspot.com, who really should be here with me . To Renee, for driving my ass to the airport. To Roseman, for babysitting my beasts while I’m running off again. To Karen, Kristen and Marlon for babysitting my sanity in Denver in the run up to me coming back. To my father and my sister for helping me out. To my bosses for not canning my ass for taking off for two weeks. And of course to Donna and Dr. Tom to asking me to come back for this. *********