Monkeys and Masaya

Monday May 11, 2009

A monkey’s adorableness is universally unquestioned – hemorrhagic viruses aside – but a chirping, playful, miniature monkey crawling all over your head and eating mango slices, well that’s just too much for anyone to handle. La Hotel Mariposa (www.mariposaspanishschool.com) the oasis jungle eco-hotel/Spanish school/animal sanctuary that I visit every Nica trip (and have written about here before), rescued four white-faced monkeys from the illicit animal trade and made them a home in their menagerie. I spent a (healthy) portion of my weekend basking in their awesomeness. An example: the tiniest of the four monkeys has escaped from the enclosure and uses his freedom to taunt the dogs, chase the chickens, and play through the fence with the remaining enclosed monkeys. He is free, but has no interest in leaving the vicinity and testing his soft, domestic ass in the wild mountain jungle, but he also refuses to return to the enclosure. Is there a “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” analogy in there?


Mariposa is in La Concha, the sort of town where kids play baseball on Sunday on narrow streets between pastel houses, and if the residents feel like it, they’ll gather up the fallen wild mangoes and avocados and cart them off to market. Yesterday morning, I rode a horse through La Concha, past the outskirts where the homes can only loosely be called homes, and higher, running the horse through volcanic soil, above the green vegetation line to drier, isolated elevation and an incredible view of fuming Volcán Masaya. Puffing Masaya is ominously beautiful, definitely active, and perilously close to La Concha. My young guides live in the town and care for the horses. Dangerous, no, I ask. Sure, they say, and shrug.

It’s interesting that this worry is trumped by swine flu. A few days ago a man died from swine flu in Costa Rica, triggering a major front-page headline on Nicaragua’s largest daily newspaper, La Prensa. Most Nicaraguans I have talked to about my trip ask probing, serious questions about the looming scourge. Is there a treatment? How can I prevent it? When is it coming to Nicaragua? There is real awareness and a fear that there’s more they haven’t been told. The government has urged only the most gravely ill to seek medical attention, partly to diminish panic, but also to fight the overreaction to the common sniffle. Clinicians here note how mild health disturbances induce swift and immediate actions, over-running clinics with minor problems, while others with more debilitating, long-term, serious conditions avoid treatment entirely. It’s over-valuing the acute, but accepting the chronic. Fight the daily ailment, real or otherwise, but trudge stoically onward with the lot you’ve been given, be it malformation, cancer, or volcano birthplace.

La Gripa Porcina

Nicaragua now has swine flu testing capabilities!
Observations that could make one think this has been a long time coming include: masked airport personnel, symptom checklists for all arrivals, and required hand sanitizing for all Pizza Hut customers. I’ve heard the head of virology here at the Ministry of Health has been under a bit of political pressure, and that blaming the CDC, while accurate, has not been acceptable. The test is straightforward, and one that most of the technicians here perform regularly, but because of the newness and the hype, they wanted to be sure, to learn it again, just in case, and have me demonstrate it.

New digs:
My usual Nica house mom is renting out her tiny spare room to a rather large family (recession?), so I’ve had to live elsewhere this trip. Enter Nicarao: a loquacious, smiley, ambitious, 40-something businessman who’s lived a good chunk of his life in the states (Miami, mostly), and is related to the girlfriend of my UCSF colleague. Nicarao owns a partially completed hotel on a hillside in Managua near Somoza’s old country club, and although the upper story is still a transparent framework, he’s renting me an elaborately-tiled, new-house-smell, downstairs room for 30 bucks a night. This is totally worth it for the A/C alone, a beautiful offset to the consistent, and humid, 95 degrees. Eventually, he tells me, his towering hillside abode will host a restaurant, nightclub, guest rooms, and a pool. He has plans to buy the block (recession?). These plans are worth protecting, so a night watchman is paid to watch television with stray dogs from the skeleton of a top floor.

Fumigation!

It’s 4:30pm on a Friday and they’ve started fumigating the lab. A man with a mask, a work suit and what looks like a deafening leaf blower is blasting nauseating clouds throughout the hallways.
Me: (cringing) What the hell are they doing?
Lab technician: Fumigating.
Me: What?! For what?
LT: Mosquitoes.
Me: What?! But we’re still here.
LT: Yeah. So?

Ok, I’m likely signing off for a few days. Heading south, maybe into Costa Rica. Back home on Thursday with lots of samples. I think I’m feeling dizzy. More soon…

Hamburgers for breakfast

My housemother, Mary, is very nice and motherly. She cooks me breakfast and dinner, cleans my room, washes my clothes, and worries if I come home too late. She kinda nags me in Spanish, loves to proclaim the virtues of the Sandinista party, and never stops asking me if I’m hungry or thirsty. Yesterday morning she panicked when I accidentally crashed the small mirror in my room. It was a pretty small mirror so I thought it’d be funny to head to the local market and buy a very large full-length mirror and hand it to her with my apologies. She laughed. All these niceties aside, something has been lost on her regarding meal selections. And by this I mean that she has little concept of what constitutes appropriate breakfast food and what food is more typically eaten for dinner. The other day I awoke and headed to the kitchen at 7am and was greeted by a very large cheeseburger, with mayo and mustard. Ok, fine. It was good. Then for dinner that night I got an omelet with gallo pinto. Ok. So, I asked some people in the lab if this is some cultural difference, some Nicaragua thing, but apparently not. They laughed and laughed at the thought of me eating a big burger for breakfast like some fat American. It happened again a few days later, and this morning I got a pair of ham and cheese sandwiches.

Giant spiders, the muddiest hike ever, and Nicaraguan Axe body spray ads - Ometepe Island Part 2

The island is tarantula country after all and at night they like to roam walls and scare people who aren’t used to living in tarantula country. An Arizonian staying at the farm, being accustomed to such beasts found one and picked it up and waved it at a group of girls who screamed and scampered. He assured that, “they’re hairy and loners and chill, like cats – it’s like petting a cat.” Anyway, the gross prize goes to a different spider. This guy was tarantula-sized, non-hairy, and had clearly distinguishable fangs from several feet away. He was in my shower in Managua as I was showering. He wins.

I made friendly with three Spaniards and early Sunday morning joined their guided tour up the volcano, a 5km straight shot up, no switchbacks, 8-hours roundtrip. The arid lowlands became the lush midlands, which became the dense, wet, cloudy highlands, Jurassic Park style. The trail went from rocky to muddy to very muddy to flowing water. The wet season turns the path into a full-on river and the volcano becomes non-hikeable, but in the dry season it’s just comically slippery. The Spaniards and I bet beers over who would fall first and I ended with a splattered backside and a round on me, the guide rolling. The ascent wasn’t without its rewards, of course. Maderas hasn’t blown in 800-years or so and the now former crater is a lush and eerie cloud-covered lagoon. Howler monkeys howled at us during the descent and at the bottom the normally shitty Tona beer wasn’t half bad. I sat and stared at my mud-caked legs.

The return to Managua took all day. Inhale – a three-hour wait for bus, then transfer to another bus to the port, about 2 hours; a 90-minute boat ride, a cab to Rivas, a bicycle taxi to the bus terminal, a two-hour bus to a Managua market, and a taxi to the door – exhale. All day, for about 70 miles. But with no maps, guides, traveling companions, or English speakers, the challenge is uplifting, and as my Spanish improves the more I love it here.

I noticed Axe body spray ads on giant billboards upon reentering Managua. The city has it’s share of ads, like any city, but most of the giant billboards display Daniel Ortega attached to some uplifting bullshit like “Up with the world’s poor” or something. Often one of the world’s poor is ironically camped out underneath. (Ortega’s approval rating is hovering at the George Dubya level of about 30%.) Ads for Huggies and Scott paper towels are also everywhere, usually painted on the sides of houses. The Axe ads, however, have a blond, full-lipped American, staring lustfully, her lips dripping with melting chocolate. “Irresistible,” it says, “like chocolate.” And by chocolate they mean the wave of American materialism.

Nicaraguan phantasmas - Ometepe Island Part 1

This weekend’s grand adventure took me to Ometepe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ometepe), which screams awesomeness from the most cursory glance at a Nica travel guide. Rising from the huge freshwater sea of Lake Nicaragua (that at one point was being explored as a possible canal site to rival Panama's) are Concepcion and Maderas, twin volcanoes that form the hourglass Ometepe Island. On Friday night I headed south to Rivas so I could catch a boat in nearby San Jorge early on Saturday. I figured I’d be slumming it once I got to the island, so I treated myself that night to Rivas’s finest, a $45/night hotel with A/C and a hot shower, my second this month. I got some long sleep and headed to the docks in San Jorge where, for the first time in Nica, I saw a slightly large group of western travelers and backpackers. I chatted with a pair of older Bay Area ER doctors on the 1.5-hour boat trip about my project. They’re staying in Granada for three weeks (free, courtesy of Kaiser) to learn Spanish (increasingly important in Bay Area hospitals) and were interested to learn what this crazy PCR they always hear about is. (“Is it like an MRI?”) They were very nice though, and let me share their shuttle around the island.

I took it as far as they would take me and walked the remaining two kilometers to the base of Volcan Maderas to Finca Magdalena, an organic coffee farm. (And yes, I’m bringing back coffee for all the people I love. And rum, of course.) Along the road to the farm, I passed a local baseball game with a volcano as a backdrop. The players all wore various non-matching American jerseys and the catcher’s lone pad was a dusty old shinguard. Despite the ragtag unis, they called signs and played with a very serious air and at a semi-professional level. The pitcher probably topped 85 or 90mph. A bus driver had stalled his jalopy bus nearby to catch the end of the inning while his passengers waited.

Finca Magdalena is large coffee farm at the base of Volcan Maderas collectively owned by twenty island families. They offer the latest in island habitation, from a old barn converted to dormitory at $2/night, or, for the thrifty, $1/night hammocks. My all-inclusive bill for two nights, including several meals, many beers, several liters of water, a hired volcano guide, a bottle of rum, and two-pounds of coffee beans came to about $50. What’s also cool is that several thousand years ago men left stories chiseled in the large rocks all over the island, including rocks around the farm. Around midnight three young Americans and I flash-lighted our way into the tarantula woods and shined our sights on the very old petroglyphs, way cooler under a clear and dark starlit sky. Cooler in the way the that cemeteries improve at night. The local word for ghost is phantasma, one of the many that I think just sounds better in Spanish (mariposa, or butterfly, being another.)

Ok, science is calling. More on Ometepe tomorrow, including giant spiders, the muddiest hike ever, and Nicaraguan Axe body spray ads.

Rogue cabbies from planet anarchy

Occasionally the Ministry of Health driver will pick me up, but I mostly commute to the lab by taxi. Each way usually only costs a little more than a San Francisco bus ticket (negotiated beforehand, of course) and the ride is anywhere between 15 and 40 minutes, depending on traffic and detours and general Managua mayhem. It’s also affected by how many times the driver stops for $1.50 gas refills. Cabbies are frantic like anywhere, but added obstacles include the million motorcycles, street vendors, dusty soccer games, donkey carts, maniacal smoking buses, and other jittery cabs, which probably take up a 40 % cut of the vehicle pie chart. My travel guide aptly describes cab drivers as “rogue messengers from planet anarchy.” To aid in their maneuvering, most cabs have flashing lights, neon license plates, and siren horns that are all apparently legal. An effective driver will spend more time on the horn than off. Today, while stopped at a traffic light, the guy quickly hopped out, bought some plastic bags of water from a peddler, quickly dumped them into the radiator, gave it a healthy kick, and jumped back in before the light changed. Sometimes they like to talk. A young driver I had in León named Oscar was telling me how he recently graduated from the university – an economics major – and was just scraping by while looking for work. Professionals have a hard time finding jobs in Nicaragua, he said.

Kayaking like Kurtz and the Cuban Bob Dylan - Las Peñitas

This weekend, I fully embraced the whole exploring by myself thing and took a variety of buses for four hours up to the Pacific coast and the beach of Las Peñitas. The most colorful part was the final 20 km leg from the beautiful colonial city of León, out to the coast in an ancient yellow school bus. (León was moved 20 km inland in the 18th century to protect itself from pirates.) Again, the bus had lots of people, lots of chickens, and the occasional gringo backpacker. Aside: why don’t dreadlocked Isrealis and lip-pierced German drifters feel more obligated to dress and act like locals? Would you go live with the Maasai wearing jean shorts? Then again, would you go anywhere wearing jean shorts? I have digressed from my digression.

Las Peñitas is a lonely one dirt road town with several little hotels, sheet-metal shacks, and beachside retreats for the León elite. My beachfront hotel gave me their seaside honeymoon suite for $25 and I loaded up on rum smoothies and watched the waves crash into the rocks. It was pretty much perfect. Notably, I went the entire day without uttering a word of English, which made me feel kind of cool. (I also probably only spoke 300 words the entire day.)

On Sunday morning I felt I could still go further, so I walked to the end of the town and asked about an organized boat tour of Isla Juan Venado, a long and very thin island that hugs the coast and is renowned for it’s turtle nests and mangroves. They wouldn’t take just one person on a tour, so they rented me a kayak, showed me a map of the thin waterway between the island and the mainland, and patted me on my way. With my ziplocked camera, water bottle, and paddle, I trudged deeper into the groves, scaring up all sorts of exotic parrots and less exotic herons. I would occasionally park in the muddy banks to get out and search for baby turtles, but apparently it’s not turtle season now. As I went further, the waterway kept narrowing and deepening and after a few miles, arms burning, legs scorching, I felt hypnotically alone and content. Thoreau would be proud, though he’d probably prefer I carved the kayak myself. From where I was on the water, it would probably take about five hours to get back to Managua, and I had Silvio Rodriguez tickets that night, so I slowly paddled back.

Silvio is not famous in America, because he’s Cuban and sings about how awesome Cuba is, but in Central America he is a Dylan-esque god. He hasn’t played in Nica since the 80’s, so it was a pretty big deal. Thousands of people big deal, with giant Cuban flags and poetic banners waving. He sported a beard, glasses, and a baseball cap, and he sat and strummed his guitar and looked like he’d take you fishing someday if you asked. I soaked it all in, and really enjoyed his music. One day I may even learn to fully understand it. The concert also had the obligatory soccer coliseum mass stampede, as the people in the third tier tore down the fence to upgrade to the second tier as security just kind of looked on. Silvio, who sings about revolution, Commandate Ché, and workers’ rights, probably approved. We snuck into the first class area by playing up the innocent “Me no speak Spanish” face. They had chairs and waitresses bringing beer and most of the people were white and a lot of them looked rich. When I got home my housemother was aghast at my sunburned legs.

Low-throughput is for the weak - another boring entry on the lab environment

Let’s talk more on lab culture.
At first I may have been a little discouraged. I saw inefficiency, bureaucratic bullshit, and micromanaging. Lab members hesitate to solve problems on their own or change their routine for fear of reprimand. The hierarchical fear is based somewhat on realities, as their jobs are valuable and delicately insecure and the country is damned poor. If something doesn’t look right in a protocol they’d rather keep going and maybe sheepishly ask the boss some other time. The benefits of this discipline, however, are tremendous thoroughness and reliability, and, unlike academic labs that try to foster a spirit of independent thinking or something like that, the goal here is more communal. Data is multiply stored and checked and double-checked and then checked by the boss. Project notebooks are all shared and specially maintained. Responsibilities are clearly defined. It’s a slowly-trudging, thorough machine, and not the most naturally accepting of a graduate student with his own demands, timelines, schedule, and ideas and who is used to the land of ultra high-throughput. Luckily, I’ve recently dug myself in. I’ve been given my tasks, they are confident I know all their rules, and now I can just go to town. The boss still wants to check my data everyday, though.

On another note, last evening after dark I saw stray cats running around the lab hallways.