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.