Nicaragua - 2009
So I'm sleeping in my bunk at the 'Bearded Monkey', when I feel what seems to be a large paperback book land on my back. I wonder if I am sleeping or dreaming, Rolling over in bed, I find a black mass lying with me. It is dark and my eyes are crusty, but I punch the black mass with a fist. I am not dreaming, it is a giant vampire bat that flops off my bed and into my face, eventually making its way back to the ceiling where it hangs above my bed the rest of the night. I wake up my Dutch neighbors with a few startled 'holy shits!' and resume sleep. A sweaty french guy slays the bloodsucker with a tennis racket the next morning.
I take a day trip out to Masaya by myself. It's a run down town with a market that runs for miles. After drinking muchas Gatorade, I really have to piss, so I squeeze through the cluttered isles of meat, trinkits and humans. A kind old man points me to the 'bano' to the back of his food stall. I go into the back room where a stumble upon two Nicaraguan homies watching a raggaetone music video, featuring a jacked and tan Latino man in a Kobe Bryant jersey, undressing his secretary. I laughed hard and peed a little in my pants.I wandered Masaya a bit more and had a questionable ham sandwich with ketchup and mustard. I added some pepto bismol to be safe. Getting lonely, I took the bus back to Granada to meet some gringos. The local transports are called 'chicken buses', which are old school buses coated with house paint.
The bus ride back was amazing. Remeber the elementary school buses when there was sometimes a little TV mounted in front, but the driver would never turn it on no matter how much the kids begged. This bus did have that TV...on...with a scrambled Latino version of Prison break playing on it.
