Hippie Island, Anatomy of a Bike Ride, and Backflips: 2 Weeks in Nicaragua

There I was, standing on the bow of the ferry, wind threatening to rip off my baby blue El Salvador hat, traveling across the largest lake in Central America. Waves crashed into the boat's hull, bull sharks circling the waters below (Nicaragua being one of the few freshwater lakes hosting ocean critters -- they swim in from the Caribbean through a river). Ahead lay Ometepe Island, formed by two volcanoes pushing up out of the lake. The twin peaks loomed dark blue in the distance, growing ever nearer. The ship pulled over a wave and the captain bellowed the horn.

And then it hit me. Hot willie. I thought.This is just like that first scene in Shutter Island.

To be fair, there were a few differences. The sky was a perfect blue, the island a double volcano landmass in the middle of Central America, and the speakers blasted reggaeton at full crank -- not really the stormy ride to a small island in the Boston Harbor in 1954 with a Scorsese soundtrack.

But then the chubby taxi driver at the port took my bag and said, "Welcome to Ometepe Island," just like the chubby deputy in the movie, and I was convinced. This had to be the Nicaraguan remake.

As a refresher, the plot of Shutter Island is pretty fricken' sweet. Leonardo DiCaprio is a fictional deputy marshal sent to investigate the disappearance of a fictional inmate from a fictional asylum for the criminally insane on fictional Shutter Island. Dodging dangerous patients, he slowly starts to uncover secrets about the island and those running the facility, who hint of miracle procedures, lobotomies, and mind control. (And then there's a big twist.)

So if I wanted to live out my dream of being the second coming of Leo, I'd have to find something to investigate. Luckily, on Ometepe there exists maybe the only subpopulation as deranged, unhygienic, and potentially dangerous as the criminally insane in a 1950's fictional asylum: modern day hippies.

I had been told there was a large population of hippies who had set up their yurts and slacklines on Ometepe. Then and there, climbing into the taxi with the nice chubby taxi driver, I made up my mind. I was gonna get to the bottom of this hippie underworld. I would infiltrate their inner circles. Learn their strange codes. Uncover their secrets. And I had booked a room in what turned out to be their main smoke circle.

"A donde vas?" The taxi driver asked me. Where are you going?

"Amigo," I said, "I'm going to the hotspot, the nexus, the patchouli eye of the unwashed storm. Take me to Hostel Huellas."

Shutter Island inhabitant vs Ometepe Island inhabitant

As it turns out, I wouldn't even survive 24 hours.

The hostel was beautiful, in the hippie way. It sat on the shores of the lake, a sprawling, cultish compound of a place with big overgrown gardens and a horse just kind of hanging out. A view of the volcano, topped by the clouds, peeked through the trees.

I walked up to the reception determined to blend in. I unbuttoned my shirt, I hid my glasses, and I adopted the slow, hazy drawl of those who debate the merits of cannabis strains with names like "Cat Piss" or "Death Scorpion."

“Greetings spirit brother,” I said to the guy behind the desk. “I’m looking for a hammock and a place I can cook some organic free range sustenance for my earth vessel, do you have any room?”

He came around and gave me a hug. Rank. "I'll give you the tour," he said.

I had passed the first test, but I soon realized just how over my head in their bong water I was.

Firstly, all the other guests or volunteers were splayed around like Dali's melting clocks, lounging on every type of furniture and floor space. They had the zombified look, like they were invisibly lassoed to some outer space moon rock and were barely managing to keep from floating away. They were a strange mess of dreadlocks and shaved heads, open shirts and no shirts, baggy pants and, unfortunately, no pants. I saw face tattoos and head tattoos and other tattoos. One gentleman had the entire galaxy emerging from his belly button. Trance music played in the background, the air redolent with the heady odor of jazz cabbage and the great unwashed.

Views from Hostel Huellas

At one point, swinging in a hammock pretending to read, I heard the eerie echo of one person laughing alone. I looked up and there was a dreadlocked girl in a pair of stained overalls, holding a hula hoop and dancing with no music, cackling maniacally.

It's okay, I said to myself. I can handle this.

Later, I went to the kitchen (to cook sustenance for my earth vessel). I drank a glass of water from the tap (“It’s straight from the volcano,” the check-in guy told me, “It will make you feel good.”) As I cooked, there were two guys sitting at the table, one burning matches and holding them to the other’s exposed skin, chanting as he did it. Some kind of medicine.

Act normal, I thought. Act like this is normal.

After dinner I noticed a sickly looking dog, thin enough to see the railway tracks of his ribs. Two of the doobie doctors squatted down next to him, a syringe in one hand and a decanter of what I assumed to be orange juice in the other.

“What happened to the dog?” I asked.

Monkey on island

Thing One straightened up and looked at me. “A monkey,” — he said, pantomiming a monkey (even though we were both speaking English and I know what monkeys look like) — “bit it,” — pantomiming biting.

He turned back to his medically accredited colleague. “More orange juice,” he said. 

I can do this. I can do this.

Finally, that very same night, it all came to a head. I went to the dorm room and found someone else’s stuff on the bed I was told I could use. I went to the guy at reception and let him know, and he told me they must have overbooked. He said there was another bed I could take, and he led me to a little cabin with a loft open to the air on one side.

I slept fitfully. I tossed and turned, thinking about the dog, the hula hoops, Shutter Island. In Shutter Island Leonardo DiCaprio has to unlock the mystery of patient 67 — he’s told there’s 66 total patients, but the incarcerated keep giving him clues about one more. I thought of the overbooked dorm room, one extra person at the hostel. Patient 67. Could it be?

I awoke at 3 am. Someone was climbing up the wall to the cabin. I opened my eyes and saw him, one of the beatniks with his head totally covered in tattoos, glowing in the moonlight. He pulled himself up over the wall and landed on my bed.

Morning scene of the nighttime apparition

"Hello again,” he said.

“Dude." I sat up. "What. The. Fuck.”

He looked confused. “Oh,” he said, kneeling by my feet. “I, uh, I thought someone else was here.” 

“Jesus Christ man.”

“Sorry. So Sorry.”

"Can you leave?"

"Yep. Right. Sorry."

He crawled back out the way he came.

That morning I woke up and buttoned all the buttons on my shirt. Leo starts to go crazy in Shutter Island, having hallucinations, and it’s suggested that it’s from the tap water. I drank the volcano tap water and now I was going crazy.

In the light of the morning, I was sure that the nighttime intruder was a dream, a hallucination. A nightmare. But either way, the gig was up. I couldn’t cut it on hippie island. 

I put my glasses on. Back to the real world.

___

Day Uno: Basketball Romance

This is a jump back in time. 

The day after the seventeen mile race in El Salvador I had a twelve hour bus ride with two border crossings to get to León, Nicaragua, and we got in around midnight and I slept like dookie. Understandably, that first day in León, I felt like, well, dookie.

But the hostel had free coffee, and I drank four cups with my feet dangling into the pool, and so when my new friend Sabrina the DJ asked if I wanted to join the free walking tour, even though my legs said “no gracias,” my mouth said “yurp.”

The León free walking tour was neat. The city has funky energy — it’s the youngest city in Nicaragua, has a huge central plaza, and the buildings are in the colorful, colonial style. It’s a little more run down, though, the buildings faded and crumbling, giving it a more Havana-type feel than some of the done-up colonial cities in Latin America. The information about the political situation was fascinating, too — Nicaragua currently has a socialist government (with revered portraits of Putin allegedly hanging in the state universities), but we were also warned that they don’t take kindly to journalists. Seeing as how this blog is currently ballooning at a whopping 7 subscribers, I think it's best that I avoid sharing any of the information I learned in case I get a knock at the door (here's an article from The New Yorker if you still want to learn something).

Leon looks like this

Instead, I’ll talk about one good day.

After the three hour walking tour my legs were basically begging me to go lie down. “Por favor,” they pleaded. “Señor.” But one thing we saw on the tour was a basketball court just a few blocks off of the main cathedral, surrounded on three sides by big colorful murals depicting the Cold War history of the US and Nicaragua. “C’mon, little twig bugs,” I told them. “You can do it.”

Sarah, a Canadian girl who was also staying at the hostel, said she liked to play, and so me and her and Sabrina the DJ and Imre from the Netherlands went over to the park. Sabrina and Imre went to watch, and me and Sarah teamed up with a local guy to run 3v3s.

One thing was clear from the start: León basketball is more competitive than El Salvador basketball. One older guy in particular was playing pretty physical, sharp elbows aimed high and all that, and he was teamed up with a younger fella who could shoot from deep.

Also, another thing that was clear from the start: Sarah is a hooper. The young fella was obsessed with Steph Curry — going so far as to get all the same tattoos as him (maybe a bit obsesivo). I translated for Sarah as she told the kid that she played basketball at the same Division 1 college as Steph. He went wide-eyed.

And then in the games, she gave the old guy the business. She had him jumping out of his Jordans on pump fakes, getting stuffed at the rim, and generally growing more and more pissed at losing while everyone on the sidelines let him hear it. 

I spent the afternoon trying to get Sarah the ball and watching her embarrass grown men. And if you've never watched a tall Canadian girl embarrass grown men on a Nicaraguan basketball court -- well it'll make your squirrels run. I was feeling things.

A spark?

That night our hostel group watched the sunset from the top of the cathedral and then hit a pool bar where we learned that none of us were any good at pool. From there, not wanting the night to end, we found our way to a karaoke spot.

It's worth noting that there are fairly large cultural differences when it comes to karaoke between Americans and Nicaraguans. For Americans, karaoke is generally measured by the amount of energy you can dump into a song. You get drunk and you sing hard. Most likely, you jump and holler.

For Nicaraguans, however, karaoke is measured by something else: talent (lame). So when we walked in -- the only non-Nicaraguans in the dim, neon establishment -- there were various groups of people sitting at their tables, keeping to themselves, and the microphone got passed from one excellent singer to another. Everyone remained seated, and polite rounds of applause followed every heartfelt song.

"Wanna sing All Star by Smash Mouth with me?" Sarah asked.

I was in love.

It was a moment. We stood in the middle of the bar and demonstrated the best of American karaoke culture, yelling-more-than-singing into the mic, hopping around, trying to get other people to come sing and dance in the center of the floor with us. Nobody budged, but Sarah and I locked eyes a few times over the mic -- and if you've never locked eyes with a tall Canadian girl while singing, "Hey now, you're an all star" in the middle of a dimly lit Nicaraguan karaoke bar, well, it'll make you feel things. The squirrels were doing flips.

As the night progressed we managed to integrate our group of hostel friends with various groups who were sitting around at tables. One guy out with his dad bought us all a bunch of drinks and they talked to us about their time in New Jersey. We sang some slow, sad songs in Spanish with real singers, I told one guy what the karaoke scene was like in the US, and by the end of the night, we managed to cue up a couple of tracks that had everyone -- Nicaraguans and foreigners -- on their feet and yelling (Bad Bunny and Hotline Bling).

Sarah and I kept talking and drinking and singing together and making eye contact, her telling me about life in Canada and saying a very Canadian "Pardon?" whenever the music was too loud. Eventually Yoris from Denmark told me, "Don't be shy, there's a spark!" and, with everyone at the bar now up and singing and dancing together, she asked if I wanted to head back. We slipped away, hand in hand.

It was a good day.

The next day, everyone tired and hungover and sore-throated from yell/singing, we decided to head to the beach. We sweated through the chicken bus ride and found an empty stretch of black sand and waded in, when Imre, not even up to her knees, screamed that something had bitten her. "Something bit me!" she screamed.

We waded out of the water and looked at her foot -- a stingray sting, the width of a needle, trickling blood.

It's probably a story for another time -- we found a local guy with no teeth who confirmed that stingrays are poisonous, a group of locals helped Sarah load Imre (now very faint, about to pass out from the pain) into a bicycle rickshaw and pedal her to the rural nurse down the road, I went into the very unsanitary nurse's room to translate. Then the nurse told me I would be her little helper for the procedure.

"I'm just, um, more of a translator? More comfortable with like, mental work than physical things?" I told her.

"Hold her leg down on the table and hold it hard," she directed, stern. Imre, lying on the dirty bedsheet, let out a whimper. A lizard scuttled up the wall.

"Jeez, what are you going to do, chop it off?"

She said nothing. She lifted a rusty handsaw and placed it on the bed.

Kidding. She needed to inject a painkiller and didn't want Imre to kick her in the teeth, so I grabbed hold, Imre yelled, the nurse blasted a bunch of Novocaine into the stingray hole, and that was kind of that. Imre got bandaged up and we called a taxi back to León.

That night our group whittled down to two, just Sarah and I. We got ice cream and she told me about her trips to Nova Scotia in eastern Canada, the time she went lobstering with her uncle, college in North Carolina. That night she taught me how to play Cribbage, which is most certainly for very old people, but, worn down from a hectic few days and with legs now so tired they couldn't even protest, it was a wholesome way to spend the night. The next morning Sarah was off to meet up with friends in a surf town, and I headed to Grenada to film Sabrina the DJ as she DJ'ed a party in a treehouse in the woods. Sarah and I parted ways, making hazy ideas to meet up again down the road. It was wonderful, it was idiosyncratic, it was fun.

So it goes.

_

Anatomy of a Bike Ride

The morning after my strange intruder dream in the hippie hostel, I tucked my tail and decided to get out of there quick. I still wanted to see the island, but I needed to be able to run away at first glance of a dreadlock. So I rented a beat up old bicycle for $6 a day and decided I'd spend two days bikepacking around the island.

Bikepacking generally means backpacking on a bike. For most people, that includes carrying a tent and cooking equipment and everything you'll live off of, and bikepacks have evolved with a range of carrying styles to make it easier and more comfortable to lug gear. I didn't have or need any of that, since it was just a two day jaunt with perfect weather and cheap eats. The first morning I loaded my backpack with a toothbrush/ toothpaste, one extra pair of underwear, one shirt, and a Kindle. I was off.

I headed out around 7, and the path quickly turned from paved stone to dirt. The main road of the island forms a sort of sideways figure-eight, making two big circles that go around the volcanos with a narrow strip of land between them. I started around the town of Balgüe on the northern part of the eastern island, heading clockwise.

My bikepacking plan

The eastern side around Madeiras volcano is much more remote and less developed than the western side (Concepción volcano). Away from the few tourist hubs (Balgüe and Moyogalpa) the island is still pretty rural and agrarian. Many of the locals seem to get by either on small tiendas or on their farms and livestock -- chickens, pigs, and cows had free reign over the roads, and the paths are otherwise quiet, with only a handful of motorcycles, scooters, and pickups driving by. As far as places for bike rides, it's pretty fricken' neat.

Early on I found myself weaving amongst herds of cows being prodded down the road by farmers walking behind. Horses grazed in wide fields to both sides, and the lake to my left lapped in slow waves against the tree-lined shore. To the right, the land rose up to the volcano, the top half still shrouded in swirling clouds before the afternoon sun burned through. It was beautiful, and it quickly became pretty tough. The bike had three working gears and the dirt road rolled up and down, with long rocky stretches that left me in the highest gear. I said a breathless buenos dias to the few people I passed. I stopped for a $3 breakfast at a place next to the water. I rounded the edge of the island and, heading west, was greeted with views of Concepción ahead. At around 11 I parked the bike, did the hike up to the waterfall, swam, and hiked back down.

Back on the rusted bike, back in the hot sun, I made it to the little town of Mérida by around 2, where I got a dorm room bed for $8 on the shores of the lake. I bought a cantaloupe and ate the whole thing. I spent the afternoon swimming and reading in a hammock. I watched the sunset and went to bed. Not a hippie in sight.

Day 1 bike and hike

I'd planned for a harder second day -- 45 miles across the gap to the eastern Concepción side of the island, the counterclockwise loop, and then finishing at a swimming hole back on the meeting point of the figure-eight. I started at 6:30 with stiff legs and an aching, well, you know, I popped in an Airpod, and I belted tunes and pedaled the first 15ish miles to Altagracia as the capuchin monkeys woke up and slapped the tin roofs around me. The road was paved and entirely empty, I was moving fast and singing hard, the sun gentle on my legs -- I felt about as confident as a nudie fella at a pickpocket convention. I got a quick cup of coffee and a typical Nicaraguan breakfast (rice, beans, cheese, plantains) for $2 and kept on pedaling.

Between all the time singing 2 Chainz and dodging rocks and horse poop, I had the opportunity to do some good old fashioned thinking. Mostly, I thought about the hippies, wondering if my investigation had produced any fruit. What I came to, riding through the rural farms of the island, was maybe a sort of explanation for my aversion, the reason for the vague feeling that something wasn't quite right.

One small part of it, I suppose, is the lifestyle. I guess I don't really personally subscribe to the mindset of smoking "Unicorn Poop" kush and melting into the couch, and I kind of balk at the notion of billing it under spirituality and holistic wellness. But another part of me knows (and loves) some very greenpeace-type figures, and I agree ideologically with many of the main talking points of being a beatnik. Counterculture in general is cool. Building a life you want to live, cool. Not caring what other people think -- cool. And ultimately, the same as I desire for myself, I don't want to look down on the filling of another's windowsill pie, so to speak. Everybody gets to pick their own pie.

The things that rub me the wrong way are the practical things, the big picture. Eventually, like with all our personal decisions, it stops only being about us and impacts those around us. A lot of the land on Ometepe, for example, is being gobbled up by mostly European hippies for cheap. Locals, at some point, can't afford to live on their own island, and it gives the sensation that they've become the workforce and service industry for space aliens from overseas. It's like, when you try to run from a thing you don't agree with and make your own thing, you end up mucking up someone else's thing. You get priced out of Germany, and then you price out the islanders. A couple of the tour guides said the foreign employers had a reputation for paying poorly, too. That's no bueno.

And the other part that just feels weird is how it impacts children. A few times we saw scruffy parents carrying dirty kids the way you would palm a basketball. There's not really any doctors on the island. You wonder about school.

I don't think everyone has to be a socially stratified and tax-contributing member to an organized, corporatized society. I think everyone has the right to choose the way they live. But I think we have to be careful when, in our kush-hazed pursuit of the good life, we start to make life worse for someone else.

Pedal pedal pedal pedal. The northern stretch of the Concepción side again returned to unpaved, rocky road and my pace slowed, but it was my favorite part of the ride. I was back among rural farms, the cultivations lining the fields up to the base of Concepción. The volcano stood out huge and blue in the morning sun, the crater slowly peeking out from the wisps of clouds that gathered at its altitude. I passed a guy on horseback and he passed me back, and we rode side by side and chatted for a few minutes. Everything was dry and green and remote and beautiful, the dirt roads webbed within a canopy of trees, and the rolling hills reminded me for some reason of Upstate New York in the summer (minus the volcano).

Eventually, back to pavement, through the main port town of Moyogalpa, a quick stop for a Gatorade, and onward, onward, onward. I passed the little airstrip, stopped at a fruit stand, made it up a big hill, and, by noon I was sitting at Ojo De Agua, a natural pool five minutes from where I'd started in Balgüe. I ate peanuts and drank two beers and swung off the rope swing into the turquoise water. I was totally alone for two days, a feller with a bike and Airpods and an e-book.

Man, I love the flavor of my pie.

Day 2 bike pics

_

Shutter Island 2: The Finale

This is going to be a large spoiler for the ending of Shutter Island. Here it is:

Leonardo DiCaprio is patient 67.

It turns out the whole plot we thought we were following -- Leo as detective, the missing inmate, lobotomies -- was devised by the lead psychologist to try to get Leo to "discover" all the crazy things he did (namely, murder his wife and kids). In his psychosis, Leo refused to acknowledge who he really was, and so they set up a whole mystery for him to solve about himself.

At the end of it, we see Leo as he really is: one of the patients.

Here's the thing: After a week in Ometepe I had made some friends (including reconnecting with Imre, the stingray girl), and there was a party at a place called "Raindance," a couple minutes' walk from Huellas Hippie House. It was our last night on the island and we figured, ah what the healing crystal, lets go to Raindance. And so we did.

Smelled about how you'd imagine

It was a fun party. We played pool (still not good at it). We played beer pong. There was a DJ and trance music and a swimming pool. There were lots and lots of dreadlocked, overalled, body-odorous beatniks, and there was a "fire show" (people twirling sticks on fire). If you've never seen hippies around a fire show, its like Viagra and oyster juice to them. They go nutso.

So the party got weird, and we were dancing with the hippies, ironically at first. And then at some point, it just kind of stopped being ironic. We twirled our arms and stared into space, held hands and swung around and looked into Ketamine-glazed eyes. Someone jumped in the pool, and we stripped down to our skivvies and followed.

There we were, all bubbling together in one big pot of human soup. People kept dancing, a whirl of arms and legs and dreadlocks. From the outside, it would be impossible to tell what belonged to who. The social divisions dissolved in the water.

I looked around. It hit me. I was one of them. Patient 67.

The last scene of the movie is Leo leaving the island. He makes the willful decision to keep believing he's a detective, even though they'll send him to the electric chair. As he walks towards the boat, he puts on the (fake) detective voice. "You know, this place makes me wonder," he says, being led off to the zapper. "Which would be worse -- to live a monster, or to die as a good man?"

That next morning I boarded the ferry. The volcanoes fading behind me, I asked myself the same, but the Ometepe version: "Which would be worse -- to live a hippie, or to die a good man?"

Just Like Leo, I'll deny that I'm anything like them. Willfully ignorant 'til the end.

__

The Can I'm Kicking Down the Avenues of my Mind: Backflips

When I was a wee little fella, maybe seventh grade, me and my friend T used to spend summer days at his dirtroad-rich neighbor's swimming pool. There was a diving board and we would go just about every day, trying over and over again to do backflips.

I don't know if either of us ever really did a good one. Probably not. But we dang sure tried.

And then at some point between seventh grade and twenty-seven, I stopped trying to do backflips. Maybe because I wasn't good at them. But more likely, I think, because at some point I got too scared to do it.

I explained this all to my Dutch friend sitting at the water at Ojo de Agua, the natural pools (which have a small diving board).

"It's like at some point, we learn to be scared," I said, talking about the diving board, working myself up into a heat. "We're taught not to do things, to doubt ourselves and what we're capable of."

"Yep, wow," she said. I don't think she was interested in my beach chair philosophy.

But that got me thinking of all the things I decided I was frightened to do. Driving the scooters, for one. They terrify me. And swimming in the lake, because of the sharks. Surfing. Scuba diving. Backflips. I wondered at what point I had decided that those things weren't for me.

And then I thought of the things I'd done, things that, at one point, I probably thought I would never do. Rural Nicaraguan bike trips. Karaoke in a room full of strangers. Mountain races in El Salvador. Heck, I rented a scooter and (nervously) drove it around the island, and I swam in the lake almost every morning.

And yes, those things can be scary (and leave you with an aching grundle). But it's good, I think, to do uncomfortable things, the things that are just beyond the reach of what we currently can do. Its the oh-I-dunno's. The one-more-mile-than-last-week. We talk about pushing our comfort zones; pushing is an active process.

Maybe we never really arrive at being the person we want to be. But we can inch forwards. And when we look back, we see that we've inched pretty dang far.

"Watch my stuff," I said. I climbed up on the diving board. I did a shitty backflip.

So long for now,

Hippie D