Granada’s market is a multihued riot of shrieking-fresh products and booming sales-pitches: capitalism before The Man took over. Crooked wooden stands haphazardly jut in from the boring buildings-proper, allowing a stream of shoppers, motorbikes, three-wheeled tuk-tuks, and the occasional car, horn wailing, to slowly pass through. In the maze, you can cop gutted fish, backpacks, phones, bananas, guavas, 17-cent coffees, kilos of salt, vinegar in translucent plastic bags, sacks of beans, sacks of kernelled corn, quart-bags of filtered water, sugar, pineapples, shoes, electric cables, loose cigarettes, moonshine, Frescas, guavas, ect, ect, ect.
The tourist population of Granada is the demographic opposite of San Juan del Sur. The average tourist age of San Juan was probably 25, while the average age of the Granada tourist is a good 30 years older. The epicenter of tourism in Granada is the mostly-unattended mustardyellow Cathedral. The small park adjacent and the European-style cafes serving cappuccinos and nouveau pull-pork sammiches have a population of probably 90% tourists, but the percent of cheles drops off rapidly after this like the continental shelf off the east coast of Florida. The tourists must be scared of the sharks and crocs, because, at the market, only three blocks away, there is not a tourist to be seen.
Grenada turned out to be a stop-over: I was there for about 36 hours, wandering the markets, avoiding the stinking, milky streams of water that flowed everywhere, street-dogs lapping…I ate cheap-ass nouveau pulled-pork sammiches, saw a trio of 70-year old American men walking hand-in-hand-in-hand with a clearly under-aged Nica prostitute like it was nothing, like they were putting milk in their coffee…they took her to a European café where they she drank beers and maintained her perfect posture before they all disappeared into a hotel…
~
The Taxi kept blindly doing loops in the small field that may or may not have held some poor peasants crops until it was practically pulling donuts.
“Over there, maybe?”
“I don’t think so…” answered Byron, my traveling mate for the moment.
The Taxi Hustler pulled another loop, kicking up dust and pebbles. We passed too close to someone’s property, and five or so enraged dogs started chasing the cab.
I stared at the rudimentary map on the pamphlet advertising The Poste Rojo hostel. “I …think?…that’s the “bamboo field” over there…”
We passed another Nica’s property, and a half-dozen more red-eyed, unneutered hounds charged the cab and joined the pursuing pack.
“Maybe we should just get out here?” Byron suggested
“With the fuckin dogs?”
“Good point.”
~
Finally, after some loops and twists, both in the Taxi and on foot, we made it to the top of to the steep hill which held Poste Rojo, the treehouse hostel. The whole thing was a delicious hippie-lodge, complete with a hanging foot-bridge, outhouses and howler monkeys. The hill the lodge sat upon was only a couple hundred feet high, but the vista spread in front of it was flat, flat with fern and deciduous rainforest, so the high, sun-baked greenery stretched hazily to the vanishing line on the horizon. Most mornings, you were woken by the demonic cries of the howler monkeys as they crawled on hands and feet overhead….their small, rust-furred bodies let off noises that sounded like the death-knells of hellhounds played in reverse.
There were Cicadas everywhere. They were loudest in the evenings, but their pitch was high and constant enough that it evaporated into white noise. But if you stopped for a moment and listened, their screaming buzzes moved to the forefront of your audio, and they were as loud as jet-engines.
~
Byron and I arrived on Valentine’s Day. Poste Rojo was throwing a Black Heart Party---an anti-Valentine’s event. Everyone was to dress up really fuckin metal and listen to the harshest music possible. Keys, a member of the Poste Rojo clan, had been in Grenada all day, picking up a goodie-bag of inebriants for the event. Keys was a semi-professional surfer, but referred to surfing as his “job.” His passion was building sensory-deprivation tanks. Although not much of a looker, Keys was a goddammned pimp. He claimed that someone once bet him a hundred dollars that he couldn’t sleep with seven different women in seven nights. He lost the bet (as much as one loses in such a situation), only bedding six. The way the women at the hostel fawned over him, I believed the story.
He was currently shacking up with Raeah, one of the volunteers at the hostel. Like all the people staying and working at the hostel, Raeah was gorgeous. Some of the other beauts at the hostel included Cynthia, a slight, svelte, fair-skinned French-Canadian with black, dready sausage curls and a smattering of star-freckles across her cheeks; Alyssa, a curvy Mexican-South Cali girl with long, dark, twisting hair who padded around barefoot in a hippie-dress; and John, a giant, broad-shouldered, long-haired hunk with sun-kissed abs who looked like some sort of fucking gigolo from a Mediterranean Cruise ship.
Siena, who could do make-up like a pro, but whose only experience was “hanging out with a lot of drag-queens,” painted everyone’s faces for the event. The gang drank before and after dinner, and we were a lovely, stumbly shade of drunk by 8 o’clock. I was smoking a joint with Cynthia, overlooking the night-forest and the stars, when I heard a giant, splintering crash. Assuming some type of brawl, I scurried over to the edge of the balcony to find a blindfolded Mikey, who looked and kinda acted like Giovanni Ribisi, swinging a chair wildly at a giant blackheart-shaped piñata. After knocking over several more things, he managed to make contact, the piñata broke open, and out spilled myriad hard candies (no one really ate them) and a plethora of Jello shots (they were consumed instantly).
The night danced on. It was a sort of initiation at the hostel to eat a live cicada. My time came when Raeah popped one, then leaned into me, passing the crawling insect between my lips with her mouth. I didn’t know if it was sexy or disgusting---probably some weird combination of the two. I held it in my mouth for a moment, then crunched down. It splintered, and I chewed it to bits, washing it down with many gulps of water.
~
“Dzis place is a vortex, you know? It’s just so….nice here, and so bEAUtiful.” Cynthia and Cynthia's sister Annie and Byron and I were sitting, watching the solar globe sink past the vanishing-line.
“Every day at dzis place just gets better and better.”
It was the day after the Black Heart party, and everyone was hungover, but in that lazy, giggly way that is quite pleasant. We hadn’t left the grounds of the hostel all day, and, in fact, we wouldn’t the next day either.
People talked about getting sucked into particular places while traveling, about staying for far longer than they intended, about being vortexed . I was weary of this warning, seeing as I was vortexed hard to New Paltz for so long. For me, New Paltz was a joyful, comfortable place (with the necessary plunges & peaks) that sung its honeyed siren-song to me for eight summers. Part of the reason (perhaps THE reason) I left was I became aware that my much preened-over philosophies were too geographically, and therefore culturally, limited---lashed to my vortex, my home.
But there are good vortexes and there are bad vortexes, and a vortex isn’t much of a vortex if you’re only there for a few weeks. So, after a little consideration (mostly financial), I decided to come back to Poste Rojo in a week to volunteer.
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