Dealing with Danger in Middle Earth

“How long ya been down in Middle Earth?
-Boss


JUST because the hike down was so exhilarating and the terminus so eye-widening, I found myself trekking from the small town of Mirador down the inside of an extinct volcano to Laguna de Apoya, a 48-square kilometer crater-lake so deep that it’s center is the lowest point in all of Middle Earth. Despite it’s volume, the water was surprisingly warm, pool-temperature, due to the honeycombed network of thermally-heated subterranean rivers that fed the massive body. The first time I went there, the crescent day-moon sat directly above and if you looked straight up at it, your view was framed with the ring of white-rock forest you had descended from.

This time around, I was leading a group of Poste Rojo guests down the trail---a small group, Dan, Jess, her cousin Mikayla, Lucie and myself. We were sliding down a particularly rough patch when I heard a scream behind me.

I whirled around with the assumption that one of the girls had fell. What I saw was a 20-something Nica guy with a goatee grabbing Jess by the back of the neck and shoving her down on the rocks. I immediately started sprinting up the hill. It was only then that I saw the Nica’s other arm, which was holding a three-foot machete high above his head in chopping position, the blade’s trajectory ending across Jess’s neck.

The guy immediately started screaming contradictory instructions in Spanish. He was bug-eyed, adrenaline and anxiety saturated, moving in jerks---a nervous mugger is the worst kind, because they’re the ones who are going to panic and kill you.

He demanded that Lucie slowly approach him and hand him Jess’s backpack, who was starting to weep in fear below him. He then yelled at me in Spanish to come to him, but each time I slowly approached with my cash raised in front of me, he screamed “Stop” in English, lowered the blade to Jess’s neck and pressed it into her skin. .

“Do you want me to come to you or stay here!?”---I was too panicked to remember the Spanish. Finally Lucie was forced to walk to me to retrieve the cash.

“Pleeeease don’t leave me….pleeeeeeease,” Jess wept as Lucie stumbled down towards me.

Dan and Mikayla were farther down the path, digging through their backpacks in a dumb panic, trying to find their wallets.

“Just give him the whole fucking thing!” I was trying to hurry them along while keeping an eye on Jess. When I turned back up the trail, I saw the mugger sprinting away and Jess crumpled in a quaking heap on
the rocks, unblooded.

~

Westerners are targeted in Middle Earth. To roughly quantify it, if you are going to backpack around Middle Earth for, say, a month, you are GUARANTEED to have something stolen from you and also have about a 1 in four chance of being mugged by knife or machete or handgun.

As is the case for muggings the world over, the victims are rarely physically harmed. That being said, after the mugging, Lucie related the tale (to make Jess feel better) of how she and a friend were mugged in Guatalajara, Mexico a couple months back. Her friend was stabbed with a switchblade in the stomach and nearly died.

In between my stays in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, a large group of men from a neighboring municipality started invading the medium-sized town at night. I heard from multiple people that there were 50-plus muggings within a week.

Nicaragua boasts the lowest crime rate in all of Middle Earth.

~

There’s certain preventative techniques one can apply to keep your shit in Middle Earth. Many backpackers wear belly-belts---wallets that are strapped under the shirt. When staying in hostels, people use lockers, though it’s always a good idea to bring your own personal lock, in case the hostel employees get grabby. Most travelers carry switchblades, or, more often, flip-knifes, both of which are completely legal in Middle Earth, though these are mostly owned for more utilitarian purposes. Female travelers usually carry mace AND knifes for rape prevention, though rape seems to be the one crime that is no less common when traveling in Middle Earth. Then again, rape is the one crime that is rarely talked about after it happens. The one incident I heard about involved a Shaman who did Iowaska ceremonies. In actuality, he was NOT a Shaman, just a shit-bag rapist who led a girl to the middle of the rainforest, then held her there for hours. After he had finished, he just left her there, and she got lost on the way back and almost died of shock and exhaustion.

~

However, you are much more likely to be hurt in Middle Earth by the non-human. Since I’ve been down here, I’ve been cut with a machete, gotten ringworm and been destroyed by bedbugs. I have gotten off relatively easy. Backpackers just seem to always be recovering from some sort of injury down here. People I've traveled with have been stung by scorpions, stabbed by stingrays, bitten by bullet-ants, infected by bot flies, attacked by swarms of army ants, gored by bulls at carnivals, been in truck accidents, quad accidents, bus accidents, motorbike accidents, been cut up by coral, gotten concussions from being smacked by their own surfboards, twisted ankles while hiking, broken toes while hiking…the list is endless.

~

After the hold-up man fled, we were still stuck a good 20 minutes from civilization. We had two weapons, both brought by Mikayla, a small pocket knife and a pink can of mace. We organized ourselves with the females grouped in the middle, Dan leading with the blade out. I trailed a few feet behind, finger cocked on mace’s trigger, safety off. Jess was being a fucking trooper---she was more distressed about the loss of her 600-dollar camera and its photos then the actual mugging.

“We passed that asshole a while back. He must’ve looped back and trailed us until the guys were in the front…the blade wasn’t even that sharp.”

We descended without speech. When the trail opened up to coral and blue beach houses and the Laguna, we let out our breath as one.

You learn to deal with this kind of shit while down here---you have to, it will happen nonetheless. In a perverse way, it’s part of the genuine experience.

As a group, we sat on the thin beach and looked out over the aquamarine Laguna while smoking a thin joint of Jamaican brick-weed.  It was a beautiful day.

Then we shucked our outer clothing and rollicked in the choppy waves.

Altogether, it wasn’t a bad day in Middle Earth.

Bruja The Witch-pt. 2

 Bruja The Witch---pt. 1


Bruja- (Spanish) n.-A Witch

My room at the GM was a single. I had always stayed in the dorms at hostels, other than copping a single my first night at Poste Rojo under the misguided assumption that I would get laid during the Anti-Valentine's Day party. Whenever I think I'm going to get "some," it never materializes. Perhaps this was the reason I had been dry my entire journey. This was rather ego-busting (among other things) because everyone around me seemed to be swimming in pussy/dick. It almost seemed as though I had to be dodging it.

Although singles are supposed to provide a quieter environment, I was jarred awake at 4 AM to the sound of a semi charging me down like a running rabbit.

After shaking the sleep out of my head, I realized that the semi was about a dozen feet to my right on the road outside. The main road that led past Granada was closed for repairs, so all the early-morning commercial traffic had been diverted past the hostel. I slept little after this.

~

John and Miguel knew Granada. When we had been out the night before, they seemed to be close personal acquaintances with all the waiters and bouncers and staff at the bars---even at Caesar's, the local's pub, where we were the only cheles in attendance. 

John needed some supplies for the hostel, so the three of us---John, Jackie and myself---dove back into Granada's central market.

It turns out that in my prior excursion, I hadn't really delved into the depths of the market---it went much deeper. We were walking in a thin line down one of the lanes, twisting our bodies to avoid smacking into vendors walking with their wares and tuk-tuks tooting their passengers along when John suddenly pulled a right. A thatched roof passed over our heads; the air grew darker and hotter until it pulsed with bartering and the scents of roasting meat. We trotted down a set of steps like we were entering a cave...light passed through the roofs above, but when I turned back, any light or air from the entrance had vanished among the clutter of stands.

John went to his fruit lady---they knew each other, and therefore John wouldn't receive a gringo tax.

The gringo tax was applied to anyone white in Nicaragua, to any product they bought. It wasn't as harsh as it seemed. Unless you were in a Pali Supermarket, Nicaraguan businesses didn't have set prices. The packaged goods weren't labeled with anything, the taxis didn't have meters and the fruit stand prices were open to interpretation. You were expected to barter, and the vendors simply cited a higher initial price for cheles. If you were a chele and didn't know how to barter, you would end up paying up to (and above) triple the price of a local.

As John chatted with his fruit lady, the scent of pork entered my nostrils. There was a pig-stand to my left, where an entire porker was carted in and deconstructed into various dishes---fried pig's ears and cheeks, stew, entrails, soup, roast meat...some pink hunks that were yet to be used were still visible, chucked on one of the side-tables.

Farther along, deeper, we found an entire fucking restaurant in the market-cave, complete with tables and a kitchen...the restaurant had no set boarders, but instead vaporously bled into the stands and shops around it.

~

We exited the market-cave blocks from where we entered it. It was early Friday afternoon, and the central square was raucous with vendors, tourists, skateboarders, nuns, drug dealers, Catholic school students in uniform, large white carriage-horses to tug cheles around, small brown horses to lean products to the markets, loose goats, pick-ups outfitted with amps in their beds that blasted music and adverts, bands...the energy and aura of the place was insane, and would only grow more intense as the day boosted along.

John had been taking Merengue classes, and when a band took up a rhythm, he started moving to the beat while walking. A Nica lady clapped her hands together in delight and told him he should take a dance with her kid daughter, who was standing a few feet away. John loved kids, and shuffle-danced over and asked with comic formality if he might dance with her. The kid looked up sternly and said:

Uno Dollar

~

That's something you don't really see in Costa," John later said while philosophically staring into the sky (he hadn't paid). "People here try to get money out of you for anything, and that's not really the case over the border."

He was right, but, then again, Costa was far richer than Nicaragua, which was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti.

It was mid-afternoon, and I wondered if I would ever see the Bruja with the scars on her legs.

~

"Where were going, there ARE no roads."

I smiled down at the bruja as I woke her with this phrase, which had floated tot he forefront of my mind and seemed appropriate for the surreal day. (I hadn't had a time-piece since I was mugged in Puriscal and had learned to tell the time through natural objects---now was the time of day when the street-dogs woke from their siestas and were seen crawling out from underneath parkt cars.) She smiled at me as she woke from her curled-up position in a chair at the Euro cafe. Her various talismanic necklaces slacked as she rose to a sitting position.

"Finally found you," I smiled.

"I've been back and forth over the last few days...I'm glad you caught me."

...

"You were going to ask me something...whaaat was it..." The bruja stretched her neck, her braids falling across her face.

I pointed at her left leg, the one with the scars on it.

"Oh yes..."

The fountain in the cafe's garden plashed amongst the greenery and a swirl of dust whipped in from the street outside.

...

I had first seen the scars when I had photographer the bruja in the nude---cross-hatched slits raised from the skin of her upper thigh.

"...I first started cutting when I was a teenager, and it was for emotional reasons, just to feel something. You know?"

I did.

"...but now it's all about ritual. Blood is a very intimate, very powerful liquid...I use it for spells...when I used to cut for emotional reasons, I never really knew how to take care of the wounds...now I use I salve I make and they don't really scar."

The bruja's talk scared me, sending a nervous twist vibrating down my middle (stretch your mind & experience).

"...sometimes I use the blood for penance, to ask forgiveness from the universe, or from someone I've failed." (Who have I failed today/not but myself.)

I cleared my throat.

"When...when I started, it was due to depression...just to feel something. As an adult, it has always been out of anger."

"Anger at what?" The bruja leaned forward and stared at me with her mystic's eyes.

"At myself. The worst I've ever cut was because of a girl...I found out a year after she had dumped me that she had cheated on me with some random dude and had started dating him immediately after she broke up with me...we were still very close when I found this out, ad I forgave her within a few hours...the next day, it all hit me, and I got drunk and slashed the shit out of my ankle with a shard of plastic...I blamed myself for it all going down the way it did, I felt I deserved what happened and deserved to bleed...I didn't give a shit and stumbled around raving...there was blood all over the house."

The bruja's earth-marbled irises narrowed and then expanded until they were larger than her eyes. I continued into her doorways:

"It's embarrassing, y'know?...having all these scars...I was scared of being sent to a mental hospital after I slashed my ankle, so I only went to a clinic when it got infected...the scars are so bad everyone thinks it's ringworm, and I have to explain it's not, then they ask what it is and I can never tell them...I feel like a middle-school girl, like I'm weak...it's embarrassing."

"Well, you have to ask yourself if you consider it a bad thing because you think it's bad, or because of the opinions' of others." (Who have a failed today/not but myself.)

The bruja rose suddenly.

"We should go."

~

For once, I knew the time: it was five o'clock, and everyone had spilled out into the central square until it was difficult to walk. The sun still blazed, though it had dropped below 100. We saw a procession in the distance with a dark-skinned Jesus dragging a ten-foot wooden cross. Nicas in street clothes walked alongside with their heads bowed. 

The bruja didn't like Christianity, so we walked to a different farmacia. You don't need a prescription for anything other than painkillers in Nicaragua, and the employees didn't even give us a sidelong glance when the bruja ordered up a couple packets of Xanax. She tucked them into her many-pocketed belt.

"We should go back to your hostel," she said.

~

The bruja had condoms in her belt also, and we entered and removed ourselves from each other until darkness had fallen. She bit the boar's tusk around my neck and we came at the same time.

~

The bruja had to leave immediately afterwards---she was heading North and I was heading South to meet up with Poste Rojo folks and then down to Uvita to Envision Fest. We wanted to see each other again, but that oftentimes doesn't happen on the road.

Bruja The Witch---pt. 1

Granada is uninhabitably hot during the dry season. The fact that 90,000 people inhabit the city nonetheless is confounding to me. They also do it while wearing shirts---I’ve recently noticed that the only dudes going around bare-chested are cheles. So, in another one of my weak attempts to not appear like a culturally-insensitive tourist, I refused to remove my tank top in the 105-in-the-sun urban haze as I tramped with my 40-pound pack in the search for the GM hostel. I had scrawled directions on a Poste Rojo bookmark, but, as my energy and mental competence drained over the course of two hours, the simple directions became schizophrenically confusing. Or maybe the pen had played some sort of cruel joke on me, the bastard, writing differently than I had told it. No, that made no sense. It was my HAND, my HAND, that had done something other than what I had instructed it to do, and had written incorrect bullshit directions to fuck me up. Or maybe…nonono, THAT was it, my hand wasn’t foolin around, it wasn’t a fuckin JOKE, the perverted evil fuck was leading me into a trap of disastrous consequences and…

I was somehow standing directly in front of the GM hostel. I realized I had passed by it once, but quite possibly multiple times, probably thousands. All the doors…all the doors seemed to be locked, both the inner wooden ones and the outer steel security gates. I slammed desperately on anything with hinges like I was fleeing Nazi Storm Troopers until I saw movement inside and finally a white-skinned Latino gatekeeper cracked the inner door and slipped the left side of his face out.

“…yyyes?”

“Uh, I’ve, I have…got a reservation?”

“Fvor tonight? Bekaus we’re not really open yet.”

“Yessss….I do.

“Yyyou do? Bekaus we’re not really open yet.”

 “The reservation was made by…Jackie made it?“

“Oh yyyes! Jackie!”

“Jackerrr…Jackie.”

 “Jackie said you were coming! She won’t be here fvor a few hours, but, here, come in!“

I entered, stumbling over my dumb, dragging feet that kept sinking deep into the sucking floor on top of them being dumb and dragging and dropped my bag in the room with rubbery arms and immediately headed to the bathroom where I pissed neon-Gatorade concentrate. I hadn’t drank anything during the entire walk. The gatekeeper asked me if I wanted anything when I exited and I croaked “water” like a horse and he pulled some from the tap without moving his feet, his two too-long fingers just stretched across the room and flicked. I didn’t know if I could safely drink Nicaraguan water and figured I couldn’t but it looked so silvery-pure that I chugged it down.

I didn’t get sick from the water, but I certainly had been sick from a lack of it. As my head cleared, the gatekeeper became Manuel, the Mexican co-owner of GM, a charismatic fellow and friend of Jackie‘s. Jackie, who I had befriended while staying at her hostel in Costa, was staying for free at GM, which, even clear-headed, was not officially open for biz.

~

The black-bright solar orb started to beat Granada at dawn, and by 10, it was so hot that everything started to melt like wax. Sluices of coralpink shops sludged down the facades of mustardyellow cathedrals and drip-dropped onto the vast complex of marbled ruins behind the GM. The ruins were a forgotten hospital that had been looted until it crumbled, and it’s massive pillars now stood stark against the hot sky with nothing on top. The dark veins of the rock was the lichen taking over. Jackie and I sat on a pebbly wall one night and two men rose from the dark and approached us, their stride slow and hard. We were expecting squatters to hit us up for change or something much worse, but it was only two sun-wrinkled security guards, who testily told us that it was illegal to be here and also that we should be careful because the wall was about to collapse.

It was very odd for a place with so little infrastructure to secure a field of doorways to nothing. I was in San Juan Del Sur for a week without seeing a single cop. There were a few cops in Granada but the majority were Policia Tourista, police making sure cheles weren’t inconvenienced. The real cops were the Policia Nationale---large men with wrap-around shades who cruised around in matte-blue pick-ups, two in the seats, two hanging off the bed of the truck, leering. They were really the only thing that scared me in Granada. Cops in Central America were more likely to rob you than help you.

I saw one of the matte trucks transporting prisoners. The bed of the truck had been fitted with a steel cage that looked like it has been purchased discount from a Western zoo…two men squatted in the back in caps and street clothes, puffing on cigarettes.

As the black-bright orb hit its zenith, even the tourist areas started to stink like feces. Street-dogs are far more numerous than their owned counterparts in Nicaragua, skittishly sidling up to garbage heaps, hoping to not get hit. They shit where they would, as did the goats that were herded through the streets and the small, brown horses that leaned produce to the market.

~

One night, me, Manuel, Jackie and John, the co-owner of GM, went out drinking on Granada’s main boulevard. The split roadway is lit with streetlamps all the way own to it’s terminus on the trash-littered shore of Lago Nicaragua, a body of water so large it has bull sharks.

After finishing our watery Tonas at Ceasar’s, we were set to go home when my stomach turned in hunger. There was a bar with its kitchen still open, so we sauntered farther down the boulevard where I ordered food to go. The menu was Western, and twenty minutes later I received a weak-looking fajita carne and some thin fries smothered in neon-yellow paste.

We had begun our walk back to the GM when I heard a yelp and two Nica kids aged about nine ran up behind me.

~

The Granadan cab I waved down already had a passenger seated in the back, but this was normal----Nica cabs always packed in as many fares as possible. The lady was about my mother’s age and a sweetheart---she noticed that one of my backpack’s zippers was jammed open and helped me to free it without me having to ask for help.

When the zipper had been fixed and I looked back up, we were in a part of Granada I had never seen before. I had seen shacks and poverty up to this point in Nicaragua, but compared to this, what I had seen was middle-class. The road was two ruts that wove around and through leaning boxes of scrap tin that wouldn’t keep rain or rapists or packs of street-dogs out, but would certainly keep heat in. Everywhere there were large pools of brown liquid that smelt like sewage and people burned trash in their yard just to get rid of it and the smoking garbage-piles leaned and sank into the sewage. Everything natural had been polluted to death, so there was no plants, only packt dirt and loose dirt and the few lone trees were blackened skeletons. The Nicas kids here didn’t wear shirts, but I looked again and realized that most of them didn’t have real pants either, so maybe they had one pair of clothes for school and one for church, but even this was an assumption.

The lady actually lived in an apartment complex in a nicer area. As she got out, I remember thinking that is was good she lived in a cleaner, more respectable place, then realized my word choice and hated on myself the whole back for it.

Maybe I had thought this because I figured the lady was kind, and wanted her to live in a nice area, and I shouldn’t hate on myself for what is ignorance at worse.

But the point is, these are my own neurosis and are White-Boy problems and I should realize this.

~

The two Nica boys circled around my back and met in front of me, blocking my path. They then simultaneously began asking me for my food while trying to grab it from my hands.

“Nononononono….”

The kids were smiling as they pawed at the container.

“Look, you can have some…un piquito…”

I popped open the top container, but one of the kids slapped it back closed and continued to try to work it out of my hands.

I was at a moral loss. I wanted to help out these assholes. This was MY food, not theirs', these poor devils. They were better dressed than I was. They were smirking. They were only children. I hissed at them like street dogs-I tried to pop open the containers to let them grab some fries-I hissed again.

This probably lasted only about 20 seconds. John then sensed my trouble and looped back and spoke something in Spanish to the children that made them scamper off.

When I arrived back at GM, I shoved the tasteless grease down my throat and fell into darkness for the night.

Bruja the Witch---pt. 2