Lago de Nicaragua is big enough or my boat was slow enough or both were each enough that my boat trip last night lasted 11 hours and that was only about half the length of the lake.

San Carlos here at the bottom of Lago de Nicaragua is practically on the Costa Rican border, something that I would like to cross. This, however, is proving an endeavor that is going to take a fair amount of patience. I got in at 6:00 am, and was told that immigration wouldn’t be open until 8:00 to stamp my passport. I guessed that wasn’t so bad and I set up camp on the “sidewalk” in front of the very weathered somewhat tilting building built on stilts in the mud. Sure enough the employees did start trickling in around about 8:00. Shortly thereafter I was allowed to proceed to the proper little window, but only got far enough for someone to glance fleetingly at the passport in my hand and tell me to come back at 9:00 “so we can eat some breakfast and get ready.” Well damn, think I. The friendly but hungry and unready agent did try to console me, “the boat doesn’t even leave until 10:30 anyway.”

So, here I sit at the septically fragranced bar next door looking over the river with resignation in my heart, pen in my hand, and some cold “California” brand jugo de piña in my belly.

Oh, and everyone should be happy to know that the funny bug bite is no longer rapidly rotting my flesh away!

It`s only 9:00 am, and I already can`t help but think of how all those American agents must have suffered over all those years. It`s really hot here. Such a difficult climate to smuggle hot black artillery and to torch villages. Maybe when it`s for a good cause that makes everything bearable.

Leon and Granada are Nicaragua`s two old cities, the first traditionally liberal (poorer) and the second traditionally conservative (richer). If I would judge by all the polyglotic wall-scribble philosophy at this hostel, I`d say it isn`t too conservative here at all. Anyway, tired of so much fighting between the two towns, they built Managua as the new capital back in 1857, simply because it was between the two. Didn`t seem to work too well, though. I had to transfer in Managua yesterday, and to me it looked like a smaller dirtier poorer L.A. with a lot less Asians but still too many S.U.V.s.

I miss direct night busses. Yesterday was just a blur of one reincarnated schoolbus after another. I could have taken a direct first classer from Tegucigalpa to Managua but that would have been only one hour faster or so,and 3X more expensive. And it`s still a day bus. It could have been worth it were it a nighter, but if I`m spending all damned day busriding, I`ll save money and get some fresh wind and be spared terrible action movies the whole way.

I got a bug bite on my arm. And then it went funny. The local doctor said it could be a bacterial infection from the instect’s urine. So gross. Lee, the Forest Service wild forest fire firefighter told me he once had a friend who got a spider bite that gave her something like gangrene and they had to cut a piece of her leg out. And then I started thinking about that part at the end of Requiem for a Dream… thanks, Lee.

Even from the top of Volcán Madera, yesterday, Lago de Nicaragua looked like the ocean, and not at all like a lake. Well, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t see it from the top. All I saw at the top of the volcano was the inside of the cloud that seems to be a permanent resident no matter what the weather everywhere else may be. Maybe that’s why they called it a cloud forest up there, because that’s where clouds grow! Wet, muddy, slippery, pretty green clouds with lots of crazy bugs, birds, and monkeys. There’s a lake in the crater too, and that was cool, but in the literal sense so was the air, which made it not so much for a swim in the non-literal sense as it would have been had it been, well, otherwise.

I’ve been having to think about school these past few days and it’s a terribly frightful thing. There sure is something to be said about getting a head start on school now that I know where I’m going (UCLA), but it’s really tough to beat the ‘I’m already here and there’s so many places to keep going to and see’ argument.