Puerto Cabezas to Francia 1/15/10

Breakfast at the Cortijo

Our little convoy getting ready to head out.

Riding in style!

Broken stabilizer bar.

Working to repair the deuce.

Friday morning we met at the girls hotel, El Cortijo 1 at 7:30 but I couldn't eat until about 8:30 because they didn't have enough utensils for all of us to eat at the same time. The food was unique but very good. It was the first time I've ever had beans and rice for breakfast although it probably won't be the last on this trip. After breakfast I went with a group to the airport to check if our luggage had arrived from Managua. We saw the plane land and then take off again without unloading any people so we knew right away that our luggage had arrived. I was pretty excited because I was starting to run low on clean clothes. After we got the luggage we went to eat at a little restaurant near the Adventist school and had more rice and beans but this time with vegetables. We met a guy at the restaurant named Carlos, a mechanic from Managua who travels all around the Nicaragua repairing large engines. Carlos had studied in Russia during the late eighties and had learned a little Russian as well as Portuguese.

We thought we were going to leave right after lunch so we headed back to the Adventist school to wait for some errands to be run. Those errands ended up lasting all afternoon, we passed the time with an impromptu soccer game and sitting in the shade. We were finally ready to leave around 5:30 and loaded the truck. As we were loading Ryan Veness, our graduate assistant on this trip, made an off hand remark about having internet at the school last year. Sure enough there was high speed internet right where we had been sitting for the past four hours and I had no idea! I ran over and sent one email before we had to head out. Needless to say I was rather perturbed about not knowing about the internet but I did enjoy the relaxing afternoon.

We finally rolled out around 6 PM and made it about 15 minutes before stopping for gas on the outskirts of town. Our little convoy consisted of the old army deuce and a half from the mission and a rented truck from Puerto. The truck held all our check-in luggage and our medicine bags and we rode with our smaller bags in the deuce. We had been told that the ride should last around 4-5 hours, little did we did we know how far from the truth that prediction would be. I started out sitting with my legs on the outside of the truck but I had to look out for trees and bushes if the truck strayed too far to the side of the road. Unfortunately I also chose the wrong side of the truck to sit on as well. The big diesel engine had an exhaust stack on the right side that belched nasty gray smoke every time the truck accelerated. After an hour or so behind it my eyes hurt so bad I could barely see and I was sick to my stomach. The road from Puerto to Francia was really a road in name only, it would probably be better termed a strip of dirt without trees. It had probably hadn't been graded or maintained since the Nixon administration. What I initially thought would be an adventurous ride turned into a bone jarring fight to keep one's coccyx from disintegrating.

Around 9 we stopped for about a 30 minute coffee break in a little village somewhere near the middle of the trip. After our stop we made it about 20 minutes down the road before the truck came to a sudden stop with a grinding metal on metal sound. We had heard stories about breakdowns and all feared the worst; soon the worst was confirmed. The stabilizer bar, the piece of metal that kept the two rear axles of the 6 wheel drive deuce had come off. Luckily we had another truck that could pull our beast into a position that made reattaching the bar a bit easier. After about an hour of grunting and pulling, getting the other truck unstuck, and mainly just standing around on my part we were on our way.

A little later we neared a bridge that Jeff, our leader, told has had collapsed under a truck several years before. The bridge was of the suspension variety and could be observed to sway under the weight of our truck as we passed over it. This did not instill me with the greatest confidence in its design but we made it over without incident, and with that crossed from government controlled territory into Miskito land. We passed through several more Army checkpoints near the spot where a drug plane had crashed several months before.

After the breakdown I put my iPod in and started listening to some tunes which helped the time pass a little better. I was perpetually in a state of almost asleep, being jolted awake by a bump every other 15 seconds. We finally reached Francia about 2:30 in the morning, unloaded, set up our mosquito nets in the dorm and fell asleep.