Lowings Michael 2007

siryoureonfire @ 2007-08-13T20:00:00

Granada, Nicaragua was the second oldest city built on the American mainland (after Cumaná, Venezuela). The name William Walker, an American filibuster from the mid-19th c., is still on everyone’s lips centuries later. He was famous for attempting to burn down the city after failing to gain monarchal status (President of Nicaragua 1856-1857) and left scrawled “Granada was here”. This is one remnant of Walker’s pyromania. I always thought lagoons were strictly swampy, marshy places of standing water and cicadas that never stopped talking, but this lagoon (as seems to be the definition of “laguna” as far as Nicaragua is concerned) is a body of water formed in the crater of a volcano ! This particular one is a sulfuric, fresh-water pool that measures 6km in diameter and the cone is deepest at 600 M. I swam about 1 or 2 km out into the lagoon and it was frighteningly dark, but I kept myself assured by the fact that there is very little life in the lagoon, only tiny fish that you never catch a glimpse of. Then a tiny bubble floated up from the endless cavity & brushed my leg. Here are some of the friends we made over the course of our unreal day floating in a lagoon. Kenny, a man from Glasgow that travels on his own but makes the juvenile decision (daily) to take Vicodin, pass out, and expect newly-made friends to cart him around (including expectations that strangers won’t leave him to sleep on a Saturday night; they will, instead, carry him to a discotheque or otherwise where he can find new people to depend on). Better: the sweetest, most energetic sound engineer from Antwerp. The Sandinista flag is split through the center with the upper section red and the bottom black. In several instances, Nicaraguans made the innocent error of sporting Anarchist flags with red and black pennants sitting into each other (or, cut diagonally instead of two rectangular sections). I then made the honest mistake of thinking this flag was chosen with intention . From the site: “Ubicados en las faldas del Volcán Maderas, Finca Magdalena es una finca orgánica que tiene una propiedad de 350 hectáreas en la Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua. Dirigido por un colectivo de 24 familias la finca produce café orgánico, plátanos, leche, miel de avejas, maíz, frijoles, arroz, vegetales y contribuimos a la protección del medio ambiente. ¡Quedese con nosotros cuando visite la isla!

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