Jan. 23 – Esteli to Rivas
When the usual road and rooster noise got up me up the morning, I went out front to see if I could find some stray parts that we had left outside. The security people had actually saved our stick and oil can for us! They custom made us a breakfast in the hotel kitchen, and then we spent an hour re-tightening and replacing loose nuts and bolts. It is incredible how these bikes shed hardware!
We got out of town easily, and made good progress until we were about 10 miles from Masaya. Then we were stopped by three traffic police. The stop was completely un-warranted. They stopped us just because they could tell we were tourists, and expected to shake us down for some easy cash. We made the mistake of not just giving them the mordida (they asked for $40, we probably could have negotiated for $20), and getting them angry with us for not doing so. They took our US driver’s licenses, and told us we had to drive into Masaya and pay the fine ($12.00 USD) at a certain bank downtown. I will not repeat the whole story here, as Levi did a great job explaining how the whole business went down, but the 2-1/2 hours that they cost us prevented us from getting to the Costa Rica border before dark.
After we finally left Masaya, with our driver’s licenses, we managed to get lost TWICE trying to find the road to the border. We passed several more traffic stops, and expected to get stopped again (we had been stopped and asked for ‘our papers’ at every roadblock so far, without exception), but instead, the officers saw us coming, often way too fast, and just looked away and let us pass. Either we had suddenly become lucky, or, as Levi suspects, the captain in Masaya had put the word out to let us pass.
Just as dark was closing in, we discovered that a town on our map, La Virgin, was not a town at all, but only a beach on Lake Nicaragua. We got a glimpse of incredible volcanoes looming over a brooding, gray, windswept lake, and then it was dark. We had to backtrack to the resort town of Rivas, where we lucked out finding a cheap hotel, and a great pizza dinner.
It was a stressful day, but Levi and I came through it in good shape. We kept our spirits up, didn’t let it get too us, and ended the day by toasting the adventure with a few shots of tequilla.