It was another beautiful day in San Juan del Sur yesterday.
Blue, blue skies, fluffy white clouds ...
The beach in town gets very busy on the weekends so it's a relief when the weekdays come and there's hardly anyone about.
Apart from the locals going about their daily business - here's the local transport business in the middle of town.
April is apparently the hottest month here, just before the rain starts and it certainly seems to affect even the locals.
I went to buy some fruit and veges and had to smile at this puppy flaked out from the heat (at least I was able to smile after I had made sure that it wasn't actually dead because at first glance it certainly looked that way!)
Remember the little boy in the bucket the other day?
Well here's an adult getting in on the act .....
This lady decided that it was just too hot and she was going to call into the petrol station to make use of their water, forget cleaning the windscreen, she just started pouring bucket loads over her head!
This morning Porl and I headed into town to catch the bus to Cardenas which is about 40 km away.
A lovely lady called Arlene lives just out of Cardenas, she has been attending the meetings in Cardenas for a while but they are in Spanish so when she heard that we now have our meetings in San Juan in English she decided to travel to us once or twice a week to attend the meetings.
Every Saturday she comes in early to the meeting and comes to our place to study the Bible and then we head up to the meeting afterwards. This makes it a long day for her between the bus trips, the study and then the meeting so I thought it would be a good idea for us to visit her for a change and have the study at her place.
As we waited at the bus, Porl was eyeing up the little food parcels that a local vendor was selling - yucca (a root vegetable), chicuron (pork crackling) and coleslaw, wrapped in a banana leaf. But as it wasn't long after breakfast he held himself back.
Arlene told us that the trip involved two bus trips and should take about 2 to 2.5 hours to get to her place. We caught the first bus without any problems and got off at La Virgen, about a half an hour trip from San Juan.
There we waited by the side of the road for the next bus ....
Arlene had told us to only catch a bus that said 'Cardenas' or we would end up on the Costa Rican border town of Peñas Blancas - we will need to be heading down there in a couple of months to renew our visa but not today.
The first bus that came didn't have Cardenas written on it and when they stopped for us we said no thanks, that we were going to Cardenas, sí, sí Cardenas said the attendant, no, no we said, sí, sí - he was insistent ... so .... on we hopped, ah well all part of the adventure.
I explained where we wanted to go and he nodded his head 'sí, sí está bien' - 'yes, yes that's fine' - after half and hour or so I got up and checked with him again and yes, you guessed it, 'sí, sí vamos para allá' - yes, yes we're going there.
But before long Porl saw a sign to Cardenas, the road on the left that we were just passing! We got up and after some back and forward discussion between ourselves, the attendant and the driver we all agreed that they weren't actually going where we wanted and we should hop off. So off we got and we joined the other travellers also heading to Cardenas, sitting ourself in a very civilized bus shelter.
The time started going by and gradually the shelter started to fill up, we also started to notice that the main road (behind us) that we had been travelling on before was starting to fill up with big trucks.
Quite a lot of time had gone by now and still no bus. A discussion started at the shelter and from what I gathered there was some kind of strike going on that was affecting the roads around this area and it seemed the buses too. Apparently some of the truck drivers belonged to a co-op and others were self employed. The Co-op was striking (if I got this right) but the self employed drivers didn't want to, this was causing a conflict and there was a roadblock in this area and no one was being allowed through. Especially not the self employed truck drivers.
We waited for ages, the discussion got quite heated, one lady with a basked of vegetables saying that no-one should be able to stop people working, she for one had children that were sick and she needed to feed them, if it was her she wouldn't be able to afford to strike. But a group of workers didn't all agree, they thought that the drivers should all show solidarity. A couple of the men were very outspoken but the little vegetable seller held her ground and got quite vocal too. Quite an interesting discussion. Very fast Spanish though and lots of colloquialisms so I may have got totally the wrong end of the stick, who knows!
Either way, the bus finally arrived much to everyone's relief.
As usually it was fairly cram packed although I was lucky enough to get a seat. Porl on the other hand wasn't quite so lucky jeje.
By the time we arrived at Arlene's the afternoon was getting on and as I had to get back to San Juan to teach my English class we couldn't stay long.
Arlene kindly made us a cup of tea and gave us some pineapple biscuits, we got to meet two of her lovely grandchildren who with a Canadian Dad and Nicaraguan Mum are totally bilingual.
Then we headed back out to wait for a return bus.
As you can see the skies looked a bit threatening and we got excited that we might get the first rain since we've been here ... and we did. About three seconds of rain drops! Ah well, I'm sure we'll get plenty of it soon enough!
A cowboy with his cattle passed us by while we waited.
The kids kept us entertained.
Joaquin and Porl had slingshot competitions.
And eventually the bus arrived.
Porl got a seat this time but it was right behind the driver and he had to clamber over bags and buckets and all sorts to get into it. I should have taken a few action shots as it was rather hilarious!
The bus seemed to have some gear box problems and there was a lot of graunching going on, I'm not sure if it was that that was making Porl look so worried or if it was the effort that it took him to get into his seat, lol :)
As we headed back onto the main road, it seemed that the road block / strike situation had escalated. There were lots of holdups and rather than just the few trucks at the intersection there was now about 5 kilometers of big trucks backed up along the road.
The people seemed pretty relaxed though, some of the drivers had slung up hammocks under their rigs and were just patiently waiting.
On the road between Cardenas and San Juan there are lots of big wind turbines ....
If you look in the background you can see the two volcanos side by side. There's a big lake between them and the land in the foreground.
We must have just timed our trip with the prime time to move cattle as there seemed to be lots of them about.
And then we got stopped again, more cones across the road!
We were thinking that perhaps the strike (huelga) had spread to the road into San Juan but after about 10 minutes out toddled a little road sweeping machine and that had been the reason, so off we went again without any more holdups.
You can see how dry and dusty it is here, this must be nearly 6 months without rain!
It doesn't seem to bother the kids though and here they are having an informal after school game of soccer.
Finally we were back in San Juan and had about half an hour to wolf down some dinner, photocopy tonights lesson and rush up to the hall for the English lesson.
(to be continued)
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