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| Cattle feeding in road side ditch |
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| Leafless trees near Bubbling Mudpots |
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| Visitors picking their way amongst Bubbling Mudpots at the base of a Nicaraguan Volcano |
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| Hillside village beside Bubbling Mudpots |
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| Gurgling mud, boiling earth.. |
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| Village children at play |
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| Acid steam rising from mud pots |
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| Village back yard |
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| Hanging up laundry to dry |
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| Eco tourism Nicaraguan style - bicycle rental store |
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| Typical road side home stead |
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| Tethered horse grazing at road side |
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| Village mainstreet with cycle taxi |
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| Taxi stand in Corinto |
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| Two boys playing with 'Pancita', their pet racoon |
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| Main Square in Corinto |
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| Men at Play |
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| Corinto Barber Shop |
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| Shopping street in Corinto |
The brochure proclaims: Corinto is a picturesque coastal town located in the northwest region of Pacific Nicaragua, and with 20,000 inhabitants an important tourist center.
What is does not say is that Nicaragua, after decades of corrupt and repressive governments of various political stripes, internal strife and deadly civil wars, is one of the poorest countries in Central America. Average earnings are about $130 a month, a teacher earns about $100, and a policeman about $300. The 'large' salary of a policeman is based on the hypothesis, that it would inhibit the urge to take bribes. Now they don't take bribes, but 'tips'. To add to the economic misery, the country feels the effect of global warming, it has not rained in 12 months, and rice, corn and bean harvests have failed, remaining food supplies are scarce and sold at high prices.
Nicaraguans certainly don't add to carbon monoxide emissions, they cannot afford to own cars due to high fuel prices. So everyone either rides one of the many skinny horses or a pedal-powered bicycle taxi or - if rich - drives a horse and cart. However, many people have satellite dishes on their shacks, homes constructed from cast off materials, and that hi-tech roof addition is said to keep population growth in check. Nicaraguan rural dwellers used to have 11 children, and city dwellers 7. Now peasants have 7 children and city people 2. TV won out over Catholicism in family planning.
Their biggest income as a country comes from moneys sent from overseas, where enterprising relatives have found work, such as cutting sugar cane and bananas in Costa Rica, or picking fruit and vegetables in North America - at minimum wage of the host country. Thus, poor families survive on a pittance back in Nicaragua. However, despite poverty Nicaragua is still considered a 'viable market' by foreign corporations, as Burgerking, Subway and other fast food outfits sell their wonderful sustenance to local citizens, who are thus taught that junk food is a treat and a status symbol.
Their largest exports, some of it passing through Corinto, which is said to be their largest port with one crane to prove it, are sugar, beef and coffee, as well a shrimp.
They produce sesame seed, sugar, rum, peanuts, cashew nuts and baseball players. One of their countrymen has reached international acclaim as pitcher and with the millions of US dollars earned he built his mother - back in Nicaragua - an ostentatious estate mansion with about a hundred rooms, huge gardens and protective walls and gates. She in turn found it too big for her simple taste, and the monstrosity now houses a couple of dozen related families.
Apparently cutting sugar cane with long straight machetes from morning to night when in season, helps to develop a good pitching or hitting arm - hence such a plethora of base ball players. But - same as for our famous pitching Nicaraguan rags to riches millionaire - the favourite sport for the populace is something else. 30% of the entire population breeds fighting cocks, and bloody competitions held in primitive small circles of rock are the most popular diversion on a Sunday afternoon after church. Betting is brisk, and the little money earned is soon lost.
Nicaraguans cannot afford to buy their prime export beef, nor their prime export shrimp. Every little shack in the country has a few pens, constructed of 'living fences' of hedges and sprouting plants, where chickens peck away in the dust, pigs are being hand fed by the family kids, or the odd gaunt cow moos sadly in the heat, and a few goats browse on the straggly bushes.
One tourist was wondering 'whether they have inside plumbing'...
They don't even have decent outside walls or roofs....a few poles usually give privacy to outside biffies.
Road side ditches are not only filled with plastic refuse, but with herds of cattle (not for export), horses and goats, who search out the scant vegetation growing between the cracked dirt amongst rubble and garbage. The odd mounted herder makes sure, that the animals keep to the ditch and are not run over by traffic. However, roads are empty, because - see above - no cars and expensive fuel keeps traffic to a minimum.
Astonishingly, the population has an incredibly positive attitude to life: no job, no money - but we have a happy face.
And so it seems, after conversing with villagers, barbers, pedal taxi drivers, street side vendors and school children occasionally.
Nicaraguans crave education, literacy rate is barely 65-70%...so many are not only unemployed but unemployable in present day skilled work.
I toured 'the country' for a few hours today, where I visited 'the bubbling mud pots'. Nicaragua, like the other Central American Countries lies on the Ring of Fire, and is home to a whole string of volcanoes, of which six are active. A lava river, ten meters below ground, connects many of these volcanoes. In various spots, pressure from below is such, that energy escapes in form of 'vents', which instead of hot air, emit acid fumes from gurgling holes in the ground, where red and brown liquid mud boils in churning cauldrons of moonscape appearance.
Pumice and lava is porous, hence volcanic mountains absorb a lot of ambient humidity. The moisture filters through the arid landscape to form a 'manto friatico' , a water deposit, four meters below ground. One wanders over this treacherous steaming bed of dried earth interspersed with boiling mud pots without the faintest trace of any water at all anywhere.
A few shacks make up a dismal looking little village, where there are more chickens, ducks and turkeys populating the earthen yards, than there are people. Children offer little clay pots in exchange for a dollar. They are relatively shy and have not yet learned to push themselves and their wares on visiting tourists. But, poor as the villagers are, their packed dirt yards are swept clean and often decorated with orchids planted in rusty tin cans and tied to poles holding up a corrugated tin roof.
It was hellishly hot around these mud pots, lava streams heat the ground from below, steam heats the surroundings, and a merciless sun bakes everything from above. One cannot but feel respect for the villagers, who scrape out a living here....
