Hello Friends and Family!
I know this is ANOTHER long overdue blog update. That is starting to be a theme! So much has happened and I have done so much in the past few days! Here goes nothing...
So I last left you telling you about my new internship. I had a conference call with the BigPush and it was awesome! It was really nice to feel validated, needed and useful! Something I have definitely NOT felt down here. It was just really cool to talk to very smart, successful women who are passionate about the same issues I am!
Right before Halloween I went to Granada to get contacts. Granada if you may or may not remember, is where I started in Nicaragua. It went a lot easier/better then I thought it would! I got my exam for $2.50!!!!!!! I got contacts for three months for $50, ok price, but the price of the exam made up for it! The hardest part was reading the letters in spanish...I get the vowels (still) confused! I had a fun time in Granada catching up with my friend Olivia who will be shortly in SJDS which is exciting. We will also be going to Panama for about 10 days in December, very exciting!
I realized that I never told you all about my seeing nesting sea turtles. About a month or so ago now, I went to a reserve nearby at night on a tour to see Olive Ridley sea turtles nesting. It is the height of their nesting period right now in SJDS. The reserve was expecting an arrival of 28,000 (yes, 28,000, you read that right!) turtles THAT night to lay eggs. Needless to say, I was super excited. It is something I have looked forward to for months before leaving for Nicaragua. It is about an hour outside SJDS on a HORRIBLE road, in the back of a truck. Thankfully, no motion sickness! We got there and there were two almost dead baby turtles on a table ) : I am not really sure why they were there, but I did get to see how small they are, about 2-3 inches. I saw my first scorpion that night in the bathroom! It was really small, much more so then I would have expected. We went out to the beach with tiny red lights (the turtles don't like light) and there were literally turtles EVERYWHERE. I cannot really convey just how many turtles there really were. I mean they were everywhere. Thousands upon thousands of them. Such an amazing site. We got to watch one Mama lay her eggs in a nest. Once they are laying eggs they are in a semi like trance state and it is ok to stand behind and watch her lay them. The eggs are these perfect round white balls, about the size of a tennis ball. Each mom lays on average around 100 eggs. First she digs the nest with her back fins (so cool to watch!) and then lowers her back end in and lays for about 5 minutes, then covers the hole back up with her fins. The whole process takes about 45 minutes and is utterly amazing to watch. After seeing the thousands of female turtles I knew I wanted to go back to see the babies hatch. Generally, babies hatch in the 3 days proceeding and on the day of the full moon, and the females lay eggs on the 3 days after a full moon. Babies like light, females do not.
About 5 days ago I found out there were babies so signed up to do another tour. This was literally one of the most amazing things I have ever done in my life! When we got there, there were two baskets of baby turtles waiting for us. The turtles generally hatch during the night, but occasionally do so during the day, and when this happens, nearly all are eaten by the birds. Because of this, the scientists step in and rescue the turtles and keep them safe until the night to let them free so they have a better chance of survival. We got to hold the babies (about the length of my palm) and see them squirming about. It was amazing! There were around 70 or so in each basket. We got to take the baskets to the beach, line up, and one by one set babies on the sand to freedom and the ocean! It was an amazing moment and one that I will never forget. Shortly thereafter, we saw sand erupting. It was a nest of turtles hatching! The sand starts to move and all of a sudden, a baby turtle head peaks out!! It is AMAZING! Then all of a sudden the sand falls away and you see tons and tons of little babies everywhere! It takes them about 3 days from hatching to get to the surface of the sand. They incubate for around 45 days. After they are all out of the nest, they make the dangerous trek across the sand to the ocean together. Seriously, I cannot explain how amazing it was to watch this. Unbelievable is the only word I can think to describe it. My guidebook explains it as something you will tell your grandchildren about, and it really was that cool. I have some videos up on facebook, although they are unfortunately low quality as I could not use a flash. If you ever have a chance to do this, seize the opportunity!!!
There was another volunteer down here from the US with the same organization who arrived around 3 weeks ago. She got very sick and I went to the centro de salud (public health center) with her and they diagnosed her as having a Uterine Track Infection/Kidney infection. But her fever was 104 degrees, so the diagnosis seemed a little strange! Two days later she was in a hospital in Managua (the capital) with hemorrhaging Dengue Fever. It is from mosquito bites and is VERY Dangerous. Essentially, your stomach can start to internally bleed at any moment. When I found out she was in Managua I went up to see her. She was soo sick, it was pretty scary. Her white blood cells plummeted and they were going to give her a blood transfusion. She was so sick that the US Embassy called her parents! Her mom flew down to be with her and now she is headed back to the US once she stabilizes. Five days ago I brought her all of her stuff from SJDS since she was forbidden to go back due to a risk of getting dengue again. So she paid for a shuttle and I went to Managua again and dropped her stuff off for her. The whole experience has been pretty crazy. She is on the mend now, just getting more stabilized for the flight back to the US. She was supposed to be here a year and was only here 3 weeks, which sucks! She was also the only person I really knew down here. The hospital in Managua is surprisingly amazing though, only three years old, like anything you would find in the US (or even nicer!).
I decided since I was already up in Managua and nothing was going on in SJDS I would head up to the city of Leon for a few days to see it. So I hopped on a bus with my bag and set off! I have never gone to a place anywhere not knowing where I was staying/what I was doing/etc...so it was an interesting experience. The first hostel I went to was full, so I went across the street and thankfully they had space! Leon is up in the northern area of Nicaragua and is very colonial-ish in a Nicaraguan way. It was fun to see a new city though and I met so many people! It is crazy how many people I meet and make friends with traveling alone!
The hostel across the street advertised doing tours to a local volcano, cerro negro, for "volcano boarding". Without even thinking I thought, "that sounds cool, sign me up!". I didn't really think of anything other then that....We drove out in the back of a truck (my almost normal style of transportation now!) to a beautiful volcano. But as soon as we pulled up, I saw how tall the volcano was (2,388 feet) and the trails that the boards went down I said out loud, "What the hell am I doing here?!?!" I was starting to panic, thankfully I wasn't the only one! We had to hike up from the bottom. The hike up was about 45 minutes-hour but literally the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. We had to carry our boards up and there weren't trails as I had imagined. It was literally like climbing on rocks pulling yourself up, while overlooking the ground...I was freaking and it was really, really intense. I somehow made it up with everyone else and we got to walk around the crater, sooo awesome!! It is crazy, because I know NOTHING I did that day would be legal to do in the US! Walking around craters of active volcanoes, hiking up rocks and boulders with no rails, sledding down volcanoes....you know the usual. It came time for show time and we all put on our awesome orange jumpsuits and goggles and the guide showed us how we were to "sled' down. Every minute my panic increased as I looked down the volcano. It was SOO Far down!!! 2,388 feet (we were at the very top) at a 41 degree incline down. I was told it would take about 45 seconds to get down. Ahhhh!!!!! One girl backed out and walked down. But I was like, ya know what, I have never allowed my fear to hold me back, so what the hell! But at the same time I was like, seriously Kimberly? SERIOUSLY? You are going to slide down an f-ing VOLCANO on a piece of PLY-WOOD?!?! My response: hells yes! I do have a fear of heights though, which begs the question: Why was I on top of a volcano about to sled down it? Go big or die trying. Two Australian girls went first (you raced another person) and they flipped off their boards almost immediately and rolled. I was like, ya I shouldn't have seen that....They were ok and got right back on! It was insane. It was more insane knowing I was about to do that same crazy ass thing. Another American girl was also very freaked out so we "raced" each other down. We went pretty slowly, using the "brakes" aka our feet almost the entire way down. I just kept trying to not panic. The entire time (which felt like FOREVER) I kept thinking OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG mixed with thinking DON'T OPEN YOUR MOUTH DON'T OPEN YOUR MOUTH DON'T OPEN YOUR MOUTH. We were given specific instructions to NOT open our mouths to scream, swear, cry or any other normal reaction one would have to plunging off of a volcano due to the ash/rocks that could/would come in if we did and to NOT put our hands down to stop (we did not have gloves). The cliff drops off and at one point you look like you are just going to go off into oblivion...but you don't. It was literally, hands down, the craziest shit I have ever done in my life. Sometimes I wonder, why do I do this? How do I get into these crazy ass situations? HAHA. But it always turns out awesome and makes a great story!! I just wish I would have gone faster! Next time...Check out my pictures on facebook to really see what I am talking about! I am glad I survived to tell the tale.
An interesting thing happened one morning in Leon. I was sleeping on my top bunk and all of a sudden I heard a siren. A very loud siren like the tsunami warning one in SJDS. I FREAKED out and shot right up in bed and thought, "OMG a tsunami!!!" Well, there were a few other choice expletives thrown in there as well. The night before I decided to try out the mosquito net the hostel provided. As I was panicking trying to get out of bed I wound myself up in my mosquito net and in my panic my flailing arms didn't help to get out of it. I was about to hop out of bed when I realized I was in Leon and not in SJDS where there are no tsunamis....lol. Thankfully, or I would have been stuck in my mosquito net. Then I thought, well wtf is that? A fire? A nuclear bomb warning? When I realized that the hostel staff wasn't scrambling for a fallout shelter I realized what it was: an asshole with a siren. I was so angry. Apparently this guy likes to turn it on every now and again for shits and giggles. I probably looked ridiculous freaking out, stuck in my mosquito net with 7 other people watching me do all that. Oh well, I like to bring the comedic relief. My adrenaline was pumping because I had been woken up thinking I had to run for the hills because of a tsunami so I wasn't able to get back to sleep. Oh and this all went down at 6 am. Asshole.
Leon was a ton of fun and I got to meet a ton of people and made friends with a few that are now in SJDS and are coming here. I traveled back to SJDS (via 3 buses and one cab, argh) with one of the people I met in Leon. It is crazy to think of some of the things I have done while in Nicaragua that I always was a bit afraid to do before. Like traveling alone, being alone, living down here etc...Now traveling alone feels very normal and you really do meet people on the road. Its pretty cool. I think that is about it for now! I am heading to Costa Rica in the next two or so days to renew my visa, where I will spend 3 days. Kristina, her fiancee and dad come in two weeks! I can't believe Thanksgiving is coming so quickly! I will be sad to miss it but will be home soon. It is crazy to think my time here is coming to a close. But what an adventure it has been thus far, with more to come.
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