by Randy Denmon
We plowed on, around a few potholes and through a few no-account villages. These rural Central American towns had all started to look the same—shabby, wooden shacks; dark, affable, and carefree citizens clustered around the road; trash as abundant as grass. Here, the landscape was more open, flat, less verdant, the land parched and sunburned. This wasn’t a theme park or parade—the prevalent horses and wagons weren’t props, but actually conducted meaningful chores. Still, I couldn’t believe the helpful nature of the Nicas and how easily we’d gotten over the border.
• • •
No country should have more disdain for Americans than Nicaragua, as no country has ever had more internal meddling from the Colossus of the North. One of the country’s first presidents was a nineteenth-century American adventurer, William Walker, who wrested power from the locals. He was later ousted by the Costa Ricans and Hondurans, the latter planting him on their eastern shore.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Marines invaded and occupied the country twice in a twenty-year span, fighting pitched battles with leftist guerrillas. Famous Marines like Roy Geiger, Joseph Henry Pendleton, Chesty Puller, and Merritt “Red Mike” Edson cut their teeth chasing leftists or their colorful leader, Augusto Sandino, the Central American version of George Washington. (Of course, George Washington won his revolution.) Marine General Smedley Butler later claimed:
I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.
A little note on Chesty Puller. He has a famous quote that brings back fond memories of my days in the military. Forced to review a bunch of dressed-up, uninspired Marines, maybe here in Nicaragua, he uttered the timeless words: “Take me to the brig. I want to see the real Marines.”
The future generals were hard on the imperialist Japanese, but they never caught Sandino. For that, we installed a military dictator who finished the job. General Anastasio Somoza García and his sons ruled the country for the next fifty years.
Their regime was one of the most authoritarian and brutal of the twentieth century until the Sandinista Nicaraguans (named after Sandino) threw them out, and the United States hired the Contras to undo this in the 1980s. For more than a hundred years, much of the fighting was here, in the north around the liberal bastions of Chinandega and León.
Why America has interfered so often in Central America is open to debate. Every scholar has an opinion. Surely, some of it was due to imperialistic motives. More probable is the vain idealism of Rudyard Kipling’s poem more than a century old, “The White Man’s Burden” —though it might be costly and burdensome, it is the “civilized” white man’s obligation to force our “superior” system on the uncivilized brown people for their benefit. Henry Kissinger had a more pragmatic view in the midst of the Cold War:
I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.
• • •
We drove on, the citizens scarce and land opening up, row crops and grassland becoming rampant. We passed through Reserva Genéticos Apacunca, one of the few remaining wild cornfields on the planet.
An hour into Nicaragua and through the miles of sugarcane, we passed through Chinandega. The fertile volcanic soil around the city is some of the richest in the Americas. The heat and rainfall produce bountiful cotton, sugercane, and oranges. Chinandegans shouldn’t like us here either. During the Marine Corps incursion of the 1920s, much of the town was gutted by American flying mercenaries
On and on we went, around the cars, potholes, horses, and volcanoes, down the old rail corridor. Nicaragua’s railroads, built in the 1880s by the famous American rail engineers Henry Meiggs and Minor Keith, who constructed many of the railroads in the Andes, and John Edward Hollenbeck, an early developer of Los Angeles, are sadly no longer in service. Constructed only fifteen years after the American Transcontinental Railroad, they were ripped up a decade ago, the steel sold for scrap.
In Chichigalpa, we passed the distillery for the famous Nicaraguan rum, Flor de Caña (Flower of the Cane), and possibly the oldest sugarcane mill in the world, Ingenio San Antonio, first noted by the French pirate William Dampier in 1685.
Cautiously studying the range meter, we rolled through León. Founded along with Granada in 1524 by the Spaniard Francisco Hernández de Córdoba as one of the country’s two principal cities, León, called the white city for its adobe buildings, is known for its liberalism. The ruling powers of the city and the conservative stronghold Granada have been at each other’s throats for almost five hundred years. It’s not so much a rich-versus-poor thing, as it’s mostly rich conservatives against rich liberals, kind of like America. Once the country’s capital, the crumbling colonial beauty was home to Nicaragua’s most famous poet, Rubén Darío. It was also here, in 1956, that the poet Rigoberto López Pérez shot and killed the American puppet dictator, General Anastasio Somoza García.
Actually, this isn’t even the original León. The city’s been moved, the residents tired of rebuilding it due to Volcano Momotombo’s perpetual activity.
We made a left in León, the road to Granada going right by Old León, a World Heritage Site eighteen miles away. We were making such good time, I thought we might stop and check it out, but a few miles outside of León we hit a hitch. The road was closed for construction. There was no re-route. It simply dead-ended. You would think there’d be a sign somewhere in León, “Road Closed Ahead,” “Don’t Go this Way,” whatever!
I pulled over, alarm bells going off in my brain. With the limited charging the night before, we were cutting it close today—the closest of the trip. Our goal was Granada, 185 miles from Choluteca. We started the day with 188 miles of EPA range, probably actually a tad over 200 miles with our slow pace. We didn’t have much room for error.
We checked our maps. The night before I’d found a few hotels in Granada where I thought we could get a charge. Correlating the GPS with the maps, we deliberated. There was another road out of León. It would add about twenty miles to our trip. This, and the extra driving getting here and back to León ruled out Granada. Scanning the maps, we decided on Managua, the country’s capital. We could make it there, but with little spare juice. We couldn’t afford another wrong turn or construction detour. I exhaled a long breath. We had no other options except León.
We hastened back to León and across the rolling terrain. Dean diligently held the map and studied the GPS to make sure we stayed on course.
“If something doesn’t look right,” I said, lighting up, “we’ll stop and sort it out. We don’t have enough spare power for even a small wrong turn.”
“Relax. I got it under control. You just smoke your nasty-ass Honduran cigarettes and drive.”
We passed volcano after volcano, four or five in a thirty-mile span, a few smoking pretty good. It’s hard to convey the quantity of volcanoes on this portion of the planet. In the last 350 miles, we had driven by more than forty active volcanoes. That stretch of road is about the same as the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Chicago to St. Louis, or Washington DC to Boston.
Even for a flatlander like me, the novelty of seeing volcanos wore off after our first day in Guatemala, but Nicaragua’s volcanos are different—much more splendid, probably because they sit on the somewhat flat ground of the coastal step, penetrating the sky above fluttering golden fields. They’re everywhere, and you motor so close you can see the steep, symmetrical slopes collide with the land as you drive through their shadows. What a strange and exotic experience. I felt utter excitement for the first time in days.
We drove past the magnificent Volcano Momotombo, along the shore of the four hundred-square-mile Lake Managua. Like many in Central America, it also serves as a toilet and swimming was not recommended.
On to Ciudad Sandino and into Managua, as Dean searched the GPS for hotels, finding only the Crowne Plaza. He punched it in.
Looking at the GPS, I made a left turn from the wrong lane. A
local street cop pulled me over, determined to write me a ticket.
I took Dean’s advice, acting dumb. To every inquiry, I simply presented my passport and driver’s permit, muttering, “Norte Americano, no hablo Español.”
The officers spoke among themselves, scribbling on their ticket-pad.
I didn’t want to get a ticket. No telling what it would entail to pay it.
They asked a few more questions. “What is your local address?” etc.
I continued to play dumb.
Finally exhausted and probably realizing this was more trouble than it was worth, the officer wadded up the paper, shook his finger at me, and motioned us on.
Trying to follow the GPS, I darted through Managua and its more than two million residents, a large portion crammed onto the winding, tree-lined city streets. Wrong turn after wrong turn, we made our way to the Crowne Plaza.
Driving in Managua is the motorized equivalent of running with the bulls in Spain. The city’s been razed by earthquakes so many times, it has no center or grid, just a labyrinth of mesmerizing streets that cut through the jungle, or through the shambles of a one-time market or neighborhood. Guidebooks have entire sections dedicated to navigating the city, since Mother Nature’s disruptions have left it virtually without street addresses. You find your way around literally by compass, with addresses referencing distances and directions from a lake, monument, or “something else.” If that ”something else” was destroyed in an earthquake, well, stop and ask someone.
Into the brouhaha we went. I was getting used to Central American driving, more akin to wrestling that entails a lot of smoking, honking, and rude gestures, requiring only the finger that the natives rely on, like a rolling soccer game. Here, tailgating appeared to be the national sport, and a few times I wondered if I’d missed the sign that said we were now supposed to drive on the left side of the road.
I finally turned off the volume on the GPS, tired of it telling me to take a left when there was no road. At the numerous red lights, we got a break and a chance to take in the cauldron of urban disorder, ruckus, noise, and dirty streets, where Western comforts sat alongside third-world poverty. I saw the unimaginable, a mother riding a moped with a baby cradled in her arms, and a few cars bellowing smoke so thick that back home, even in Louisiana, the environmental police would be ready to lock the poor drivers up and turn the cars into metal shreds.
A bus was crammed so tight, a half-dozen people hung out of the doors and windows. Pedestrians of every sort mingled along the road. It’s always amazed me that, despite the relative poverty here, beggars and street dangers are significantly less visible than in much wealthier places. Income levels in New York’s Garment District are some of the highest in the world, but a stroll around Penn Station might lead a stranger to think that half the population is either homeless or hardened criminals. Here, everyone looks friendly.
Then we saw Hugo, Hugo Chavez that is, decorated with thousands of golden light bulbs. The gigantic steel mural sat in the middle of a large traffic circle, now known as Hugo Chávez Eternal Comandante Rotonda. The monument was recently erected by America’s longtime nemesis, Daniel Ortega, the current president and onetime arch-enemy of Ronald Reagan. A hard-boiled Communist in the 1970s and ’80s, he’s moderated his views to accommodate the new world order, a mix of capitalism, socialism, and democracy. And yes, he’s a poet too.
Through the ruckus of traffic, Dean saw the Crowne Plaza poking up above the tall trees and buildings.
I still didn’t know how to get there. We motored into the traffic circle and were swept around Hugo, dumped off on a side street going the wrong way. We did pass an eerie testament to Managua’s past, the Tribune Monumental, built by the Somoza regime as a huge stone grandstand for watching military parades. Now defaced and strewn with weeds, it resembled some of the Nazis’ viewing structures for rallies—once the center of a country’s attention, but now hidden away in disrepair, only visited by tourists, an everlasting reminder of the country and its leaders’ sins.
Tired of going nowhere, we parked, and Dean took off on foot to find the route. In this maze of concrete, the simplest form of exploration is the one that often works.
Through the Lobby
Down to thirty miles of range, I pulled into the Crowne Plaza, ten stories of concrete shaped like a pyramid. If nothing else, it likely had an English speaker who could help us find a charge. I scanned the parking area, looking for the mechanical room, then studied the lobby, scrutinizing the available power.
We were learning the art of charging as we went, and my recent education taught me to look for something that might work before talking to the hotel staff. This would help my cause and reduce the turmoil. I could show them what I needed instead of asking them. The Crowne Plaza didn’t look promising. The hotel had central air. Everything was 120 volts, and if it had a mechanical area, it was hidden away somewhere.
More importantly, I’d discovered a few key points that produced positive results when haggling with locals for power: be persistent, convey a sense of doom, and muchas propinas (liberal tipping).
I explained our situation to the polite young woman at the front desk, and she relayed our problem to the manager, a man about my age who spoke terrific English.
I was soon walking the grounds with three of the hotel’s maintenance crew, including the resident electrician. I showed him the car, and he spent fifteen minutes admiring it and taking a few pictures. I had discovered that lifting the hood to show there was no engine produced the biggest effect, often inducing a jumble of quick Spanish. Today was no different.
“De Texas a aquí,” I said. “No gasolina.”
The electrician’s eyes and smile got big. “Yes?”
I pulled out some cash, twenty American. The Latin eyes got bigger. I showed the electrician all my extension cords and the charging adapter. “Doscientos cuarenta voltios.”
The electrician pondered a few seconds, rubbing his hands together. He then led Dean and me into the hotel’s convention center across the street. We walked through the grand lobby, the ballroom, and then down some steps to a little room filled with wires.
The electrician pointed to the breaker box, illuminating it with a flashlight.
I surveyed the boxes and wires, but saw no socket.
He pointed to two big wires, dead-ending out of the fuse box. “Doscientos cuarenta voltios.”
I studied the situation, calculating. I raised my hand, putting my thumb and index finger close together. “Un momento.”
I stepped back and gauged the distance from the street through the lobby and ballroom to the electrical room. Our two hundred-foot extension cord would likely reach here. If not, I had another one hundred-foot cord we could add to the end of it. I walked to the car, got my plug bag, grabbed one of the plug adapters that fit the extension cord and removed the male end, leaving the three leads exposed. I grabbed the Tesla’s charging adapter, my flashlight, and the plug, and strolled back to the electrical room.
With amazement, Dean and I watched the electrician wire us up directly to the breaker box. In no time, we plugged in the adapter and got a green. We then pulled the car in front of the convention center and stretched the cord through the lobby, jamming it under one of the eight 16-foot-tall glass doors. We were charging at 25 amps. The traveling circus was in business. We’d be fully charged by five in the morning.
I shook everyone’s hand. The hotel staff laughed and joked, full of Latin carefree bliss. The maintenance crew seemed to enjoy the madness more than we did.
Checking in, I inquired about the hotel doing our laundry, not cleaned since we left Texas, and in dire need of some soap and water.
“Sí,” the young woman at the front desk said with a smile.
I pointed to my watch. “Este noche. Vamos muy temprano in la mañana.”
“Yes, by seven or eight tonight,” she said in English. “There are some fine cafés and bars near the hotel. Would you like some suggestions?
”
“Maybe later,” I said, taken aback by how friendly and helpful all the Communists were, especially to such an obvious imperialist.
Utilizing the hotel’s business center, I emailed Bill Moore, of EV World, and after a brief exchange of emails, we set the interview for six that night. I looked at my watch, a twenty-five-dollar Timex that I’d bought in basic training more twenty-five years ago. It had been around the world with me several times, through a war, across oceans, to mountain summits, and everywhere in between. It still ticked away, accurate as a Rolex.
It was only a little after two. We’d covered the 180 miles, including the border crossing and the dead-end side trip in just under eight hours. Not like a drive down I-20 from Shreveport to Dallas, but pretty good for Central America. More importantly, for the first time since leaving Mexico, we were charging with some sunlight left in the day to relax or take care of much-needed chores.
I walked back outside. By now, a half-dozen Nicas stood around the car, inspecting the strange machine. I later discovered that the English-language newspaper in Managua had done a brief story about the electric car passing through the country’s capital.
With its strange shape, the hotel itself, formerly the Hotel Intercontinental, was something of an historical landmark. Perched high in the Barrio Martha Quezada, it sat only a few blocks from most of the government buildings. Just down the hill was a park and the site of the old Casa Presidencial, where the Somoza gang executed the revolutionary Augusto Sandino in 1934. One of the few buildings to survive the massive 1972 earthquake that killed six thousand, injured twenty thousand, and left another quarter million homeless, the hotel has over the years hosted such famous guests as Howard Hughes, dozens of foreign journalists during the revolution of the 1980s, and even the Sandinista government at one time.
Managua was founded with little planning, a compromise capital between Granada and León, which were always fighting. Of course, they didn’t have seismologists then. The city sits almost exactly on a tectonic fault line, the intersection of the Cocos and Caribbean Plates. It’s been destroyed twice in the last century, 1931 and 1972.