Friday, February 5, 2010






Bit of lousy sleep last nite, disco, dogs and pigeon's cooing!! Oh well off to Managua today. Nice b'fast at b&b and down to rental car agency. We rented a sweet Toyota Hilux crew cab. Diesel and a 5spd. The ride to Managua was pretty interesting. Transport trucks, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, cars, horse and ox carts, stray dogs and pedestrians all vying for their pieces of road. The road is actually good, all paved but not very wide. I promised my first born as collateral to rent the truck and Eric drove with a wallet full of drivers licences!! More on that later?? The landscape changes dramatically from SJDS to MAn. Very dry and arid to quite green and many flowering trees and bushes etc. Travelled through one area where the road was lined with landscape flowers and trees. Very pretty. Many volcanoes, some active and very hilly. Also mango groves, bananas, plantains, papayas, rice and sugar cane. Very cool. arrived in Managua mid afternoon, visited a couple shopping malls and got some pictures developed for the kids in Cangrejo. Lisa turned 3 of them loose with disposal's so there was some neat pictures for them. Sandi, we tried hard to find the "big fabric store" that we were told about but no luck. Traffic is insane and Eric was pretty nervous in a rented truck with 4 gringos. Interestingly the fabric stores Lisa and i visited in Rivas was solid colors and mostly rayon/polyester, like the back end of Marshal's.
Any way we we decided to chill out with a beer at a cafe overlooking a water filled volcano crater. Nice spot. A quick change into Rotary gear and off to the Managua club meeting. Very nice hotel. Small club (23) but a small attendance about 10 people. Their club had just hosted a dental/opthamology visit so were very busy. One of their members is a dentist in charge of PR with Colgate so a lot of access to dentists etc. The pres of club spoke English, as well as a lady past pres and her husband and Sandra, the wife of Enrique who we met the day before in SJDS.George presented a banner and all in all it was a great evening. We have made some good friends and contacts that were certainly benefit in the future. Actually it paid off asap as they invited us out to a beach party on Sat to meet the Santa Rosa Rotary club who were here with their mission. At a resort just out of SJDS and they offered us accommodation at the resort at a very good Rotary price. Also Kris and I had a long visit with the lady Sandra. Husband runs a very large international finance/export company and she operates the family tourist/hotel group. She offered us her driver and van from SJDS to drive us up to Granada on Tues, give us a tour then take us on to Man. for flight on Wed. Sweet!! Never know if this will all work out but we hope so. Stayed over at Man. due to being very late so came back today . The hotel was old but very Nica and quiet!! At least after they kicked the Miami bong drummers out. Interesting ride home as we were introduced to Nica highway patrol!!
All home safe and well now, Kris had a little touch of stomach troubles but got a good sleep and is tuning up to feed us a tuna and mackerel supper!!
Awesome place!! Dennis

Well not much more to add to Den's report. The highway patrol tried to get a bribe from Eric for the equivalent of one months pay. Eric negotiated him down to half that but it was still outrageous so he told them to keep his license and he would go and pay the fine to get his license back. That won't be happening so we have a souvenir Nico traffic ticket. Eric says that he has a whole photo album full. We're off to get some stamps, souvenir pottery and the market for Kris's cooking. We're going to stay at the Remanso Beach Resort from saturday till tuesday and will be incommunicado for that time. We will try to pry ourselves off the beach for a quick trip to SJDS to update.
Lisa

Nothing like an exciting hiway ride in a pickup with a stomach full of rumbles. Not the most comfortable road trip but I'm a survivor. Managua is hot, dirty and very busy. Didn't actually get to see much of it as we had some running around to do before the Roatry meeting. Did manage to grab some McDonald's at a mall food court, seriously. Was feeling like a little taste of home. Bought some souvenirs too. The meeting was much better than I had anticipated. Small group and very engaging. Should be a great contact in the future. It will be interesting to meet the Californian Rotarians on Saturday. By far the highlight of the trip was our run in with a gentleman in a blue shirt on the side of the hiway. Apparently if you give him 1500 cordobas or maybe 750 cordobas you can avoid the hassle of going to the bank to pay your 300 cordobas fine and then going to the police station to retrieve your confiscated license. Better yet it might be best to carry a few "disposables" he can hold on to and forget about paying the fine all together.
Kris

So the first thing I'm going to do when we get back to a Sunrise meeting is make a motion to be more like the Managua club, specifically that we have the Flor de Cana that is served at the meeting. The meeting was a little slow starting, scheduled for 7 pm but only 2 members arrived on time, turned out this week was very busy for their club and there were running around with 17 Rotarians from California, and the had no official agenda for this meeting, so we had lots of time to talk about how both their club and ours worked. Lots of good contacts and opportunity to partner on a project in the future. We called Kevin K this morning during the Sunrise meeting but he must have forgot that Dennis said he'd call. We levied him a $10.oo fine.
Back to SJDS and getting groceries for Kris to do up our fish!
Cheers
George

1 comment:

  1. looking good - Thanks George for posting the picture now I know he his really there with you. Have a good fish dinner. Hope Kris is feeling better. Love S

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