You know how you kind of chuckle when the car next to you at a traffic light is a jeep with giant mud tires, brush bars, floodlights, a snorkel, and a roof rack that could carry more than the inside of the jeep? And if the person is really into it, they have a 5 gallon gas can on back and perhaps a tall jack that can handle those monster tires. Where is that guy going in Florida to need all of that stuff? Well, in Nicaragua, that stuff is for real. Folks don't have much, but almost all of the vehicles, including mini vans had brush bars on front and back, a lot of them had snorkels, and almost all of the little cars had very expensive Thule luggage racks on top. I spent a bit of time wondering what company had deal to sell all of those racks to the people. I never saw one business that looked like it could even install a brush guard or any of those parts, much less sell them. I laughed a bit at first, until I had driven around the country for a few days, then I started wishing I had all of that stuff on my truck. The brush guards weren't for mudding around on the dirt roads, they were to protect your vehicle from damage in collisions with the many cars, trucks, motorcycles, and livestock that might jump right in front of you at any given time. The roof racks were there because if you had something that could carry people and things, you were in big demand. I didn't see any UPS or any kind of delivery trucks, unless you counted the guys that rode around in a stake truck full of produce with a speaker system announcing "Avocados! Pineapples! Papaya!" Of course, none of that was in English, for the first few times I heard the speaker in the distance, I thought it was revolutionaries trying to gather support, and then found it was the Nicaraguan version of our Ice Cream trucks.
Probably the first time I realized that we were truly in 4x4 country was on the road to the secret beach, where I came home with an image burned into my brain. After struggling down the muddy, winding single-width trail through the jungle in 4 wheel drive mode and in first gear, I came upon something I will probably never understand, sort of like Sasquatch. It was two beautiful women in a late model Mercedes sedan fishtailing down the trail towards us. I pulled over as far as I could, mere inches from a barbed wire fence and watched them slide by, with no idea of where they could be going and how they would get there. If there was one thing in the world more out of place than me in Nicaragua, it was those ladies, that car, and this road. It was one more mystery on this trip, but it was not the last.
The second time I knew why you needed a 4x4 was the time Sam decided that his van could make the trip to Playa Maderas. The three guys climbed in and stacked our boards inside and took off. Our first hint should have been when the van barely made it to the top of the hill in first gear, but we were excited about our last day of surfing at Maderas, and I was certain that I was going to conquer the waves that day. The next hint should have been when we noticed how steep it seemed in the van going downhill to the beach. We had fun in the waves, or the other guys did. I got a beatdown again, and this time the Pacific took my brand new GoPro camera for good measure. If I cried, it wasn't so much for my new toy, it was the realization that it had a 64gb card in it of three day's worth of surfing images that I hadn't yet uploaded to the cloud. In so doing, the ocean made sure that the only images I have of secret beach are in my memory.
While I was bummed about the camera loss, and the feeling that there were probably going to be stories told for years by the locals about some bald-headed gringo on a big orange paddleboard trying to surf Maderas, I was pretty sure that nobody had footage of it, or at least until some extreme low tide day sometime way in the future. My two friends were in good spirits, although I think Miguel had similar feelings about bringing a paddleboard to that break.
It was about halfway up the hill to the Eco Lodge that Sam stopped smiling. Sam is the kind of guy that has been everywhere, done everything and can handle most all of it, including the big waves. However, the shaking truck, and the sliding sound of rubber on mud was confirming something none of us wanted to imagine. We were stuck in the middle of the jungle, uphill on a muddy trail in a brand new forty thousand dollar Toyota van. You are probably thinking that you just pick up your cellphone and call a tow truck. Besides the small matter that none of us had a cellphone that had service since the day we left the USA, we had the problem that none of us had seen anything that even looked like a tow truck the whole trip. I saw that confident smile fade, and listened to Miguel coming up with ideas about how we could get out of this, and I was just thinking about how we were blocking the whole road and all of the traffic to Maderas.
Suddenly, a small truck with dually tires managed to climb it's way around us, and what appeared to be a sixteen year old kid got out and spoke with Miguel and Sam about pulling us up the hill with his truck. I'm thinking that our van weighed more than his truck, but he was excited about helping us and I was starting to feel better until he came back with something that looked like a long belt to tie to our van. That belt didn't look strong enough to pull me up the hill much less the van, but they decided to try it. He got in his truck and revved the engine and Sam revved our engine. There was a loud snap! and the strap was broken. We were goners. The two guys thought I was in shock over the whole deal because I was so quiet, but it wasn't that. I was on the front passenger side of the van and had my window down. Next to me was a head high berm of red clay and beyond that was nothing but jungle. What had my attention was a sound I had never before in my life outside of a horror movie. The closest I can come to describing it was a bad recording of a bunch of dogs barking, or more likely...a monster approaching.
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