Letters From Nicaragua: Part 9 - The Incident At Maderas

The Eco Lodge was really rustic, but if you like rustic, we had the honeymoon suite. We had the room at the top of the mountain and from our front porch, you could see forever on three sides. There was a constant cool 30mph wind and you had the feeling you could just sit up there all day...or that is what Pam did, while I found the only way to work up a sweat there, carrying all of our luggage up the 50 rock steps to the top. The place was so eco-friendly that you were not to put toilet paper in the toilet and the shower had one temperature....not hot. I didn't really mind any of that and neither did Pam, but she did start noticing that the mosquito netting on the bed was not just for looks and not just for mosquitos. I've never seen so many different kinds of bugs, especially beetles. On the sink, in the shower, and in Pam's hair. At first she screamed when she found one on her, later she would just pull them off, take a second look and toss them off the balcony.

While I was making what seemed like my 100th trip up the steps, with somehow more stuff than we carried on the plane, Pam managed to get really hurt by just standing on the balcony. It turns out that the wind is such an issue there, that the rooms had huge tarps tied up to block the wind. Our tarp wasn't quite secure enough and blew a chair over onto her foot.
A little note about the furniture in Nicaragua. I believe that it was Miguel that picked this up from one of his many acquaintances on the trip, that termites are a problem and that a lot of furniture is made from a really dense wood that termites won't eat. All I know is that most furniture looks rough and is really, really heavy. The bar chair that landed on her foot probably weighed 50 lbs. The top of her foot swelled up like a baseball and her whole foot turned an bright red.
When I arrived at the top of the steps, proud that I had finally carried the last bit and could sit down and have a beer, I found her sobbing on the floor and saying that there was no way she could get back down the steps. It was then I realized that there was no EMT, no doctor, no x-rays, no nothing but figure-it-out-yourself.