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Granada, Nicaragua - May 17, 2002

There is enough room under all the colonnaded porticos of Granada for everyone to find refuge from this sudden afternoon thunderstorm. And even before the rain the streets themselves were wide enough to allow boys to fight, hawkers to sell their odd combs and wristwatches, schoolgirls in uniform to tease and laugh, and beggars to try for a cordoba from one of the few idle tourists that have made it this far into Nicaragua and find themselves sipping icy guava juice on the Plaza Colon.

This is Granada, founded in 1524 by Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba. It stands near sea level along the shores of Lago Nicaragua, an ocean-like expanse of freshwater dotted with towering volcanic islands and inhabited by strange species of fish and freshwater sharks found nowhere else on Earth.

During its early days Granada was locked in a power struggle with liberal Leon, a slightly larger city a hundred or so miles to the northwest. In 1855, in an attempt to emerge victorious, Leonese leaders hired an American trouble maker, William Walker, who conquered Granada and later went on to rule Nicaragua. When he was forced to flee just a year later, he burned much of the city and left an infamous sign in his wake: 'Here was Granada.'

Such meddling from Americans has been a relative constant in Nicaragua's history. When a Communist-leaning party came into power in the late 1970s, President Ronald Reagan began funding counterrevolutionary military groups that operated out of Honduras and even peace-loving Costa Rica. In 1985, when Congress rejected additional funding for this subversive war, the CIA illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the money to fund counterrevolutionaries.

You might forgive the Nicaraguans, then, for not taking too kindly to Americans, but even if there are Nicaraguans angry at the U.S. most of them are simply too polite to make mention of it these days.

I was in Nicaragua for a bit more than a week, and at times it was difficult at times to get over the oddity of being a tourist in a country that still seemed to so freshly have emerged from a conflict. One spectacular afternoon I was in a typical palm-thatched bar literally yards from a stellar Pacific cove in a town called San Juan del Sur-- a single six-foot breaker creating refuge for local boys to tackle the surf -- and though palms arched out toward the water and a handful of sailing sloops bobbed gently back from the beach, just a few yards behind me was a city to a large extent still reeling from years of civil war.

Nicaragua is my first stop in a year-long around-the-world backpacking trip. I am traveling light, and cheap, and with my good friend Laura plan to visit about 38 countries between here and Asia before our time and money run out sometime in June of 2003. Occasionally during this travel year I plan to report back to you some of what I have seen, not because it relates to Utah in any specific way, but perhaps because sometimes travel to a foreign place brings a sort of rare poignancy and understanding the land you used to live in.

But now, unfortunately, I need to end this dispatch: it is raining again, and I have a long walk back to my hotel before it gets dark.

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