Make Some Noise

Vida Nica - Dry land thoughts from the beerfloat.calm world

Nicaragua, Make Some Noise – by Corliss Buenavida

I've been meaning to have a T-shirt made with...

...printed on it.

It speaks volumes, see the pun there, about life in San Juan Del Sur and so appropriate to the native culture.

Here is a slice of that life in the form of your first day visiting.

You are arriving from a foreign nation which likely means getting into the country in the mid to late afternoon followed by the 2 or so hour drive from either of the two nearest international airports. So, let’s say you get in around dinner time, find your accommodation and get settled in with a chilled adult beverage. You are tired because of the long travel day and tempted by that bed. This also just happens to be the one time of day when there is often a little lull in town, so all is peaceful.

However, a nap is out of the question as you are excited to see what this little fishing village you have heard so much about has to offer. Off to the beach for a walk as sunset approaches. As you walk along the road you hear a squawky sound approaching. It sounds like someone talking through a megaphone and it is getting louder. Ahead you see a pickup truck round the corner with a full load of scrap metal in the back and a loudspeaker mounted above the cab playing a recorded message. If you understand Spanish, you can pick out a few words about buying cans or anything else made of metal.

The blaring barrage has now passed, and you are onto the wide swath of sand between the bay and the beachfront bars. As you walk along you see a few young men in a circle with a soccer ball trying to keep it from touching the ground using just their feet and heads while a boombox blasts out a Latin dance tune. Blending in is another Spanish song coming from one of the little cinderblock and tin buildings overlooking the playa and this track blends into yet another. Curious you walk up the beach away from the water and can't help but hear that every little bar has its own sound system, and they are trying to out do their neighbours volume but from your short distance away it is just a raucous cacophony.

Welcome to San Juan Del Sur beach life. Now I like my tunes and can appreciate most types of music but if you are looking for a quiet peaceful holiday or place to live, this town ain't for you.

That's just the start of possible resonating refrains you might hear. Often temporary stages are set up around the village for performances of various kinds usually with a couple of tall stacks of speakers to make sure everyone must listen.

Many of the bars and restaurants which are all 'open air' will have bands playing regularly and if your neighbourhood has locals living there you can expect a karaoke event or a sing along, clap along prayer meeting sometime during your stay. That is, if they are not already blasting Latino tunes all day!

But music is just a starting point. If someone has ordered a taxi or a friend is coming to do a pick up, the way to let the passenger know they are waiting outside is to honk a horn, with a three-honk minimum before attempting another method of communication.

Very similar to the metal buyer there are various vendors either in small trucks, horse drawn carts or tricycle vending carts who will be announcing their wares via a megaphone or by simply yelling out to potential customers. Fresh fruit anyone? Want a Creamsicle? There are also vehicles which drive around with recorded messages over peaceful music letting us know of a funeral happening in the near future. Actually, this isn’t so bad because it lets us know when the only road into and out of town might be blocked by a procession.

But the worst are the advertising trucks announcing a party or other big event. In most civilized parts of the world this voluminous onslaught would be considered noise pollution and subject to large fines. A couple of weeks ago one stopped outside my casa because the driver went to a neighbour’s house for a chat. After a few minutes of enduring the tirade, I popped out onto the street and unplugged his amp from his generator bringing relief to the hood. Short lived however as he plugged back in to continue his route down the street a little later.

Also on the street, be prepared for revving car engines (as they try to get them going), racing motorcycles or ATVs (just because they can), tires skidding on loose gravel up a steep hill, brake squeals as vehicles come down those same slopes and the roar of large trucks in low gear passing with full loads of construction material. When the trucks or loud ‘motos’ go by it triggers our local Mantled Howler monkeys to start a roar of their own and they are called howlers for a reason.

This leads me to point out other sounds from the animal world. Many residents have guard dogs who will bark at anyone who walks by from behind their fences and gates. You can tell when some one is walking home at night based on the approaching sounds of barks from each respective household. When all the dogs go at once its probably a possum or wild cat walking down the street. Someone who lives down the back lane from ‘pool float central’ has a parrot who can do a pretty good dog bark imitation too!

Meanwhile at the south end of town where I reside in The Villa many locals raise their own chickens and roosters who don’t understand when morning is and thusly go about crowing at all times of the day and night. Some families have larger lots here at the edge of town, so they are raising pigs also. The squealing is maximized when the slop gets dumped in their territory. We even have a small cattle farm on the little mountain at the south end of the community, so we get to hear the lowing of cattle when they come over to this side of the ridge. I like their sound!

Monkeys excepted; those are the (somewhat) domesticated animals. Next, the birds of the region.

Yes, there are a few caged parrots, not an issue, but there are a few wild avian creatures with fairly annoying sound behaviours, whether it is sheer numbers creating a loud dissonance or just an individual pesky fella who likes to hear his own chirp. Great-tailed grackles can actually be placed in both categories. Separately they can make a variety of loud squawks, whistles and electronic sounding buzzes but at dusk they gather in huge flocks combining all these sounds. As you may have read previously, I don’t find a lot of redeeming qualities in this bird so thank goodness their local favourite tree is down the block a few hundred meters!

Parakeets will sometimes amass above my pool deck, but these are usually short-lived shrill sessions before they move ‘en masse’ to another tree. As a birder most of the other fairly loud bird sounds such as those from the wrens, owls, kiskadees, and woodpeckers, are pleasant enough and I actually listen for them in hopes of identifying a new sound and species in the vicinity. In a separate post, I will chat about the Villa birds being sure to single out what the locals call Urraca or White-throated Magpie-jay, some of whom like to practice vocalizations with ever increasing intensity starting at about four in the morning.

So, if you wake easily through the night then you will be spending a lot of money on electricity to keep your air conditioner running to block out all the sounds that are - Nicaragua.

A little later in the still dark morning the town’s catholic church will start to ring its bells. This is really a practical sound to many locals who use it as their alarm for preparing for work or school. Each town has its own sequence of bells with a small clanging on each quarter and half hour while the big ring is on the top of the clock. If a religious institution is going to force its way into my eardrums, then I much prefer this to listening to the loudspeaker ‘calls to prayer’ from almost every Islamic Mosque in the Arab world. I had to change hotels once because my room was right across the street from one of four blaring mega-speakers mounted atop their spire. In San Juan Del Sur even the church is on ‘Nica Time’ with their bells tolling 3 minutes late every time.

A couple of other natural sounds you may hear are weather dependent. In rainy season you can count on thundering downpours often preceded by actual thunder. If you have experienced a tropical rain schedule, then you know they often just pass through a couple of times per day and can be very localized so I might be completely dry while I watch the storm from my roof deck as it blasts my friends who live at the north of the beach. I’ll still hear the thunder of course and also that from multiple other cells circulating in the area but viewing the lightning filled clouds all around at night is quite impressive.

The other tropical rain is the one that comes with a tropical depression, like the kind which form before they become Tropical Storms and possibly even Hurricanes. These large moisture laden air masses move slowly so they can pass over the area for a couple of days all the while unleashing heavy drops which pound on my neighbour’s metal roof or your rental roof. Its LOUD, just so you know!

Finally, I must mention 'bomba season'. This has a special place in my heart & and eardrums!

So, a bomba, is a firecracker, and often a big fat one with a very big bang. Basically, a small bomb. Some are smaller and they will be lit as a group for a multi-burst of sound and then others are launched on sticks which get shot high in the air like visual fireworks, but these don't present any colours or extensive light show, just a big explosion which the entire town can hear.

For some reason, 'La Purisma', the nine-day celebration of the Virgin Mary, has been tied together with simulating the sounds of a war zone, so 'bombas' go on sale and the good parents go out and get their small children bombs to play with.

Now, I'm not a religious person, in fact I think all religions are basically cults, but I am completely open to someone having their own spirituality, just don't try to sell your false gods to me. But from talking with people who grew up in a Catholic world I don't recall anyone telling me about when God or Jesus said, "...and the skies will be filled with man made thunder."

Now the children don't grow out of this tradition until the are seriously old, so almost everyone who has the means, at any time of day or night, starting around the beginning of December, can toss a small bomb into the street or onto an even better sounding board, the previously mentioned metal roof. Then, my math might be wrong, but I believe the 12 days of Christmas explosions starts the next day and what the heck New Year's is right around the corner so lets make it about 35-40 days of ear cracking excitement!

Of course, the New Year’s celebration is like just about everywhere else in the world, a culmination of boombastic behaviour with not just firecrackers but also spectacular (and some pretty average) firework displays. It actually seems like the only time Nicaraguans are not on Nica Time is when they have fireworks to launch so starting shortly after dark, they start going up with the big shows happening around the midnight hour. But that's not the end of bombas, they go on until supplies run out in early January.

Did I mention the siren tests for tsunami warnings?

That's what living in San Juan Del Sur sounds like.

Have a bang of a float,

Corliss

beer float.calm = beerfloat.net not beerfloat.com