¡NICARAGUA SI!: Walking the Walk

Exercise and I have never have never achieved any sort of comfort level together. I have always accepted the importance of physical workouts for a healthy body, just as I have never doubted the need to floss my choppers. Acceptance of these truths has yielded only sporadic adjustments in both cases to my preferred, rather slothful, pace of living. When I quit smoking 15 tears ago, I wondered if my increased lung function would lift that indolent veil and find me leaping, sylph-like, from one cardio-positive nostrum to the next, brimming with vitality. Alas, no, my cigarette-less oral fixation leapt, slug-like, instead, to eating and drinking to excess, until I leveled off some 50 pounds heavier.

Here, now, in this tropical clime, I have embraced the slower pace that comes with the heat of the Nicaragua sun. Here, we do not hustle. Ever. We amble, we mosey, we sashay, and sometimes, we even move so slowly that we actually stop, especially under the odd shade tree, until we resume movement toward some eventual end.

The only time of day in which purposeful locomotion is at all feasible is at about 5:30 in the morning. For about an hour, it is almost cool. Not only that, but the street is empty, save for the occasional pig or skinny dog, and Brynn and I can hoof the mile to the beach at La Boquita and put our toes in the surf for a few minutes before we reverse course for home. My wretched knees complain, the sun hits its stride, and the world wakes up before we arrive back at the house, but I feel so virtuous that I almost immediately decide to do it all again the next morning.

Here is the little pizza place just down our road, open Thur-Sun. The pizza is simply delicious!

A little further along is this hostel, with a "siesta rate" (see canoe) of 200 cordobas ($7.50) for a

four-hour "no tell motel" arrangement.

This is the entrance to the tourist center of La Boquita, with a "pulperia" that sells no rum or cigarettes, which is the only reason to go to a pulperia.