Managua
I know I'm weird.
Most people, if faced with the choice between spending one's last day of travels in either a much-loved crystal-blue lagoon filling an extinct volcanic crater or a much-reviled, amorphous and rapidly-growing capital city, would choose the former.
I, on the other hand, made a bee-line for Managua. I'm a city person and a contrarian, and it was for me the more interesting option. All I'd seen of it so far were the airport, a few bus stations, and the snatches of street life I'd caught from taxi rides between those exit points.
My first reaction: I didn't hate it. After a few hours, actually, I found myself developing an odd affection for this bizarre city. It's unlike any place I'd ever been to and it violated all my internal principles of navigability, but it works somehow. A little background:
Granada and León were Nicaragua's principal colonial cities, representing very different aspects of the the political culture; Managua (a small fishing village) was chosen as the capital in the mid-19th century as a sort of compromise. During the 20th century, its population exploded, but the effects of having a major earthquake every couple of decades has caused entire neighborhoods to be abandoned and new sections to be built seemingly at random. It looks now as if a dozen groups decided to each build a part of the city on their own, with the assumption that someone somewhere else would take care of the "downtown" idea. There is no downtown. There is no governmental or business center. What there is is a residential/commerical neighborhood here, then a gap, and then another neighborhood, and another gap, and then a mall (built in the last five years). And then a crater lake.
What's remarkable about Managua is that when you're standing on a hill* in the center of it, you do not see a city of 1.5 million people around you. You see lots of trees, interrupted by the occasional hotel/mall or cathedral**.
Despite its uninviting reputation, it's actually a rather interesting place to wander around in. The major drawback to this is that maps aren't widely available, and even the ones that are available aren't a huge help because most of the streets don't have names. "Addresses" are based on the distance and direction from a given landmark (or the previous location of a decades-gone landmark). As the sort of person who is loath to yield my freedom of navigation to cabdrivers, it was a bit of a challenge learning to get myself around.*** Eventually, I resigned myself to hopping on buses at random just to see if I could get anywhere close to where I was going. (I'm happy to report that it worked.)
Finally, Managua is a safe city. I never felt threatened, and more than anything else, I found that people were curious about why I was there if not on business. The truth is, I guess I'm just even more of an urbanist that I thought.
* (next to a black metal silhouette of General Sandino nearly a hundred feet high--it's not visible from the entire city, but there were a few times I'd be walking in a distant neighborhood and happen to catch sight of it, and jump)
** In case you're wondering: when it's not artfully lit, the cathedral's milk-bottle/concrete-box design can be astonishingly ugly.
*** The biggest surprise for me was that using my shadow as a compass wasn't much help when I hadn't realized that my shadow would be pointing due east by 1:30 in the afternoon. The joys of latitude-awareness are manifold.
Most people, if faced with the choice between spending one's last day of travels in either a much-loved crystal-blue lagoon filling an extinct volcanic crater or a much-reviled, amorphous and rapidly-growing capital city, would choose the former.
I, on the other hand, made a bee-line for Managua. I'm a city person and a contrarian, and it was for me the more interesting option. All I'd seen of it so far were the airport, a few bus stations, and the snatches of street life I'd caught from taxi rides between those exit points.
My first reaction: I didn't hate it. After a few hours, actually, I found myself developing an odd affection for this bizarre city. It's unlike any place I'd ever been to and it violated all my internal principles of navigability, but it works somehow. A little background:
Granada and León were Nicaragua's principal colonial cities, representing very different aspects of the the political culture; Managua (a small fishing village) was chosen as the capital in the mid-19th century as a sort of compromise. During the 20th century, its population exploded, but the effects of having a major earthquake every couple of decades has caused entire neighborhoods to be abandoned and new sections to be built seemingly at random. It looks now as if a dozen groups decided to each build a part of the city on their own, with the assumption that someone somewhere else would take care of the "downtown" idea. There is no downtown. There is no governmental or business center. What there is is a residential/commerical neighborhood here, then a gap, and then another neighborhood, and another gap, and then a mall (built in the last five years). And then a crater lake.
What's remarkable about Managua is that when you're standing on a hill* in the center of it, you do not see a city of 1.5 million people around you. You see lots of trees, interrupted by the occasional hotel/mall or cathedral**.
Despite its uninviting reputation, it's actually a rather interesting place to wander around in. The major drawback to this is that maps aren't widely available, and even the ones that are available aren't a huge help because most of the streets don't have names. "Addresses" are based on the distance and direction from a given landmark (or the previous location of a decades-gone landmark). As the sort of person who is loath to yield my freedom of navigation to cabdrivers, it was a bit of a challenge learning to get myself around.*** Eventually, I resigned myself to hopping on buses at random just to see if I could get anywhere close to where I was going. (I'm happy to report that it worked.)
Finally, Managua is a safe city. I never felt threatened, and more than anything else, I found that people were curious about why I was there if not on business. The truth is, I guess I'm just even more of an urbanist that I thought.
* (next to a black metal silhouette of General Sandino nearly a hundred feet high--it's not visible from the entire city, but there were a few times I'd be walking in a distant neighborhood and happen to catch sight of it, and jump)
** In case you're wondering: when it's not artfully lit, the cathedral's milk-bottle/concrete-box design can be astonishingly ugly.
*** The biggest surprise for me was that using my shadow as a compass wasn't much help when I hadn't realized that my shadow would be pointing due east by 1:30 in the afternoon. The joys of latitude-awareness are manifold.
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