CraigGrimes's travel blogs
Living in Nicaragua - 2007
2007-10-08,
oct
8
2007
Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
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I know that this title was used by sailors when they had run out of fresh drinking water and even though you don’t really want to drink the tap water here it does seem quite apt. Although it rains almost every day in Nicaragua the tap water also gets cut off every other day. For most people this is irritating but as a disabled person it makes life very difficult. Most houses have an outside sink with a reserve of water for such events, however, for me it’s not quite as simple as throwing a bucket of water over myself on the patio instead of having a shower. If there is water I can be independent and have a shower myself, if I have to resort to the open air patio bucket throwing shower I need Edurne to throw the water and refill the bucket! Actually it’s quite a lot of fun but I’ll spare you the photos….
Another thing that regularly gets cut off is the electricity. Power-cuts occur because there isn’t enough electricity for the whole country during the working week. Therefore, in urban areas the electricity company cut off the power supply for 2 - 3 hours (apart from on weekends), the time of day depends from week to week. Last week it was from 19.15 - 21.30 hrs, which was a bit of a pain as we were sat in the dark with candles. For many people in Nicaragua this isn’t a problem as they simply do not have electricity in their homes as they cannot afford it.
There are options though if you are willing to brave the pitch black streets, which is hard in a wheelchair with the state of the roads here. I’ve ventured out a couple of times armed with my head torch to local bars where they have generators for when the power cuts occur. The best thing to do during evening power-cuts is plan ahead. We knew the time of night that the electricity would be off last week, so on some nights we would go to a restaurant or bar with generators half and hour before the power-cut and ride it out with the luxury of a few drinks, dinner and light! Other nights we just stayed in and played music off the laptop battery and had a nice romantic candle lit evening.
The power-cuts and water problems don’t really affect tourism that much as the larger hotels have generators, tanks for storing water and bottled drinking water. I guess it depends on what kind of experience you are looking for whilst traveling in Nicaragua, I’m doing the cultural emersion type traveling and trying to experience to a certain extent what many (middle class) Nicaraguans deal with every day. Of course for many people this isn’t very confortable or possible due to their disability, there are many ways of traveling for all types of people and in the future I hope to be able to supply some of these options in Nicaragua and beyond in other parts of Central America.
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