Leon, Nicaragua

I´m writing this in the town of Leon, in Nicaragua, where I arrived yesterday. I know I´ve waxed lyrical about quite a few old colonial towns (with cobbled streets, shaded squares and fine architecture), but this place is head and shoulders above the rest. The ambience is so relaxed and the people are so charming, that you can´t help but smile like an idiot most of the time.
Getting here from La Esperanza, on the other hand, was unpleasant and gruelling. The first stop was the capital of Honduras, the impossible-to-pronounce Tegucigalpa - fortunately referred to by most people as Tee-goos. I only discovered this abbreviation after baffling about ten bus drivers with my stuttering attempts at saying the whole thing. When I asked "are you going to tee-goo-ca-goo-gah-picca-ga-alpa?" they just scratched their bellies and raised their eyebrows at each other with looks of sympathy.
Tee-goos is just as nasty as it is hard to say. It´s a mess and a shambles and very dangerous. I arrived late and had to stay over, so I caught a taxi to a hostel run by an American bloke. He had two sets of iron gates at his front door and thick bars stretched all the way over the top of his internal courtyard. To get in you had to ring a bell and wait on the street. He would peek round the corner and look you up and down before scurrying out to unlock the padlocks on the gates and hurrying you in. It was while sitting among all this security, a cross between Wormwood Scrubs and Fort Knox, that he said: "People have the wrong idea about this city. It´s real safe, no problem at all. It´s a great town." He had a local wife who always seemed to be coming and going with shopping bags, and I got the impression he hadn´t stepped out of his front door for years.
I didn´t leave the hostel either, it had a sociable bar so I had a few beers with some Americans and a Honduran bloke called Lenin and turned in early. In the morning I was straight out of there and on my way to here.
At the bus station I bumped into the Scots-German girls, Katherine and Marion, and their friend Emmanuel, who were also heading to Leon. The journey to the border was quite swift and uneventful, we had to catch a bus to some god-forsaken little crossroads town and then transfer to a mini bus. This dropped us off just a few yards from the customs house. Then the fun began.
Borders are always frantic and stressful places, but this one was like an open-air lunatic asylum. As the bus pulled up a phalanx of tricyclists under multi-coloured umbrellas raced towards us and crashed their rickety rickshaws into the side of the bus and started grabbing at us through the windows. As we fought our way off we found ourselves the unwilling subjects of a multi-dimensional tug o´war with hands grabbing our arms, clothes and bags, pulling us this way and that, while demented faces pressed in all around shouting: "come with me, border five kilometers, good bike, where you from, come on, I like Beatles." There were a pair of intrepid grandmothers on our bus, one from Norway and the other from Serbia, who completely disappeared under the mass of spittle-spraying scumbags. Of course, there were also the money changers, and they added to the fun by poking their filthy wads into everybody´s faces. We had been told on the bus by well-meaning locals that the tricycles were necessary, but that you had to drive a hard bargain. We did our best and agreed a price, but when we got to the other end there was the inevitable: "No, no, forty each. Each. Eighty. Give me eighty." He got forty, as agreed.
Despite the best that the customs officials could do, we got through in perfect time to catch the direct bus to Leon. Like nearly all the other buses here it was an old American school bus, but this was the most decrepit yet. All the windows were held closed with twigs and some of the seats were so frayed they looked like cobwebs. It was driven by a man who was obviously tired of life. I could see him in the rear view mirror looking really bored as he swerved off the road to avoid trucks or speeded up to attempt jumps over potholes. To the left of me were a local mother and son who throughout these incredible manouveurs managed to scoff their way through paper plates filled with chicken and rice and slopped with gravy. They didn´t spill a single grain or drop.
As I arrived at Leon I instantly felt relieved and relaxed. When the bus pulled up a few taxis were lined up nearby, with the drivers chatting among themselves and waiting for us to go to them. The four of us got a cab to the centre of town and even though we walked around for about an hour with our rucksacks comparing hostels nobody hassled us or tried to drag us anywhere. Actually, there was one - a funny little man who spoke perfect German and English and, he said, five other languages. But he was just offering a laundry service.