Nicaragua: there and back again

Hey-ho, I'm back and still alive! Well, actually I've been back for a week now, but I was too lazy to write about it. After 10 days of rain, various illnesses and all other hassle it feels good to be back here :) However, the trip itself was very eye-opening, hence my interest in sharing some experiences from the land afar.

The first thing that struck me in Nicaragua was the poverty. Ok, that's really a bit of an overstatemen: the first thing that struck me was the annoying immigration, the second thing was my lovely girlfriend, the third thing was the darkness and the fourth was the jetlag. But the first thing the next morning was definitely the poverty!

To rewind a bit, my first trouble was with the Nicaraguan immigration. I was happily standing in the line for the immigration after some 20 hours of traveling. Looking around, it struck me a bit odd that a lot of people had dollars held between their passports. "Wow, is the corruption really this bad that people speed up the process at the border already", I thought to myself. As it turned out, upon arriving to Nicaragua you have to pay a tourist fee of 5 dollars. Naturally, I didn't have any dollars at hand, nor did I have any cordobas. So the immigration officer confiscated my passport and told me to get some cash for the fee. Well, I trudged dutifully to the exchange office, only to discover that they didn't accept cards! Curses! So, a frantic search for cash was in order. After raiding my wallet and all my available pockets I managed to gather around 7 euros, which just about was enough. So, I managed to exchange it for cordobas, got my passport back and got through the whole hassle, tired and annoyed.

The next morning I was wandering around Leon with amazement. Coming from a country like Finland the poor state of affairs was really something. The infrastructure was pretty bad which contributed to a feeling of insecurity and general untrustworthiness towards other people. Well, I got used to it gradually, but that's how I felt in the beginning. After two days of jetlagging (and avoiding the storm that was flooding the streets) we climbed to Cerro Negro and volcanoboarded downhill from the 400m. It was fun, even though the storm that hit us at the top of Cerro Negro was quite annoying - you couldn't hear anything from three metres afar, let alone see anything, as the rain was hitting us basically sideways.

Driving through a local horse fair in Nandaime

A regular long-distance bus in Nicaragua

The bus control panel was seriously high tech

After that it was time to travel around Nicaragua: we spent time at Isla de Ometepe, climbing Concepción (1600 m, went up to 1000 m) and not seeing much of a view due to some weather (again!). A day was well spent at the amazing beaches of Santo Domingo, after which we took a day to review a nature park near Moyogalpa.Climbing up to Concepción

The smug look of disappointment as we realized the clouds
were going to spoil the view from Concepción.
(oh btw, this guy was actually an Austrian from Graz, who we met
by chance on the way up - you can imagine my surprise!)

A moment of perfection in Santo Domingo

Then we left Isla de Ometepe and went to Granada for a boat trip. Almost immediately after that I got 39 fever and was forced to spend the remaining day in bed. Next morning at 3.30 we left for Managua to take a flight to the Caribbean side, to Corn Island. The plan was to go from Corn Island to Little Corn Island for snorkeling. But as it turned out, my body had quite different plans. I felt nauseous all the way to Managua, and my suspicion was confirmed as my previous dinner made a reappearance right after the 1 hour taxi ride. My body seemed to be enjoying this show, since encore throwing up resulted with 3-hour intervals for almost the rest of the day. Somehow I managed to survive to Corn Island, but we decided that a 1-hour trip to Little Corn in an open boat in sunshine would be too much for me - which indeed it would have. So, we booked a hotel in Big Corn and I collapsed in a heap on the bed, just trying to stay alive and keep the rest of the liquids inside me.

At 4 pm I finally gave up trying to get better with our own medicines and Sonja convinced me to go to the local hospital. I have to say that the treatment at the hospital was very good, despite the poor conditions and ridiculous pay - doctors and nurses earn about 800 $ / month. After an afternoon in there with 2 l of saline dripping in my vein I started to get gradually better. Combined with antibiotics, the excellent treatment of doctors and nurses and two days of rest got me up to shape just in time (talk about being on the receiving end of JIT!) for the flight home. Still, the annoyance of missing four full days was pretty big.

Some very strangely shaped rice fields in eastern Nicaragua

Anyway, I hope the pictures tell you more than my ramblings. Due to technical difficulties with my camera, most of the pics were taken with Sonja's - I might upload some of those later on. For now, though, you'll have to stick with my documentation :)

Stem rust - a serious threat to wheat production

Stem rust is threatening the production of wheat in Africa and Middle East, according to a recent article in the Economist. To summarize the content briefly: stem rust, a devastating plant disease that was the worst wheat disease in the first half of the 20th century, is back and badder than ever. It was thought to have been wiped out in the 1970s as Norman Borlaug discovered a gene that resisted the aforementioned disease. Unfortunately, stem rust evolved to another form, now dubbed Ug99 by FAO (Ug for Uganda, the country of origin; 99 for the year). Ug99 bypasses the previous gene protection and has destroyed even as much as 80-100% of crops it has afflicted in Africa.

So far, it has spread to Middle East and advanced to southern Africa as well. As the picture below portrays, there is a severe risk of stem rust jeopardising the entire wheat production in Africa and severely afflicting Middle East, being a threat even to Pakistan, one of the top 5 wheat producers. With time and a little bit of bad luck, the spores might even be carried with the winds to Australia, the third biggest wheat exporter in the world. Clearly, something most be done to 1) stop this crisis and 2) to prevent future disasters.

Labs around the globe are putting in hours to develop any kind of cure for Ug99, but so far there has been limited success. Even though nine rust-resistant breed have made it into production and distribution, the problem of logistics remains.

Producers in Africa and Asia are poor families with little or no leverage to invest. The cure has to be distributed to them in some way. They cannot afford to buy it from the private sector, and in many places there really aren't any public organizations capable of administering the solution. So far, only 0.1% of wheat area in countries FAO has deemed to be under threat has been planted with rust-resistant varieties.

This really calls for multinational action. Perhaps FAO could organize the distribution itself? After all, Borlaug's new breed spread relatively fast, so it should be possible to achieve a similar result this time. Stem rust threatens as many as 26 countries at the moment - countries that make up about 1/3 of the wheat production in the whole world. I don't care who does it or how it's done, but this crisis has to be stopped before it escalates into full-blown hunger!

Preventing future disasters is a completely different matter. There have been claims for more diverse farming. It is true that the current monoculture enables fast spreading of such diseases, as cops usually involve the same grain and are very large areas. However, there have been also some contradictory opinions especially regarding the development of Ug99. Reader northoldmoss expressed this view in the discussion regarding the source article:

"While Ug99 was discovered in Uganda, it almost certainly did not evolve there. Most probably it originated in the hotbed of wheat variation in traditional farming in Ethiopia - long known for its rich crop genetic resources."

However, the research (that I know of) is not yet decided on the matter. Personally, I'd currently vote for diversity but I guess that's not really a very educated opinion. If anyone has any insight on this matter, I'd be delighted.

The attic of my mind

The attic. The place where we take all our junk. All the things that now seem so useless, so unworthy of our care. We don't want to look after them anymore, because they have been replaced by something else. Something, which glimmers betters in the sun, smells nicer or looks less rugged. We grasp that new shiny wonder and throw our old stuff away from sight, away, to be forgotten.

But sometimes we climb up the stairs to the top floor, take the ladder from the closet, open he hatch and climb up to the attic.

We casually browse the contents of the boxes, occasionally picking up something. Almost everything reminds of something and brings back a wave of memories. Look, there's the old tea set you got from your aunt, and there's that old toy you played with as a kid. Sometimes we can't remember why we tossed something away in the first place. "This shouldn't be here, I can still use it", we catch ourselves thinking. We keep it in our hand, holding on to it tightly almost as if it could run back to the box and lock itself in. Carefully, we carry it back down and place it in our favorite spot above the fireplace, where we can see it every day.

The same is true of ideas.