A slightly unenthusiastic start led to a trip to the MetroCentro mall to buy some clothes, to replace those damaged during the building work.
Many of the smaller shops were closed on Sunday, but the main department store (ominously called Carrion) was open and looked like a slightly shabby Debenhams, which is good enough for my needs. There were a few items in my size, but they were uniformly awful, with badly translated English slogans or very dated patterns.
Having skipped breakfast I got distracted by the food court. Besides the usual burger and pizza chains there was a Nicaraguan charcoal BBQ. I opted for the mixed grill, a combination of tender steak, chorizo, salsa and refried beans, all freshly cooked, with a side order of grilled cheese for good measure. This was all good, but one taste of the little helping of hot pickled onion on the side gave me hiccups and a severe case of the sweats, much to the amusement of the chef who’d encouraged me to give it a try.
In an effort to cool down I took a taxi to the airport as it seems the only place in town with decent air-conditioning. Still got hot and bothered waiting for the stupid woman in front of me at the check-in to realise that standing on the luggage scales wasn’t going to hide the fact that her suitcase weighed over 28kg.
The ensuing 4 hour wait at the airport was pretty uneventful, but unlike London all the airports I’ve seen in Central America so far seem to have excellent free Wi-Fi. Stupidly I used this to read the Sunday papers back home and on reading the restaurant reviews got a bit despondent at the thought of four more weeks of Rice and Bean, interrupted only by Beans and Rice or the more exotic sounding Gallo Pinto.
The only light relief of the day was being first in line at the departure gate, so I happily showed my passport and boarding pass and strode off past some stairs and down the ramp towards the plane. Shuffling my passport and the now useless Nicaraguan currency back into a side pocket on my rucksack I became aware of some frantic shouting behind me and a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Looking up from my bag I was only a few feet from falling off the end of the ramp. Unfortunately the plane was sitting about 100ft away on the tarmac so me and all those who’d managed to blindly follow me had to head back up the ramp, down the stairs and walk over the tarmac to the waiting plane. Sadly an airport worker then put a barrier in front of the ramp so we weren’t treated to the sight of a series of late arriving businessmen running up the tunnel and falling out the end into a huge wailing pile.
