A day at the spa

by Ryka Brown (Canada)

I didn't expect to find Nicaragua

Lola and I stood at the side of the highway, bathing suits and towels in hand, donning matching looks of confusion. We did tell the bus driver San Jacinto, right? Because this was certainly not the tourist destination we envisioned when we picked up that pamphlet a few hours earlier, advertising geothermal pools. And, with no visible signage or life forms in sight, we weren’t convinced it was anything more than a remote patch of grass at the side of the Nicaraguan highway. I had been traveling with Lola for three weeks, after several chance encounters in Honduras and Guatemala led us to team up. Now, finding ourselves potentially abandoned in the middle of nowhere with unreliable bus service, we found the only path leading into the woods, and headed off further into the unknown. After a short walk, we found ourselves at a ramshackle hut with a roughly constructed “entrance” sign, comprised of a few pieces of wood nailed together haphazardly. A woman stood in the hut while her two young daughters ran around and played, vying for our attention. We paid the meagre entrance fee and our adolescent tour guides led us through the gates, and into another world. Before us lay a desert wasteland pockmarked with boiling, muddy geysers popping out of craters in the earth like a terrifying game of whack-a-mole. On the horizon rose the majestic Volcan Telica, a juxtaposition to the stark landscape before us. The girls guided us through the frying pan fields with long sticks in hand, dipping them into the mud filled craters as we choked on the sulphuric, rotten egg smell. We continued through the fields for a short while and, when the mud on the end of the girls’ sticks had cooled, we leaned in so they could paint our faces with the colours of the earth. As we prepared to leave this barren wasteland, no longer able to stand the heat eminating from below with the hot sun beating down on us from above, we bought a couple bags of mud from the girls and they led us down a small path. The girls laughed and played as we passed tiny wood huts with corrugated roofs, their owners smirking at the two mud faced girls parading through their town. At the end of the path, we found ourselves at a tiny pool, with a natural rock slide on one end and a small, rocky shore on the other. We discovered a secluded place to change and slathered ourselves in mud. As we sat on a boulder letting the sun bake the mud onto our skin, we watched the local children competing fervently for the rock slide, as well as our attention. Once the mud had dried, we slipped into the pool, finding a shallow spot to sit and relax. “Nibble” fish immediately started to feed off our dead skin cells, dining directly from the source. This unexpected exfoliation and violation of personal space made me slightly squeamish at first, for it is an odd sensation to have hundreds of tiny little fish giving you nibble kisses where you expect there to be no fish, but it did not take long to feel comfortable with this relaxing, symbiotic relationship. And I would be remiss to ignore the obvious skincare benefits. As the day wore on, we played in the pool with the sisters while other children came and went. Near the end of the day, a local farmer brought his herd of cattle to drink from the pool, bulls drinking from the water only feet from where we played. When the late afternoon sun had tucked itself in behind the treeline, we emerged from the pool, our skin aglow and satiny. The girls led us back, climbing trees to pull down fruit to gift us, and scouring the ground for dead pacay — long, flattened seed pods that resemble a straightened boomerang and sound like a rattle. We bought more mud as we said our goodbyes to the girls, and headed on our way, joyous for having taken a chance and eager to make a habit of it.