Santa Maria

View of Santa Maria and Honduras(the mountains in the back)

One of the places on my Nica Bucket List was Santa Maria. It's very much off the beaten path.The reason I had always wanted to go to Santa Maria is my friend Neil. It's his site, and since it is so isolated and so far away, he always tried to lure us into the wilderness that is Santa Maria. Santa Maria is about 60km northwest of Ocotal and borders Honduras. The first 18km of the road are paved and the rest is mountainous dirt road. Definitely the bumpiest ride of my life.

The weekend I went was Santa Maria's fiestas patronales, the big town celebrations. People came in from out of town to set up booths selling food and beer, gambling, and a dance hall was finished just 3 days before fiestas started. During my time in Santa Maria, we watched some bull riding(although technically not all of them were bulls. Some were females) and a cockfight.

Cockfight!

Yes, a former vegetarian witnessed a cockfight. It was really just like a boxing match. The roosters had 15min to make a kill. The owners tied tiny knives to their legs to try to pierce the other. As they fight and start to bleed, the owners occasionally have 10sec to clean up their gallos(in one case squeeze out blood from a mangled foot). There is only a winner if the other dies, and (luckily) the one match I saw had no winner. Not an experience I want to repeat, but definitely interesting.

Neil has also gained celebrity status among volunteers because in his first months of service, he bought a horse. Since Santa Maria is so mountainous, Neil has used Nego to get to communities hours away. And for the last day of fiestas, his host dad retrieved Nego from his pen. Neil even let me ride him!

Neil, Nego(the horse), and I

Santa Maria was a beautiful, beautiful town. But it is very isolated. It is much, much harder for Neil to get out of site and go anywhere. Good thing he has those mountains(and the horse!) to keep him company out there.