Pie de Gigante

I had been in bed for about a half hour. It wasn’t my bed mind you. I was staying down in Gigante, Nicaragua at the staff housing of my friend John’s restaurant/bar/hotel called the Pie de Gigante. I was to fish in the morning with the Color-line Charter boys and planned to just stay the night. It would be easier than driving 45 minutes home and then back again at five in the morning. Besides, it was quiet and cool at this hour and when I got to the staff compound, I was asleep in minutes. This, unfortunately, was not to last. Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante.

Pie de Gigante

At 10:30 on the dot, Reggaeton music exploded into my room with all the subtlety that that musical genre carries; that is to say with the sensitivity of a rabid bull. When the first note barraged into the room, my head popped up, my eyes opened wide, and I gasped for breath. Some of this music is so bad it can literally take your breath away and not in “you take my breath away” good sort of way. Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante.

I tried to ascertain where I was, but I was temporarily as lost as the musicians performing the travesty blasting from the speakers. The laughter, cigarette smoke, and other general party sounds joined the bad music to make for a cacophony of not good-ness. I kept hearing people scream “Feliz Cumpleanos” so I guessed one of the staff members was celebrating a birthday with friends. Now, I know a bender when I hear one and this party was definitely heading that way. The slurred speech, the volume of the voices, the giggles from the drunken girls – They were not stopping anytime soon. So I lied there for a while. I mean a long while, praying that they’d pass out or run out of liquor or both. Any other time, I would have gone out there and asked them to quiet down myself, but the thing was, I was a guest in their house; I could hardly do that. Instead, I had to resort to other less effective methods, such as the pillow over the head, long unused meditation techniques, and other useless methods to drown the sound out. I looked at my watch. An hour of this had passed and it was now 11:30, I was fishing at 6. I needed sleep. So I did the only reasonable thing I could think of; I folded the mattress over in half with all the bedding stuck inside and walked out of the room and into the party awkwardly carrying the queen-sized mattress. As I maneuvered through the crowd of drunken partygoers, everyone pretty much stopped what they were doing and just watched. They weren’t quite sure what to make of the crazy gringo carrying a bed through the center of a party and it definitely warranted stopping the hip thrusting and gyrating dance patterns they were engaged in, to watch. I walked straight through the dance floor, out of the front gate, and into the street with this mattress. I carried on down the road to the beach and through some trees until I found a flat patch of sand and dropped the mattress there and lied down. It actually felt pretty nice to be outside sleeping in nature. The only drawbacks were the full moon, which down here, meant it was practically daylight, and the mosquitoes, which were having a mid January Thanksgiving feast courtesy of me.

Pie de Gigante

In spite of these challenges, I found sleep easily. The night passed quickly and quietly as I was slowly relieved of excess blood by the jungle mosquitoes. It was around 5:30 a.m. when the first rays of sunlight hit me square in the face and my eyes sort of twitched under their lids and I rustled around and that’s when I realized I had company. The realization was sudden as I was bitten on the ass by a stray dog that was spooning with me in the bed. I guess she was upset that I had moved and upset our carefully orchestrated cuddle session. The bite didn’t hurt, but surprised the hell out of me, and I turned around to see who or what had bitten me, and that’s when I realized I had not one but two dogs in the bed with me. As my vision continued to clear I could see that I wasn’t just sleeping with two dogs, but three and a chicken to boot! Now mind you, only two of the dogs were actually in the bed. The third one was curled against the mattress and the chicken was a couple of feet away. I stood up as the first rays of morning light passed over us and marched towards the waters edge. Sand fell from me as I stretched my arms out wide and looked down over my little posse of beach creatures. The chicken cooed softly, the dogs all yawned and rolled in their morning routine and I smiled. It’s not often you get to wake up with three dogs and a chicken. Pie de Gigante.

Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante. Pie de Gigante.