by Alex Edgerton
One thing many first time visitors to Nicaragua take home with them, as well as great memories and a suntan, is a taste for the national spirit, Flor de Caña rum and of couple of bottles.

The country’s premier alcoholic product is making a splash in glasses all over the planet as rum sippers from Miami to Manila get a taste for the smoothness that Nicaraguans have long cherished. In fact, many connoisseurs rate the rum superior to many more well-known brands that usually occupy the top shelves of fashionable bars and clubs around the globe.

Perhaps the best known and most loved product is the seven-year-old Gran Reserva dark rum, a mellow and rewarding drink best served neat or on the rocks. But Flor de Caña is not just about Gran Reserva.

by Marie Mendel
I was in El Realejo in northwest Nicaragua sitting on the damp, moss covered stone brought up from the nearby river Las Lajas some 500 years ago and listening to Hilario Alemán tell the story of how he found the remains of the oldest brothel in Central America while excavating foundations for his home. About one meter wide, the wall had been built by Doña Isabella de Bombillia, the widow of Pedro Arias de Avila (or Pedrarias), first Governor of Nicaragua.
My eyes tracked along the wall from where a cement toilet box had been perched to a barbed-wire fence to cows lying on the old stones, trash on both sides. Though it was hard at times to understand Mr. Alemán, I gathered somebody had written a book, El Burdel de las Pedrarias, and then an archaeologist had shown up.

by Mike Newton
The Nicaraguan presidential campaigns are upon us and the general feeling in the business community is that Nicaragua will move forward regardless of the outcome this November. This positive sentiment is no more evident than amongst real estate developers along the Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast.

The local real estate boom has attracted many forward thinking American, Canadian and European investors who are in the process of buying, building and developing and finally insuring their “creations”. I have had the good fortune to meet and work with many of them, and an obvious reoccurring theme in our discussions about Nicaraguan insurance is cost.

by Mike Sabine
Linguists have compared observing Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) to an astronomer being able to watch the big bang. It is generally acknowledged as the only time a grammatically complete language arose spontaneously in modern human history.

The system developed in the early 1980’s in Managua among students in a new school for the deaf who had had no exposure to sign language and thus no way of communicating with one another. They came from around Nicaragua with no exposure to other deaf people, each bringing with them a set of “home signs” they used to communicate with hearing people. Teachers tried futilely to teach the children Spanish and lip reading. Meanwhile, on their own, the students began to communicate among themselves.

by Kat Young
The silver tips of corn stalks rustled as we walked silently past. The full moon above cast a soft glow, illuminating the landscape with a million shades of grays, blues and blacks. As we moved through the somehow sacred terrain, our large group of 20 made hardly a sound. It must have been the moon that lent this pious air to the night, or perhaps it was the several active volcanoes looming in the distance. Whatever it was, the feeling of pilgrimage was heavy as we began to ascend our destination: Vulcan Telica.

I came to be in this situation while visiting Leon, a historic city in the north west of Nicaragua. I was actively doing close to nothing as I struggled to become accustomed to the overpowering heat. I sat one day in a restaurant drinking a cold juice, pondering my sloth-like behavior, when I saw a sign nearby advertising a “Full Moon Hike” to the top of Volcan Telica. I have had the fortune of seeing many volcanoes on my travels so that was not the appeal; it was the full moon that intrigued me. Also, a fellow traveler in the restaurant mentioned to me that the company offering the hike was non-profit and all the proceeds went to help local street kids. This peeked my philanthropist spirit, so I went to the office of Quetzal Trekkers to inquire further. They promised a unique experience as only in the darkness of night and pre-dawn is one able t see the deep red glow of lava within the crater. A drop of sweat rolled down my back as I stood listening in the heat. They added that this hike was very popular because it is significantly cooler and more pleasant to hike in the night. I was sold.

by Alex Edgerton
It is hard to imagine how the sight of two dozen foreigners setting off to climb an active volcano in the middle of the night must look to the residents of San Jacinto, but this is the spectacle that greets the inhabitants of this small town near León once a month.

San Jacinto is the starting point for the monthly full moon hike to the summit of Telica volcano run by Quetzaltrekkers, a volunteer organization based in León that raises funds to improve the lives of impoverished children.

The organization, which started out helping street children in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala, has just celebrated its second anniversary in Nicaragua, and in this short time has helped change the way many people view the future of tourism in the country.

Salomón de la Selva was born in León on March 20, 1893 and died February 5, 1959 in Paris. This poet ranks right up there on the Nicaraguan pantheon of poetry with , Carlos Martínez Rivas, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and others. He lived most of his life outside of Nicaragua. Poets are wont to form movements of literary revolution. Modernism, post-modernism, vanguard. De la Selva at one point coined the term neo-popularism for his kind of poetry. For a time he also adhered to a school of philosophy called “arielism” that proclaimed to go beyond both socialism and anti-imperialism, popular ideas among many in the early part of the 20th century.

Salomón, educated in the USA, wrote bilingually. He was friends with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, and other contemporaries and as such mingled in what were considered radical thinking circles in those days. A romantic revolutionary, he volunteered in 1917 to fight in World War I and saw that conflagration to its end.

by Nick Cooke

Tourism investment: a BIT better

Tourism investment took off in Nicaragua at the turn of the century with $76 million being invested in 2000. The rate of investment, however, suffered a downswing starting in 2003 due to a lack of incentives for the sector and total investment in 2004 was only $9.6 million. An upswing has begun. By mid-2006, $12 million in investments had been approved and another $36 million was in the midst of the approval process. The recent legislative go-ahead for Bonds for Investment in Tourism (BITs) should result in a major upsurge, particularly of mid-size to large projects.

The upcoming elections and their unpredictable aftermath are already having an effect. While some people continue to plough ahead with their plans, others are holding back their investments a bit, alleging uncertainty for the future. Yet no matter what the electoral outcome, it is more than likely that the country will continue to see an increase in the number of visitors and the amount of foreign exchange earned by Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Tourism Institute reported at mid-year that just fewer than 714,000 tourists came in 2005 and the projection is for the figure by year’s end to reach 800,000. (more…)