Expectations

I really don't know what to expect on this trip. Maggie and Kate have told me so much about Nicaragua and the people and organisations they help there. I've heard so much about the bars and the music in Leon, about Esteli and the long journeys by bus. I've read the Lonely Planet guide, pored over the map, visited web sites, even listened to Radio Managua streamed on the internet. But the people and places they know there are still just names to me - Rigo, Zelinda, Mamalicha, Granada, Las Salinas. It's a long list. 
I have an idea of course, as we all do of places we have heard so much about. But it's just an idea at the moment. The reality of the heat, the intense sunlight a few degrees off the Equator, the smells, the strangeness of another place is going to wallop me immediately I get off the plane in Managua, tired from a long twelve hour journey.It's part of the joy and surprise of travelling by plane. You get on in one place that is familiar (so sad, perhaps, that Heathrow is familiar), and off in another that is utterly foreign just a few hours later. Perhaps I might even like it.