Getting Around in Managua

I’ve been living in Managua for a couple of months now, and I must say that it is not my favorite city. There is nothing particularly charming about the place. It is a maze of illogically placed streets without names or addresses, punctuated by traffic circles governed by the oddest rules (literally, you leave the traffic circle from the inside lane, crossing incoming traffic).

Supposedly before the earthquake of 1972 levelled the city, Managua was one of the more beautiful Central American capitals, but that was before the city was rebuilt from a pile of rubble. Now, new malls, condos and gated communities rise alongside ramshackle neighborhoods, incongruous against the bedraggled backdrop.

But I am grateful to be here. I like my job, I like my apartment, and to be honest, I didn’t want to make the big a leap from a rural Nicaraguan lifestyle to a US lifestyle all in one go. In my personal journey through the stages of development Managua seemed like the next logical step. How can you go from hauling water and using a latrine to air conditioning and elevators and iphones all at once?

Despite its inconveniences, I am finding some things to love about Managua (e.g. salsa classes). By comparison, though, Managua has nothing on other cities that offer safety, convenience, and beauty as public goods. Here – and in many others cities around the world – only people with money can afford safety, beauty, and convenience within the urban environment. Those are luxuries you can find within a mall complex, or behind the gate in a gated community, or inside your Toyota Hilux, not out on the street.

In Managua you can’t safely walk anywhere. It’s just not done. There are plenty of things to do in the city, and great night life, but you can never just walk comfortably from place to place. Nor are there parks – or at least not any that are safe enough to venture into. There isn’t even public transportation to speak of. There is a bus system, but foreigners are advised not to use it, even if we could figure out the routes. Instead, we are told to take “taxis de confianza”, trusted taxis, to avoid the possibility of being “express kidnapped” (i.e. having your bank account cleared out while you are held hostage in the back seat).

In my old life, choosing to walk was the virtuous thing to do – it’s good for your health and the environment – but here that type of civic and personal responsibility doesn’t even cross my mind when I decide whether to get into a car. If anything, walking is a guilty pleasure, a risk I take every once in a while even though I know it’s dangerous. Being able to walk out my front door and get somewhere on my own two legs tops the list of things I miss about the US.