The Throwaway: What was She Thinking

I was sitting at Finca Magdalena, the hostel I lived in and worked for during the majority of my time in Nicaragua. An interesting group had arrived the night before, and had moved into the cabin next to mine. Late that morning, breakfast menus in hand, they walked over and had a seat at my table. All of the other tables were empty, so it was clear that they wanted to have a conversation. I couldn’t help but be curious and welcomed them.

The younger gentleman with them was visually striking. A Russian traveler with this all-black tattoo that covered his entire body all the way up his neck until his face. It branched off into different directions, as if a visible poison had taken over his body. He would walk around without a shirt to have the work on display. He also wore  black out contacts that would leave an older person certain they encountered a demon. 

The second person was a woman in her early to mid thirties. She was also from Russia, but had been living in Los Angeles for the past couple of years pursuing some life-in-the-arts. She was the standard beauty with the style of a mid twentieth-century dame, leaving her to stand out as well; it’s not every day you see a five foot eleven blonde woman wearing Chinese satin robes on an island in Nicaragua. 

The third was a lady who looked about sixty years old, give or take. She was an older Ukrainian Jewish woman who had been living off of the coast of Nicaragua for decades with her son. I was wondering how these three met and why they had been traveling together.

As if reading my mind, they shared that they all met in Granada at a nightclub and loved each other's energy so much that they decided to travel further together. We spoke as they ate their breakfast. Before I knew it, our conversation turned  to the genocide in Gaza — the older woman was a Zionist, and the other two were entirely indifferent to the whole conflict.

I at the time had the energy and interest in debating about Palestine, so we talked at length about what was going on, including our disagreements. This was only a few weeks after October 7th, and I was leaning into the empathy I had for people that actually believed everything western media had to say about the events. I also know that the hand of Israeli propaganda reaches far and wide. Soon enough, they finished their breakfast, we exchanged instagram handles, and they continued on to do the small tourist circuit of the island. They left the island sometime in the late afternoon heading to the mainland.

Six or seven months later, a Canadian woman named Sandy arrived at the Finca while I was working behind the reception desk. She wanted to hike up the volcano and had been waiting for her friends, so we talked about what she was doing in Ometepe until they arrived. She was solo traveling through Central America and was deciding between heading out to India at the end of the month, or going home to her daughter. I saw Sandy all over the grounds of Finca Magdalena for that next month. She frequented the restaurant for breakfast and could be seen having coffee and a piece of cake on the balcony when I would wake up for work. I also saw her a bunch at the natural pool. Over time, she and I had become friends in a way. Sandy came across as a real assertive, likely conservative type of chick, which I knew to be on par for the Canadian expat community on the Island. 

If you read “The Throwaway: The Grifter” I talked about a party that Cody and his “best friend” at the time, Gus, went to. It was a full moon party on the west coast of Nicaragua, a huge deal amongst the travelers in the country. Even Sandy shared that she was going, and wouldn’t be around for a little bit. On the surface, these parties are inviting, innocent and fun ways for tourists to meet and interact with other travelers and the locals that decided to attend too. 

Here on my Newsletter though, we know that to not be true. A critical element of these parties, along with the weekly cacao ceremonies run by some expat in any given town, is the perversion, or co-opting, of ancient native practices for the entertainment of travelers. What was once a sacred ceremony where the natives would take wild cacao, strong enough to hallucinate, for religious purposes, is now a bunch of tourists taking a weakened farmed cacao in a group, for an opportunity to party and get drunk afterwards. The full moon parties are an instance of this issue as well. 

This party was on a Sunday. Sandy had originally shared that she wouldn’t be back until Thursday. To my surprise, she was back early on Monday, having traveled in the very early morning directly from the coast. There had been a problem at the party; a woman had died while swimming with a group in the ocean. Apparently, the woman had been high off psychedelics, of which kind Sandy she was not certain, and had also been drinking profusely. She was taken over by a wave, and in her drunk and high state, could not figure out how to swim back to shore.The other people around her seemingly weren’t aware, because it was nighttime and all they had was the light of the full moon to see, so the woman was eventually brought to shore by a small rescue group. They tried to resuscitate her, to no avail. She lay there dead on the beach in view of the entire party, subject to their cameras and video recordings. Sandy told me this struck something in her  that night, she decided not to go to India but instead to return to Canada to raise her daughter. She needed to be around her kid as much as she could be, because she didn’t know when she would never be there again. 

We continued chatting, and soon Sandy told me that she had a conversation with the woman on the way to the party. She said she was an Eastern European woman who had been living in Nicaragua with her son. Unable to hide my disbelief, I told her I thought I knew who she was talking about. I pulled out my phone, and showed her the instagram of the older Ukrainian woman that  I had met in that trio about half a year prior. 

She nearly collapsed in shock, completely bewildered by the fact that I knew this random woman who died on a random night hundreds of miles away from the place I had not left since I arrived. I shared the story of how we met over breakfast, and we talked about how coincidental this entire situation was. 

Understandably I was also in great shock, but more so about the death of the woman than the coincidence that Sandy had met her. All I could think about was what she was doing there. A woman of at least sixty years old, at a beach party, drinking, taking psychedelics, all while swimming deep into the Pacific Ocean in the darkness of night. At her age, what was the thinking? But as soon as I contemplated this, I appreciated how this perspective showed ageism and I must admit, I guess it was pretty baller to die while partying. Either way, she was gone

 If you take away anything from this excerpt, let it be a lesson in how small the world really is, and the unpredictability of what initially seems like some good fun. “Around the corner” and “on the other side of the world” are synonymous in the scope of what life has to offer.