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Arrival
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The majority of travellers arrive in central Managua on the
international
Ticabus services from either Honduras or El Salvador in the north or from San JosA© in Costa Rica to the south. Buses from within Nicaragua arrive at one of several crowded, noisy and generally chaotic
urban marketplaces
that also serve as bus terminals. For
drivers
Managua is a disconcerting city in which to arrive; the lack of a definable centre and landmarks - not to mention road signs or directions - makes driving into the city a stressful experience, especially coupled with zealous traffic cops and aggressive Managuan drivers.
The good news about arriving by air or bus is the abundance of
taxis
. If you know where you are going to stay, it's helpful to have the address given to you in terms of neighbourhood and distance from a well-known
landmark
; no one uses street addresses in Managua, and taxi drivers will find places by its relation to a well-known city fixture. Distances are measured in metres as much as in blocks - in local parlance 100m is a city block or
cuadra
. Sometimes an archaic measure, the
vara
, is also used: one
vara
(a yard) is interpreted as roughly equivalent to a metre. To confuse the issue still further, many Managuans do not use the
cardinal points
in their usual form: in Managua north becomes
al lago
- towards the lake;
al sur
is south;
arriba
- literally, "up", is to the east; and
abajo
, "down", is to the west. So, "del Hotel Inter-Continental una cuadra [cien metros] arriba y dos cuadras [doscientos metros] al lago" means one block east and two blocks north of the
Hotel Inter-Continental
. For clarity, we've used blocks and the usual cardinal points in addresses throughout. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Nicaragua,
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