Yesterday a group of Volunteers, myself included, took a self-guided hike to Volcan Telica. Now, all of us having seen Interstellar last night, we were showing off our new-found PhD’s in Physics and Metaphysical Philosophy the whole way up.
The two year thirty minute bus journey to the worm hole trail head departed at 6:40 AM, and we were on our leisurely way by 7:15. The first hour of the hike is a flat walk down a dry riverbed, which we have aptly called the Endless River of Sand and Sorrow. No shade, all sand, hard to walk down.
Now, we did not have a guide. Instead we were relying on a set of written directions that had commentary like, “Go under the bridge,” “turn right at the big mango tree,” and “follow the ridge.” Needless to say, we got lost. However, it gave me a perfect opportunity to prove to my naysayers that you can’t go back in time, despite what Christopher Nolan would have them believe. After about an hour and 15 minutes of trudging through a thicket of brush, despite all of us wanting to turn back time to when we strayed afield, we had to decide to backtrack, and we found the trail. It turned a four hour hike up into more than five hours.
Jessica’s Thicket of Misdirection and Shame Face
After the Endless River of Sand and Sorrow and the Thicket of Misdirection and Shame we came to the Tiring Hill of Switchbacks. Luckily, at the top of the hill we finally came upon the magnificent crater of Telica.
Emerging from the Thicket of Misdirection and Shame
Once we could see the crater (not just the cone around the crater, like in the picture with Jessica), it was an easy hike past the Pleasant Meadow of Volcanic Fertility to the crater itself. After our visit to the crater edge we lunched back down in the Pleasant Meadow of Volcanic Fertility, complete with a few stray horses and cows munching on the grass around us.
The crater is large, deep, smoky, scary, primeval, and menacing. At the bottom there is enormous pools of boiling mud pits and there is a constant cloud of foul sulfurous gasses wafting about. If the Mayans had volcanoes like Telica so readily available they would have certainly been tossing sacrificial victims right on in. I can’t find on the internet Anne Hathaway’s quote from the movie about evil not existing out in the galaxy, but it explains Telica well. Not evil, but certainly daunting.
Orbiting the horizon of Gargantua
And no, I didn’t really like Interstellar. It was cool to watch and think about – worth the C$85 I spent on the ticket, but the story didn’t make sense, it was very similar to Inception in certain respects, and the dialogue was Hollywood cliché bad. Here is a small list of things that do not make sense that I can think of:
- Traveling back in time to save the future. It’s just not possible. If it took Matthew McConaughey himself programming the NASA dimensions into the dust to get him into space, he would have never been in space in the first place to program the coordinates into the dust
- Same thing with the super-evolved humans of the future. How did they get into the future to place the wormhole and the “tesseract” in the first place, if humans were going to all suffocate and there would no humans of the future to place them?
- The expedition’s first stop after the wormhole was Surfs Up planet. They went because the first spacewoman to go there was transmitting a “good” signal. However, time on that planet is slower because it is so close to Gargantua. It turned out that because of the time differential she had only been there for 10 or 20 minutes. First of all, Genius McHathaway should have easily realized that before going down. But even more so, they should have been tipped off to this, since the beacon signals should have been coming in at different intervals, due to the time-shift.
- Why did the future humans make it so difficult to achieve our goals? Why couldn’t they have put the wormhole closer to Earth, not at Jupiter? And why did they have to cajole Matthew McConaughey into the bowels of a black hole to help him achieve our goals? Couldn’t they have just done it themselves?
In the end, Christopher Nolan had no interest in telling a story. Like most Hollywood movies, he just wanted to make some money. I’m sure he will accomplish his goal.
So here is where the bucket list stands:
- Isla Juan Venado
Salinas Grandes Beach- Volcan Cosigüina
- Volcan San Cristobal
Volcan TelicaMomotombo- Momotombito
Nagarote- León Viejo
- Jiquilillo Beach (site of October’s earthquake)
- Wetlands of Chinandega
Climb the CathedralRuben Darío Museum (which is a block from my house)- Myths and Legends Museum
- Botanical Gardens
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