Nicaragua Trip Day 3

Our third day in Nicaragua started off with a nice breakfast at the restaurant that is kind of paired with the hostel we stayed at. Soon enough, our tour guide came along, as well as a young Dutch guy who was finishing up a medical volunteer program in Nicaragua, a German tourist and an Australian tourist who didn't speak much Spanish. The tour was super interesting. We visited a medium sized cigar factory, with about 40-50 employees, all within about a city block worth of land. There is a larger and more famous one outside of Estelí-but they didn't have tour guides that met us at our hostel. The guide was very informative, as well as one of the managers of the factory (I think the son of the owner). He explained in great detail the selection of the leaves for the different qualities of cigar, all while passing around a cigar and helping us smoke it (I at least required instruction). 

It was awesome how open the tour was-we were walking all around the factory, right next to the people working, even picking up and examining cigars about to be boxed. One item of interest is that the rollers work in pairs-and always one man and one women. The man works the machine that presses the filling into the cigar and the women rolls on the outer cap by hand and trims the end by hand as well. Employees are not allowed to take products home (unless they pay) but can smoke as much as they want when working-and there were a few that were definitely taking advantage. The cigars are essentially made completely by hand, the leaves are picked by hand, sorted, soaked, and dried by hand. They are then further sorted by hand, and aided only a bit by the simple machine (hand powered) in the rolling process-and are then packed by hand as well. The manager explained that with Nicaragua's cheap labor, high import costs, and due to the size of the company, it still makes economic sense to do most of the work by hand. 

Nicaragua is a growing presence in the cigar production world, as we were told that Cuban quality leveled off many years ago due to a variety of factors. Cuban emigrants in the 1960s and '70s brought the know-how and seeds to Nicaragua, Ecuador, and other places, and these countries are now starting to reap the benefits after adapting the plants to their soils and climates, and especially with Nicaragua, it's benefitting from stability and peace after its long and destructive civil war. So, be on the lookout for Nicaraguan cigars-I certainly might've been to the factory where they were made. 

Barton, Brian, and I spent the rest of the day cruising around beautiful and tranquil Estelí-I really can't stress how much I enjoyed this town. We headed to some of the less worn parts of the town, into the dirt road, trash all over poor area-and peeked in on a pick up soccer game at a small stadium. We ended up chatting with the coach-who appeared to be an former player from the professional team. He talked about how they had started this youth soccer league to help keep kids off drugs and healthy. It was a great conversation, we shared a bit about what the Peace Corps does, things about Costa Rica. 

After getting our fill of the town, we headed to the bus station, grabbed a bus to León, met up with Andrew at the hostel, walked around town as the sun set, grabbed dinner in a pool hall that didn't serve alcohol or allow smoking (we figured it must be an AA pool hall). We got ice cream cones for something like $.25 (Nicaragua is awesome) and checked out the local scene in the central park. A nice and pleasant evening-which is what vacation is all about.