Nothing about ACDU except Nicaragua is apparently still there. I was unable to grab a couple of pictures.
Finding San Francisco history in the most unlikely of places: Nicaragua
I have always thought of it as the ultimate escape from reality — sailing out of the Golden Gate and turning left, bound south for Panama and the far oceans.
Ideally, you should make the voyage on a sailing vessel, fair winds and following seas, bound for adventure. But that is unrealistic. So the Sailor Girl, my companion, and I were aboard the cruise ship Coral Princess with 1,900 or so others. You take what you can get.
We went south, down the long Mexican coast, then Central America, through the Panama Canal, a quick stop in Cartagena, Colombia, then through the Caribbean up to Port Everglades, Fla. The sea is always the best part; long days of reading books and walking the decks, adventure with room service.
But there is always the thought of a new port in the morning. We went to places I had never been and found a bit of nearly forgotten San Francisco history.
Seven days and 2,707 miles out of San Francisco, the Coral Princess anchored at San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, a small, out-of-the-way place. Mark Twain had been there once, in 1860. After two weeks at sea, he found it “enchanting and lovely.” He had come from San Francisco and was heading to New York, crossing the continent via the old route across Nicaragua.
He rode in a wagon up through the green countryside to Granada, about 20 miles from the coast. We took a tour bus. After a while I remembered stories I’d read about Granada and another 19th century visitor from San Francisco. He was William Walker, a soldier of fortune who was famous in his day.
He was an unlikely hero. He was 5 feet 4, weighed about 100 pounds and had a squeaky voice. “A very ordinary looking man,” according to a New Orleans newspaper. He was a man “burning with a desire for fame,” wrote historian Fanny Juda. To his admirers, he was “the gray eyed man of destiny.”
He rode in a wagon up through the green countryside to Granada, about 20 miles from the coast. We took a tour bus. After a while I remembered stories I’d read about Granada and another 19th century visitor from San Francisco. He was William Walker, a soldier of fortune who was famous in his day.
Walker ledtwo expeditions from San Francisco to Mexico and Central America. On his second foray, in 1853, he raised a small army in San Francisco, promised his men land and fortune, and intervened in a civil war in Nicaragua. His side won, and he installed himself in Granada. Walker soon brushed aside his Nicaraguan allies and proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua.
Walker was a man of the American South: He made slavery legal in Nicaragua and decreed English the official language of the country. He lasted two years until the combined armies of four other Central American countries defeated his ragtag armies.
Walker was vicious in defeat: He burned Granada to the ground. He made two more attempts to seize power before he was captured and shot by a firing squad in Honduras in 1860.
There seems to be nothing now in Granada to remind visitors of this strange interlude. Granada is very pretty, a pastel-colored city in the colonial style, built around a central plaza with a bandstand.
When the tourist buses pull in, small children come out selling whistles, pottery, leather purses, hats. It was Sunday when we were there, and choir music spilled out of the doors of the cathedral into the plaza. It was warm for a winter’s day.
Granada was important once and may be again, but now it is like a movie set, frozen in time. Granada was founded on Dec. 8, 1524, exactly 495 years ago. Henry VIII reigned in Europe then, and California was only a blank space on the map.
We took a cruise on Lake Nicaragua, gazed at the local volcano and threw bread to the monkeys. We sailed the next day, south again to green and friendly Costa Rica and then to Panama.
The Panama Canal is still one of the wonders of the world, the path between the Pacific and the Atlantic over the spine of the continent.
It is beautiful, too, in its way, with ships moving along one side of a small mountain, across a wide brown lake and then down the side of another mountain. The Coral Princess, our ship, is 106 feet wide and 984 feet long. It fit in the old locks with 2 feet to spare on either side.
But we saw bigger ships in the new locks. One ship was 150 feet wide and 1,095 feet long, too big for the old canal.
The new locks added an extra ship lane to the canal and has doubled its capacity. It is all easy to see and not hard to understand. A mechanical marvel in plain sight.
This was the fourth time I’ve gone through the canal. In the old days, the American flag flew from nearly all the buildings. Now the Panamanian flag is everywhere, on all the buildings and even the little locomotives that pull the ships through the canal. It’s a new world.
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