The scenery in western Nicaragua is quite different from that I saw father north in Central America. The country is very varied topographically and in terms of scenery from a mountainous northcentral region to rainforest on the Caribbean side that's one of wettest places on earth. The western Pacific side of Nicaragua, though, is mostly dry hot country at relatively low altitudes. It is tropical dry forest and open woodland, much of which consists of deciduous trees that have shed their leaves by now well into the dry season, cattle country that looks a lot like Texas. The exception to the Texan type scenery is a set of volcanos rising high about the low hills and plains, some to over 6,000 feet. While not high in total altitude compared to those in Guatemala, that’s some dramatic difference in elevation from near sea level plains below. Nicaragua’s less populated landscape than El Salvador and the Guatemalan Highlands also gives the country a much more spacious feeling. Central America’s largest country in landmass has a somewhat lower total population than its densely populated smallest (El Salvador).

Nicaragua also feels a little different . Under control of the socialist-oriented Sandinistas for more than a decade from the revolution through the 1980s and now having elected Daniel Ortega as president again I was sort of expecting a min-version of Cuba. Nicaragua, of course, has never taken its socialism so seriously, though, and there’s always been plenty of free enterprise, and the area around Managua, the capital city that holds about half the country’s population in its metropolitan area is as congested with cars and filled with fast food restaurants and shopping malls as other Central American capital cities.

Some of my initial observations, though, confirmed my prejudices. The Nicaraguan side of the border crossing had one of the sorriest border posts I’ve seen outside of Africa. The first stop for everyone on the bus was a trailer with a health check point where a nurse took a look at each person crossing, asked me a few questions I didn’t understand, and waved me through. And at this border post there weren’t just money changers and people selling bags of cashews and bottles of local brand soda but also lots of beggars and prostitutes . What’s this? I thought socialism was supposed to eliminate all such social ills.

My first impressions of Leon were of a quite shabby looking town, somewhat disappointing at least compared to the glowing terms in which it is described in my Lonely Planet guidebook by n author who obviously finds great glory in the city’s claim to be the birthplace of the revolution and the most historically left-leaning of Nicaragua’s cities. But that stuff doesn’t particularly impress someone like me who’s not inclined to identify with far-left political movements.

When I got to my hostel on a somewhat shabby street a few blocks southeast of the town center I found they didn’t have my booking. What? That’ the first time that has ever happened to me in my many years of using the Hostelworld.com website. They told me to come back a few hours later after lunch. Socialism! See, they just don’t give a damn about customer service.

I then headed to the street that serves as the backpacker ghetto with several large hostels and restaurants, travel agencies, and other businesses that serve the needs of a backpacker type crowd . It seemed to be full of especially grungy-looking tattooed and pierced types. Obviously people attracted to Leon and Nicaragua by its Sandinista history. I’ll bet they’re all Bernie Sanders supporters, at least the American ones. Socialism!

After a few hours at some cafes, wandering around town in search of the local Quetzaltrekkers office, and trying to scope out interesting places to eat in the days ahead I visited Leon Cathedral and hung out until dusk in the Parque Central, the hub of the town’s activity in front of the cathedral. Some food stalls were set outside the Mercado Central with tables behind them in what was turning out to be a lively street scene of both locals and travelers. I decided that a sampler platter, a plato mixto, of many of the different foods on offer at a stall would make a pretty good dinner and introduction to Nicaraguan food – some grilled chicken, a deep-fried crescent called an enchilada, some types of what appeared to be stuffed vegetables, a couple other deep fried unidentifiables, and lots of gallo pinto, the mid of rice and beans that’s apparently Nicaragua’s national food . Altogether I ended up with two heaping paper plates full of a little of this and a little of that, well more than even my big-appetited self could normally eat.

Honestly, though, most of it wasn’t very good. I gave a large chunk of something I determined I didn’t like very much to a dog begging at my side. In an instant an obviously mentally ill man came running over begging me begging for what I was giving to the dog. He then began pointing to the chicken on my plate. "No, man, you can’t have my chicken. You can share the stuff I don’t like with the dog!" The attendant of the stall who served me my food came running over and scared off the crazed beggar giving her foreign customer a hard time with a stick and a spray bottle filled with something I suspect was not water. Hey, that’s what we used to use to shoo away our cat Claude away when he pursued food from our plates too aggressively!

I put the things I decided I didn’t want to eat (the majority of my dinner) on one of the two plates and motioned to the beggar (now sitting against the wall staring at me eating) that he could have them. He rushed over and dumped it all into a small plastic bag, fighting with the dog for the portions of it that fell on the ground instead of his little bag. Gee, I thought things like this didn’t happen in socialist countries where everyone’s needs is taken care of. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” or something like that the socialist motto goes .

Well, the hostel eventually found my booking and found me my little private room with a fan, so all was well until morning when something else struck – diarrhea, the quirts! Or as the British say, “Liquid bum”. What’s this? I have a cast iron stomach. I never get sick when I travel. I carry Cipro with me as a precaution but have almost never needed to use it, even in India and Nepal. I know what’s responsible for my sudden illness. Socialism!

I was considering using Leon as base for local trips, including some of the many advertised on the websites of several tour companies in town. These included the Leon Viejo archaeological site which is UNESCO World Heritage listed. There are also numerous volcanos in northwestern Nicaragua with both day trips and overnight camping trips supposedly on offer. To be honest, though, after having climbed so many volcanos in Guatemala I wasn’t overly enthused about hiking up more, especially since any hiking here would be beastly hot in contrast to those in the cool Guatemalan Highlands . As it turns out, though, I didn’t have much of a choice. Because of recent seismic activity in northwestern Nicaragua that raised the risk of unpredictable eruptions from the volcanos all but one were closed and off limits for hiking while I was in Leon. The one exception and sole volcano trip the tour operators were offering was for “Volcano Boarding” tours on the cone of Cerro Negro. These trips apparently involve walking up the volcano (in the hot sun) with some kind of sled or surf board and then sliding down the steep volcanic scree slopes at high velocity. That involves just way too much adrenaline for me! The other tour option was a boat trip through coastal mangrove swamps, also not my idea of a fun activity.

I have to admit that Leon grew on me quite a bit as I explored it further and gave it more of a chance. The city is full of great big churches still in use but rather crumbly looking with some quite inspiring architecture. The biggest of them is Leon’s Cathedral, the largest one in Central America and a UNESCO World Heritage site . It’s quite plain by the standards of cathedrals in Europe or Mexico but quite nice and the place of interment for some notables from Nicaraguan history like poet Ruben Diario.

The barrios to the west of the Cathedral and the Parque Central are where Leon’s numerous museums are concentrated and are significantly nicer than the parts around the central market where my hostel as well as the backpacker street are located. The first museum I visited in Leon was one of the weider ones I’ve been to, the Museo de Leyendas y Tradiciones (Legends and Traditions), an eclectic mix of life size papeir-mache figures depicting the creepy and ghoulish creatures from Nicaraguan legends as well as a bit of history. The museum is located in a building the old Guardia Nacional used to torture prisoners in the decades before the Sandinista Revolution, one that’s now covered with murals depicting some of those gruesome torture methods.

The Ortiz-Guardian Foundation Museum is described as the finest contemporary art museum in all of Central America, and I’d believe it. It’s a sprawling complex of rooms in several houses with art displayed in rooms surrounding beautiful garden courtyards on two city blocks. The art is mostly Latin American from the 20^th century to the present with a natural concentration on Central America, but also includes some works by Spanish masters like Picasso and Miro . I was positively impressed.

A third museum in the area is the childhood home of Ruben Dario, Nicaragua’s most famous poet, which serves as an archive of his life and work as well as a period home of an affluent Nicaraguan family in the 1800s. Probably the museum I was most interested in, though, turned out to be closed during my visit to Leon. The Galeria de Heroes y Martires is a museum commemorating Leon’s role in the Sandinista Revolution and is run by the mothers of FSLN veterans and fallen soldiers.

I feel lucky to be able to travel in Nicaragua and throughout Central America nowadays, a region that’s been largely peaceful and more or less democratic for almost a quarter century. When I was growing up, though, this was one of the regions of the world rocked by armed conflict and victimized by Cold War superpower geopolitics. Nicaragua was as much in the news in the 1980s as Syria and Iraq are in the 2010s and American foreign policy in the region was just as controversial .

The FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) successfully overthrew the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1978-79. Dominated by left-wing ideology, the regime received support from Cuba and the Soviet Union and in turn helped funnel military aide to left-wing movements elsewhere in the area, particularly El Salvador, seeking armed revolution in their countries. The United States during the Reagan years actively supported various aligned groups called the Contras that sought to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, probably the most controversial foreign policy position in America between the Vietnam War and America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. I remember it well since it was one of the dominant political issues on university campuses while I was in college. It now seems quite hard to believe that the U.S. would sometimes openly and sometimes clandestinely be supporting militarily a group of guerilla fighters trying to overthrow a government, but things were different during the Cold War .

Interestingly, Daniel Ortega, the Marxist-Leninist president of Nicaragua during the 1980s who lost a presidential election in 1990, has served as president again for nine years since getting elected again in 2006. He’s apparently moderated his tone, as much of the left around the world has done since the fall of Communism, but you can still get a whiff of the old revolutionary ideology around Nicaragua in the form of widespread propagandistic billboards and lots of very ideological graffiti. I suppose Nicaragua may have some more subtle aspects of socialism than surrounding countries, but for the most part it doesn’t seem all that different from Guatemala or El Salvador. This is not Cuba; most of the country clearly operates on a mostly market economy. Nowadays commies and capitalists can be friends again, more or less.