When my two friends decided they wanted to get hitched in Nicaragua during March, I found an excuse to explore a country I assumed I would never see otherwise. Fresh from my trip to Europe, I still had “the wanderlust” and tried to recruit someone to come with me. Unable to find anyone to tag along, I set forth on my own, landing in Managua and spending all of 35 minutes in the city before catching a Microbus and heading north towards Leon. I had no idea what to expect while traveling through the country as my understanding of Nicaragua was based on a couple of Latin American history classes and my neighborhood 'Fritanga' restaurant in Miami. What I discovered was a country full of hardworking people who seemed to be more interested in the fact that I was a guest than where I came from. In the matter of a week, I had made a solid group of international friends with whom I shared countless bus rides and Toñas with.

Halfway through my trip, I caught salt water in my digital camera, and that was the end of that. I still had my trusty film camera at my side, but some shots would be much more difficult to shoot. I felt unarmed at times without my piece, without a camera.

It wasn't until my last night in country, that my friend David and I were sitting in the back of a pickup truck looking up at the stars while the truck bounced up and down some dusty road that I had an epiphany. Until that moment, I had mourned the inability to take certain photos, but I now realized it.

I realized that no matter how many photos I take of anything, I'll never be able to really explain a lot of what went on. It would be very difficult for one photo to convey the experiences of the solitary bus ride scenery of volcanoes, FSLN flags, and barbed wire fences. Random conversations, smells, and especially, night-time are particularly hard for me to capture on film. It's taken me a long time, but I'm finally starting to appreciate the fact that some experiences are just better kept as little anecdotes between you and the people who were there. Maybe what I mean to say is, not photographing every second may preserve the experiences in a different way and conserve some of their mystery.

Even under perfect lighting conditions, I would never have been able to make a successful photograph of us, sprawled out in the bed of that pickup truck, gazing up at the night sky as it drove down that dusty road somewhere in the middle of Nicaragua. It's obvious now that I write it, but that's a memory only we have.