- San Juan Del Sur
June, 1999
I was lucky enough to be in San Juan del Sur (Saint John of the South) the same week as they celebrated the day of San Juan. In this week they had a Miss San Juan del Sur, complete with a procession, the competition at the local 'discoteca', and the uproar that resulted when the daughter of the lady who organized the event won - the mother evidently slipped a whold role of voting tickets into the box before counting commenced. The people on stage and audience (friends of the losing entrants)ended up throwing cups of water and ice at each other, while other groups (myself included, just for the fun of it) shouted 'fraude, fraude'. But that turned out good, because the uncle of the girl who supposedly should have won ended up throwing a 'screw you' party with free drinks on the same night as the crowning event.
Other events through the week were a rodeo and a 'greased pole' competition, see below.
Procession of "Miss San Juan del Sur". They were throwing out lollies, drinks and beer to the crowd. As you can imagine, I went home with a pocketful of lollies.
I think this girl was the winner of last years competition.
The people marched slowly around the streets, periodically letting off fireworks, which ended at the local church. I took a daytime shot of one of these things in Antigua, Guatemala.
Outside the church these kids put on masks and danced around to drum and trumpet music played by men in a band. Meanwhile, other slightly older kids straddle a stick with a horses head on it and try to run down the other kids dodging in front of them.
Here is the bay and beach along which San Juan resides.
This is the Rodeo. First they rope and drag one of the unlucky beasts from the herd, then tie his head to this pole so that they can strap on a rope to hold onto, and a bell between his willy and testicles, just to annoy him more (and who wouldn´t be annoyed).
Then after a jab up the butt with an electric zapper, he´s off and kickin´. See that bottom wooden rail on the fence? The kids love to run around in the ring, dodging as the bull charges away. And when it looks like he´s coming their way, they make a run for it and dive under the bottom rail before they get trampled. Can you see the guy´s face and blue jeans underneath the bull as he narrowly escaped? In case you're wondering, the kid with the white T-Shirt is also on the other side of the fence.
I thought it was pretty good how these kids stay on the bull, but I later noticed that the spurs they had were literally sharp spikes hooking upwards. Notice how close the guys feet are to the bulls ribs? And when the bull tires out, the guy reaches down further and really digs up hard with the barbs in the hope that the bull will react further. This doesn´t always work, however, as I saw one guy digging for about 2 to 3 minutes without much reaction from the pooped bull.
...but then sometimes they´re able to get their own back. I think this kid was stepped on. He was unconscious for a good 5 minutes. Their First Aid method was to all crowd around him and wave air onto his face like they do in the old movies. When he came around, they lifted him to his feet (though he could not bear his own weight) and walked him around with his arms around their shoulders. I think even still he drifted in and out of semi-consciousness as they were holding him up... ahh, good ol' boys from the country.
On the actual day of the celebration of San Juan, they stick a long pole in the ground and smother it in black engine grease. This is the competition of the 'Palo Sucio', the Dirty Pole. This is not a competition of people or groups against others. Rather one in which individuals participate in the collective effort of recovering the flag at the top. The plan was to climb as high as possible, wipe the grease away (though of course there is always some left on the pole) and rope a piece of wood to the pole to stand on.
After most of the grease had been wiped off, I thought the photo opportunity would be good, so offered to stand on someones head to help out.
...only to be climbed and stood upon myself (that´s me in the green shorts). What I didn´t plan on was that when the guy climbed on my back, the others collapsed from under me, leaving me clinging like mad to this still slippery pole. Realising I wasn´t prepared to go down without a fight, the guy hurriedly clambered to my shoulders, stepped on my head (with of course greasy feet) to gain the height I´d lost in slowly slipping, grabbed onto the plank of wood that the guy above was standing on, climbed onto his shoulders and finally got the flag.
The prize is 500 colons (AU$75) and 24 x 375 ml bottles of cheap rum to be shared among the participants.
The triumphant team.