White Lobster

The Caribbean coastal waters off Nicaragua are part of the Colombian drug smugglers' speedboat highway to the United States. And, as would be expected, not all of the smugglers' go-fast boats make it without being intercepted. When they are, the contraband drug shipments are jettisoned overboard.

For the fishing villages scattered across these remote central American shores there was seldom reason to welcome visits from the outside world.

But that was before the "white lobster", and before everything changed. Now the villagers rise at first light to scan the horizon in hope of seeing a very different type of intruder.

What they are looking for, and what they have coyly euphemised, are big, bulging bags of Colombian cocaine. A combination of law enforcement, geography and ocean currents has washed tonnes of the drug, and millions of dollars, into what was one of the Caribbean's most desolate and isolated regions. Villages that once eked an existence on shrimp and red-tinged lobster have been transformed. In place of thatched wooden huts there are brick houses, mansions and satellite dishes.

"They consider it a blessing from God. You see people all day just walking up and down the beaches keeping a lookout to sea," said Louis Perez, the police chief in Bluefields, the main port on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast.

Anecdotally, there's a story from a few years ago where 15 villagers died after mistaking a bale of cocaine for baking powder. Don't you just hate when that happens?