Saturday, September 27

After some mixed feelings about Costa Rica we felt much better in Nicaragua. It's a lot poorer and less developed than Costa Rica, but somehow that's also charming. The houses are not completely surrounded by fences and gates anymore and people live more outside instead of in their airconditioned homes.
The poverty is clearly visible: we see beggars and streetchildren, wanting to shine our shoes (even though we wear flip-flop's most of the time), houses are made of wood and mud, only the better ones are made of stone and the road conditions are of Southamerican quality again.
The people we meet are very friendly and most of the places we visit are not very touristy. Most of the time we like that, but it also means the services are not always geared towards tourists so you get basic hotels with cold showers, few restaurants and typical breakfast consisting of eggs,rice and beans, yummy!

We started by travelling by boat from Costa Rica into Nicaragua (the road to cross the border is only open for Very Important Government People). The boat got engine problems right in front of the Nicaraguan border patrol, but Jeroen cheered up the crying girl on board by making his famous dog-balloon for her. In San Carlos, where we spent the night, an international fishing contest was just starting, combined with a culinary festival for tourists. This "culinary festival" turned out to be several bbq-stands lined up around an open space where very loud music was blasting from the speakers. The only tourists among the local crowd were 2 Germans and us...but we had a good time nevertheless.
We visited the remote (only two regular boats per week) islands of Solentiname where almost the whole community makes paintings and beautiful handicrafts of balsa wood. After that we took a 9-hour ferry across Lake Nicaragua to the island of Ometepe. For those who like statistics: it's the largest island in a lake in the world. Right before we left we quickly bought two simple hammocks, because it turned out that that was much more comfortable to pass the time on the ferry than in the ice-cold air-conditioned sitting area.
Ometepe is an island consisting of one active and one inactive volcano. We looked at them from our rocking chairs and only climbed to a beautiful waterfall.

The city of Granada was our next stop, and a very nice one. It's an old colonial city (actually the first in Latin America) with beautiful coloured houses with even nicer patios, nice bars with outside terraces and a very comfortable hotel. Besides strolling around the city we went on a Canopy tour. That means sliding on a steel cable through the tree tops. There's no chance to see any wildlife (unless you smash right into a poor bird they're normally scared away by the noise of the cables), but it's a very fun thing to do! See the movie below for an impression of our Super(wo)man combination :-)

After Granada we visited Leon, a less beautiful but historically interesting city. The city was much involved in the revolution ('73-'79) and civil war ('81-'93) and we visited a small but interesting museum about this time. The museum was located in a building where in 1979 several students were shot during a demonstration and consisted of nothing more than some walls with newspaper clippings and pictures, explained by a former guerilla fighter. The city has been restored after the war, but there are still some buildings showing bullet holes, an old command post and the ruins of a church that was bombed during the fighting.
In the evening the festival to celebrate the Virgin de Merced started. We don't know the connection with the Virgin, but it came down to a big street party with the highlight being a person dressed up as a bull, randomly shooting fireworks while running crisscross through the public. It's the same every year, so the people know what's coming, but they started screaming and running every time they thought this bull-person might start running, and it almost turned into mass panic when he really did come. We had found a safe spot to watch it all and to shoot a movie, see below.
In the small town of Esteli we visited a cigar factory. Most of the seeds are original Cuban stock which some Cubans took when they fled Cuba during the revolution. It was interesting to see all the workers making the cigars by hand, but the smell of all the cigars that lay fermenting in the storage room was disgusting!
Later that day we visited a museum set up by mothers of guerrilla fighters who were killed during the revolution. The personal stories and pictures and especially the story of the mother who guided us around were very touching.

Yesterday we arrived in Somoto where we hiked to a beautiful canyon. The canyon was only "discovered" by Europeans 5 years ago and we were one of the first 25.000 tourists to visit. This is probably as close to a "Livingston-esque" experience as we will ever get in our life. Because of the rainy season the water was too high to cross the canyon completely, so we also watched it from above. That meant we had to cross through people's backyards (and ask for their permission first) and walk through their fields with corn and beans. We took a break at a lady's small but welcoming house where she especially put some extra wood on the fire to make us coffee.

We're off to El Salvador now, another war-torn country, hopefully as interesting and beautiful as Nicaragua.