Greeting From Granada

My last night in San Juan del Sur was spent at a fun live concert given from a stage set up on the beach. The following day a group of us with the same destination in mind set off for the island of Ometepe. The ferry ride across the lake brought into view the scenic island, dominated by it's twin volcanoes, one active the other dormant. We found a nice hostel located on a local farm, well removed from any population. A giant sow and her brood of piglets rooted around in the garden, birds and their songs were abundant, and no alarm clocks were necessary as the incredibly loud and annoyingly early hooting of howler monkeys greeted each day.

Pigs and piglets doing their thing

We decided to climb the somewhat less daunting inactive volcano, called Maderas, and spent a hot, sweaty and grueling day trudging ever upwards across slippery rocks and roots and through mud that left more than one person suddenly and unintentionally sitting on their ass. Their were some cool Pre-Colombian carvings to be seen and the pungent smell of nearby coffee bean plantations was amazingly aromatic. Reaching the top of the volcano was followed by a harrowing descent aided by ropes into the crater where we were rewarded with a refreshing swim in the lagoon, though it involved walking through thigh-deep mud to get out of shallower waters. All told the whole thing took 6 hours at a fairly brisk pace and I returned sweaty, tired, and with aching knees. Definitely glad I did it, but that being said I wont be climbing that particular volcano ever again. Was also relieved that the less ambitious among us prevailed and we hadn't chosen to do the other volcano which was reputed to take 10-12 hours and for the last 3 didn't even have the small comfort of canopy cover to keep the sun off.

The larger of the islands volcanoes

Ometepe had a very rustic and country kind of feeling due to its isolation and I definitely understood why so many travellers I'd met spoke of it in such glowing terms. It's too bad that the lake is as polluted as it is, though I've nevertheless swum in it. A further fear, at least of some, is the fact that Bull Sharks, the only kind of it's species that can survive in fresh water and very aggressive, swim up the River San Juan where the lake empties into the ocean and can be found in the lake.

The wheels on the chicken bus go ´round and ´round...

Having seen our fill of the island the group, consisting of me, a Californian, some Dutch, and an Australian took the boat back to the mainland and went our separate ways, though the Australian guy, Reece, and I continued on to Granada together.

View of Granada


Hostel courtyard in Granada, kind of hard to tell but it was raining buckets

It's funny, we seem to have sent our entire fleet of sixties era school buses to Nicaragua where they've been repurposed as local public transportation. Many of them still have random U.S. school district names on the sides, though the front windshields are now usually adorned more colorfully with religious icons and requests for divine protection from the dangers of the road. Each bus is also at some point a local market and prior to departure a long line of locals hawking various products file through the bus yelling out whatever they're selling. As you wait to get to your next destination, not only can you buy food and snacks, but cure-all remedies, socks, underwear, jewelry, hair-gel, and any number of other unlikely seeming products for travelling by bus. Additionally, at some point their will inevitably be someone who gets on board and proceeds to regale the bus with some or another ending in a plea for money. Sometimes it is simple poverty, medical emergencies for children, financial support in one's continued struggle with the help of Jesus against drugs or church support programs. Surprisingly, often times the locals on the bus will donate and I usually take my cue from them and chip in, trusting they can discern genuine need from scam better than I. One time there was a blind guy with a harmonica who was telling an apparently amusing story with musical accompaniment and sound effects, which was actually pretty impressive despite me not understanding the story.

Cool stained glass window of a church in Granada

Granada is a very cool colonial town rich in character, with impressive churches and charmingly colorful buildings. You can eat a delicious dinner on the town's main drag where roaming bands of the Nicaraguan equivalent of mariachis will play for you and a troupe of breakdancers perform on the street. The breakdancers were extremely impressive, best I've ever seen, with one little kid who couldn't have been more than 7 doing impressive spins and vaulting off another members hands into a backflip high in the air. One of the members was obviously double-jointed and seemed to combine contortionism with his breakdancing. They really had a fine routine and a great sense of showmanship, with the incongruous backdrop of a "House of Pain" song playing in the background. There is also an unfortunate amount of straight up begging by the town's children, which is equal parts sad and annoying.

One of the many narrow and crowded lanes of the market


Ding-Dong! Time for church

After checking out the town, I spent a couple nights in a small, remote hostel on the shore of nearby Lake Apoya, located of course in a crater. Cleanest lake in Nicaragua and the hostel provided inner tubes to float and kayaks for exploring the lake. Extremely peaceful and relaxing change of pace from the more frenetic atmosphere of Granada. The lake also had a ton of volcanic rocks whose trapped air-bubbles cause them to float at the surface, very cool. Two relaxing days spent lazily swimming and kayaking and peaceful nights lying in a hammock drinking rum and cokes and listening to an aspiring song-writer\guitarist girl from Oregon with a beautiful voice play her original songs. As an additional treat, the power was out most of one night which lead to an impromptu concert alternating between the Oregon girl and the trio of Argentinians who ran the place playing a wide variety of musical instruments, such as a wind-flutea and some interestingly unique S. American percussion instrument. Was really good music all around and in the pitch darkness it was set to a backdrop of occasional lightning flashes and the sporadic twinkling of the numerous lightning bugs in the area.

Idyllic lakeside setting

Refreshed I returned to Granada and as the Australian departed, met a nice guy from California who agreed to accompany me to the nearby Masaya Volcano. Whoo, finally made it to an active volcano! Caught a ride on the road through the park to the crater rim where huge clouds of noxious and sulfurous smoke belched out. Definitely stung the eyes and throat. Very interesting history to the area, as a huge cross overlooks the volcano, a replica of one erected by a Spanish priest in an attempt to exorcise the demons of the volcano, which was thought by the Spanish to be the literal entrance to hell. The volcano had also been revered by indigenous tribes prior to the arrival of their Spanish conquerors and they used it in an ingenious ritual to appease angry gods by occasionally throwing in a virgin or two as a sop said gods. Charming, yes? We also did a tour through these awesome natural lava tunnels formed in a previous eruption. They were inky black and were equipped only with cheap miner's helmets and weak and dim flashlights. The eruption that formed the tunnels was relatively recent and you could see the slowly forming beginnings of stalactites. No dark scary cave is complete without bats, and their were plenty, especially in the hugely cavernous room which our guide told us was the room where the deliberations of the tribal elders took place ot select the unfortunate sacrifices.

Reclining near the entrance to my future home


The Spaniards made a point of literally ¨baptising¨all the volcanoes
they came across in the New World


Entrance to the bat cave/lava tunnel

We hitched a ride down to the park entrance with an amazingly nice Nicaraguan family who insisted on giving us a personal tour of the nearby natural history museum before we left. I judged them to be a relatively well-to-do middle-class family and they hailed from the capital, Managua. They plied us with drinks from their cooler and the son, a high-school age kid happily practiced his English with me, and I my Spanish with him. It was actually rather touching how he showed us around the museum giving us the Spanish names of all the local flora and fauna, pointing out interesting side-bars and giving personal anecdotes and then at the end, looking straight at as and saying with such pride, "So, what do you think of my country?" The trip to the see the volcano was worth it for this unexpected local encounter alone (plus his sister was the best looking Nicaraguan girl I've seen to date) and we ended up hanging out with the family for a couple hours and they went a half-hour out of their way in the opposite direction to drop us off at a nearby town and save us from having to transfer buses.

Smoking, sulfurous hole in the earth, aka volcano

Independence Day! Spent the morning touring nearby isletas with the Dutch girl, Marica, from Ometepe, who I had chanced to run into, two nice Israeli girls and some Israeli guys they'd met. It's hilarious to me that every single Israeli, and there's lots of them, comes up to me and asks if I'm Israeli. Must have happened like thirty times. Anyway, the islands were nice, though the water of the lake was especially brown from dirt runoff with all the rains. Saw some old historical mini-fort and a tiny island populated with monkeys, who in the local tradition were reduced to begging handouts.

Local commerce

That afternoon I found an American owned bar that was marking the occasion of our Independence with a traditional feast of BBQ ribs, burgers, brats, potato salad and corn on the cob. Sounded good, and the food did turn out to be excellent but the ambiance left something to be desired. The owner was an older Texas born expat and was extremely drunk already by the time I arrived. He was wearing a ratty American flag tank top that was much too small for his considerable girth and in consequence the front of the shirt rode up, exposing a freakishly hairy beer gut, the hair matted with sweat in a quite unsightly manner. His entire upper body was a dense forest of hair, covering shoulders, arms and back and it seemed to be desperately trying to escape from all sides of the flag shirt that held it in. Needless to say it was a sight that inspired in me a great upswelling of patriotic emotions and national pride. Completing this picturesque scene of American vitality was the horrible country music chosen for the occasion, the requisite group of overly drunken and loud countrymen and women heaving themselves up onto the bar to sway to the ¨music,¨ and just to cap it off a woman whose desire to have lips to put Angelina Jolie to shame was thwarted by a plastic surgeon who was either a drunk, an incompetent, or both. Ta Da! It seemed like something I´d have thought only the most mean-spirited, cruel and uninformed satirist could have dreamed up, but there I was to witness it in the flesh.

I extricated myself from this spectacle happy in the hope of atonement, as the Israeli girls I had met earlier had offered to cook me one of their national dishes for dinner (my counter-offer of lobster stuffed pork chops was politely refused). The meal was excellent, as was the company and the conversation. That evening however I was to inadvertently further celebrate America as I ended up at a club/bar whose Saturday showcase was that quintessentially American sport, I assume, of Jello wrestling. I´ll just say it was a fun night, as much for dancing and hanging out with the group of cool people I´d met in Granada up to that point as for the main event.

A moment of silence as we give thanks for electric washing machines

Spent a lazy Sunday reading, recovering and planning my next moves. I had planned to spend a week or so more in Nicaragua and then check out Honduras, but history may have intervened in those plans. A military coup, how typically and delightfully Central American I suppose. I initially thought I´d just be able to go into Honduras as planned only it´d be more exciting with the added spice of seeing history in the making. The developing news reports of continued instability were less responsible for my reconsidering than the first-hand accounts, of those tourists who had made it across the Southern border down to Granada, of roadblocks, buses turned back, military checkpoints that involved AK-47s pointed at one, curfews at night, and a general inability to get around, go out, or do much of anything. We´ll see what happens in a week I suppose. I´m currently in Leon, North of Granada, and have as my backup plan to take a boat around Honduras straight into El Salvador and then from there by bus to Guatemala.

Hope everyone had a great Fourth of July and is enjoying their summer tremendously. Drop me a line, I love hearing from the folks back home! -Azi