Without the usual lame excuses for not having posted in a while I’ll just get into it.
Since my last post we settled down in a pleasant apartment on a residential street in Granada not far from the central plaza. Mary Beth was teaching English about 6 days a week, and I was letting myself be little more than a quiet observer of the town and its inhabitants. Really not much else happened beyond many pleasant walks along the colonial streets and nights out with other travellers. We made a small number of Granadino friends that enriched our time there and even resulted in an invitation to be godparents to a young man’s first child. It remains to be seen if we will be able to get back to Nicaragua to be there for the baptism, maybe we can do it by e-mail.
So that was 3 months ago and now we are just regular backpackers again, going from hostel to hostel, bus ride to bus ride. Directly after leaving Granada we headed to Ometepe Island, an island formed by 2 volcanoes in the middle of Lago de Nicaragua. A lovely place really, with very charming island atmosphere, but as October is the rainiest month in the region there was little going on and the rain prevented us from freely exploring the entire island. One morning we woke up with the intention of hiking up the larger and still active Volcan Concepcion, but a rainstorm had turned the main street into a river and we decided it better to spend the day writing postcards and other leisurely activities. We rented a motorcycle one day and had an adventure circumnavigating the sometimes barely passable road around the southern volcano. Other than that we found the food to be overpriced, and not well prepared, after having access to the number of good, traveller-oriented eateries in Granada.
After Ometepe we spent a night in Managua before catching a flight to the Corn Islands in the Caribbean. Once again the weather prevented us from experiencing everything the islands had to offer, but the people and the scenery more than made up for the lack of action. The island lifestyle certainly agrees with us and I felt as though I was in heaven with the constant blasting of reggae music from every business, bar and taxi we passed. At first we stayed on Big Corn Island and spent our days walking and biking around the island. A lack of convenient ways to get cash meant that we planned to head back to the mainland sooner, but a mis-communication at the hotel had us at the dock a day before the ferry would even arrive. The only boat leaving that day was a small panga (an open, 14-foot boat with an outboard engine) to Little Corn so we said to hell with our plan and went there. Little Corn proved to be the more comfortable of the islands. So small that there are no cars, just a series of foot paths, which makes the island a very tranquil place to visit. We settled in a bamboo hut on the eastern side of the island and went snorkelling in the waters just outside our door and ate wonderful seafood meals at night. But again the same problem with cash arose. Big Corn at least had a bank, but Little Corn had no such thing so we had to leave a day before the ferry for the mainland came.
From Bluefields on the Atlantic coast we made a long journey by river boat and 2 buses to Leon, another colonial city and Granada’s arch-rival. Leon is much larger than Granada and more liberal, which I think is due to the large student population that attends the university here. We got ourselves a cheap room at BigFoot Hostel and have been exploring the many churches and museums here. There are several volcanoes in the area and we immediately got ourselves a place on the volcano boarding tour offered by the hostel. It was a blast to sled down a black sand volcano face, but I forgot to close my mouth and ended up with a mouth full of black dust and pebbles.
And that pretty much brings us up to date. We may stay in Leon for a couple more days to hike another volcano or go to the nearby coast. But our time in Nicaragua will soon be over as our visas expire on the 15th I think. El Salvador and Honduras are next.
