Nicaragua

So all of our border crossings (so far - fingers crossed) have been pretty straightforward, just the usual minor bureaucracy, none of the West African style nightmares. We´re in Costa Rica at the moment, going surfing in the next few days and maybe a bit more diving...


It always amazes me how much more trusting you have to become when travelling, whilst still being aware. When you´re in a mental bus station with hundreds of buses and people and some complete stranger at the bus station tells you that this is the bus you need, tells you to pay on board and throws your sizeable rucksac onto the roof in around three seconds. Or, when some dodgy looking bloke at the border with a calculator and a bundle of money looks at you and tells you an exchange rate that you haven´t researched (just add 10% to their first rate seems to be a good rule of thumb here). Also, I guess it´s all about making connections and finding tiny bits of common ground. Like our taxi driver in Guatemala City who didn´t speak a word of english and chattered away while rooting through his cds, selected one and with an enormous grin pressed play and stated "ingleterra" - out of the speakers blared "lonely, I´m so lonely" as sung by Kim Il Jong in team America. Random and hilarious.


So, anyway, Nicaragua. The most volcanic country of Central Amercia, still largely undiscovered and all the more lovely for the fewer travellers. We were on a mission to get to Granada for Christmas so sadly had to miss out on Leon... always hard, but reality is beginning to dawn that our trip´was pretty optimistic, given the amount of ground we have to cover in three months!


Christmas day was like no other, a long walk around the historic town of Granada (in need of a big clean up and a little diosappointing after what we've heard about it)and a bit of breakfast saw us watching Lord of the Rings on HBO (not too disimilar to a UK Christmas in the Pollard household!) Fellow travellers will understand our love of the ever reliable HBO for a little bit of familiar entertainment! To do Granada justice we took a lovely horsedrawn tour of the town (in the rain), with a lovely Spanish guide who gave us a really thoughtful insight into the history. Thankfully our Spanish is now good enough to understand and communicate effectively so we got a lot out of it.


The Spanish and US have a lot to answer for in this region of the world, millions of deaths over the last five centuries, and more recently political meddling, coups, general war mongering... for resources, access to the Panama canal, etc. Although, the UK's record isn't much better in many other corners of the world.


Anyway, a few days in Granada and we headed off to Ometepe, an island in the middle of Lago de Nicaragua that was formed by two volcanoes erupting. Naturally, we had to climb one (a touch higher than Ben Nevis). Naturally, it was chucking it down. We'd got quite excited about trekking through cloud forest (which seemed like quite a romantic prospect, however the reality was a little different but fun all the same!) The path up seemed to be made up of a small stream bed that on the way up was okay, just very muddy but trying to stay relatively mud free, lots of slipping and close calls but we were soaked close to the top. The view from the top was amazing, if the mist lifted, but typically the clouds were down and we could just about make out the near shore of the crater lake, never mind the other side. The mud added a bit of danger to the path down and Loretta was in prime position for the muddiest of the group until the army bloke in our group stacked it in brilliant style ten metres from the end of the trail.

The rest of Nicaragua passed by relatively quietly as we bussed our way to the border and jumped on a bus to San Jose in Costa Rica. Nicaragua´s a stunning, gentle and relaxed place and we left with a nagging feeling that we hadn´t done it justice. next stop the slightly less chilled and much more American Costa Rica was lying in wait, an interesting contrast.

The reality dawned on us that there was no way we could fit in Colombia and Venezuela to our itinerary and make Rio carnival so they´ve been put on the back burner for our next trip to South America and we´re flying to Lima, Peru on 6th Jan for the main event of our trip... South America.