Nicaragua 2010
With Guatemala City covered in a blanket of ash from the recent eruption of Volcan Pacaya, with the flooding from the tropical storm and torrential downpours of a heavy rainy season, and with the stress of grading and ending a school year – let’s just say, I was ready for a summer vacation.
As soon as school was over, we headed to Nicaragua with our friends Stephanie, Rachel, Jeff, Maya and Alexis. We decided to use Granada on the shores of Lake Nicaragua as a base for several days. It was easy to use the quiet colonial city as a central spot to explore the surrounding area.
For some reason, you can’t quite escape volcanoes in Central America. Even though we just shoveled ash for weeks at home, the first place we decided to go was an active volcano called Volcan Masaya. It was a flatter volcano with a road that basically goes right to the smoking crater’s edge. After peeking down into the massive crater, we drove around the back side of the mountain and took a tour of an old lava tube. There is something irresistible about volcanoes – they just are so cool and if they are steaming and active… all the better!
Granada is next to an area of Lake Nicaragua called, “Las Isletas”, which is an area with approximately 360 small islands. If you have money, for a mere $300,000 you can buy your own island – many rich people from Managua do just this. We took a nice boat tour of the islands where we could see beautiful homes, shore birds and nice views of the massive lake. It was a good relaxing time to unwind from a stressful end of the school year.
Nicaragua was similar to Guatemala in many ways. It was a country that seemed to be in the middle of modern and ancient just like in Guate. In Nicaragua, the streets had modern cars and motorcycles weaving around horse drawn carts that carried produce or were used as a means of transportation. I suppose like everywhere, there was a vast difference between the rich and the poor. Again, like both countries all the people were super nice. When our friend Jeff got his wallet stolen on the public bus, a group of guys from a baseball team that happened to be on the bus, ran after the thief and got the wallet back. Not only that, but a nice man named, “Angel” walked us back to our hotel to make sure the gringos were safe.
From Granada, we got a ride in a pick up several hours south to Rivas and San Jorge where we got a ferry to Isla de Ometepe. The huge island sits in the middle of Lake Nicaragua and was formed by two large volcanoes – one active and one inactive. It was a nice quiet island with very few roads and even fewer cars, there were howler monkeys and white faced monkeys, many beautiful birds, swimming holes and waterfalls. It turned out to be a great place to enjoy several days. It was also a fun way to spend our last few days with friends before they moved back home to the San Francisco area.
From Isla de Ometepe, we parted company. We spent a night in Managua before our flight to Lima. We were excited to leave the heat and humidity of Central America to head to the mountains and the cold of winter in Peru!
Pictures of the trip can be found at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/GrobGuat/Nicaragua2010#
