Float On

Hola! I´ve gotten all the way to Nicaragua at this point, and again, have had a great week :) Unfortunately I still can´t get my pictures up...I´ll be in San Jose Costa Rica in a few days though, I have high hopes for the internet connection there...

We left Copan about a week ago - caught a bus to San Pedro, and made a last minute connection to Tela. Tela is a small Honduran beach town, and it was my first beach in nearly 3 weeks in Central America! I was quite excited to get back to the beach. Although the jungle is exciting, I really am a beach person.

Tela was nice, I had a few good seafood meals and the beach (or at least sections of it) was lovely! We were off again in the morning on a chicken bus, and then a very rough ferry, to Roatan Island. Roatan is one of the more popular Bay Islands, and is a picturesque Caribbean island. We had a few days in Roatan, most of which were spent lazing around the beach during the day, leisurely lunches, and hanging out at the hotel pool in the evenings. It was like a mini vacation from my vacation! A very good way to recharge the batteries and just chill out for a while. I did manage to get some sailing and snorkeling in though, and this was really nice. I saw some Squid! They look funny. I also visited the West Bay Beach, which was beautiful - turquoise waters, white sand, palm trees everywhere, just a really nice place to be :) The night scene in Roatan was also pretty cool, although the bars tended to shut early, the parties seemed to move to house parties afterwards so it was all good fun!

Anyway, we left Roatan dreadfully early after 3 days, and took a 14 hour trip involving minibuses, a ferry, and some (thankfully) first class buses, to Tegucigalpa, the captial of Honduras. This was an intimidating and bustling city. As with most big cities in Central America, it is rather dangerous and we traveled in big groups. But it was laid out really nicely over the rolling Honduran countryside, and was a terribly interesting place to see! We were only there for one evening, and then headed off on another long journey (only 9 hours or so...) into Nicaragua.

Nicaragua is a beautiful country. Shortly after crossing the border, I started to notice striking volcanoes in the distance as well as big lakes. We briefly stopped in Managua (the Capital) to change buses. Much like Tegucigalpa, this was a big and intimidating city. While driving through, I noticed more poverty than I saw in the other cities, although this probably more dependent on the neighborhoods we happened to drive through than the state of the cities themselves. Nicaragua has had a turbulent past plagued with political corruption and civil wars. At the present, it is very peaceful; the current administration is doing their best to turn things around (or so I´m told) and are doing a decent job of it (again, so I´m told!). But it is a beautiful places, and one of my favorites in Central America so far!

We went straight to Granada, a beautiful Colonial town set up by the Spanish Conquistadors several hundred years ago. It actually reminds me of Antigua (colonial town architecture), although has a different atmosphere (though equally pleasant). I find myself wanting to take pictures everywhere I go in Granada, it´s really nice here! After walking around and getting acquainted with the town, I did a bit of shopping and then hiked the nearest active volcano, Volcan Masaya. Although slightly less impressive than Volcan Pacaya (Honestly, that volcano will be hard to beat!), Masaya was the picture-perfect volcano, with a giant crater on the top and massive amounts of steam and poisonous gases bellowing out. Adding to the atmosphere created by the smoke, there is a giant cross near the crater which was placed there by Spanish Priests to exorcise demons from the volcano. I´m not sure whether it worked... At the summit of the volcano there was a beautiful view of Lago de Nicaragua and Lago de Managua, and of the smoking crater at sunset. We then went down to see a bat cave! I heard rumours that this is Batman´s summer home...I don´t know if it´s true, it´s just what I heard. I´m sure he´d be comfortable there though, there were Thousands of bats, and to be honest it´s a pretty intimidating setting. There are 16 lava tubes around Volcan Masaya, which actually used to be one big tube but these were separated over time. A lava tube is basically a cave which formed when gases shot through molten lava - the lava hardened around this vent, creating a cave. It was really neat to walk through. Volcan Masaya was the site of human sacrifices long ago by indigenous people in Nicaragua. Mostly virgin women and children were sacrificed (although the occasional warrior volunteered as well) to honor the Gods. Apparantly skeletons of these sacrifices have been found in some of the lava tubes... creepy! But also awesome!! Lastly we tried to see the lava in the crater below the smoke. To avoid getting poisoned by the fumes we wore gas masks. I did manage to see a faint glow of the lava, but it was difficult with all the smoke! Also I was tentative of leaning too far over the crater, didn´t want to become an accidental sacrifice.

Yesterday we checked out the Apollyo Crater Lake. It was really nice, and especially nice to swim in fresh water! It was a neat little crater lake, I´m really glad we got to see it! We stayed for an hour or two and then caught a cab to the Masaya Markets in a small town (Masaya, of course) near Volcan Masaya. Masaya was a very pretty (although apparently quite dangerous) little town, and the market was fabulous! I was actually a bit overwhelmed, there was so much to buy I didn´t buy anything! It was like being back in Asia (except there I bought stuff). I also don´t have a lot of room in my bag, so the souvenirs will be in short supply this trip! Anyway, the Markets were awesome, and then I headed back to Granada and got a massage at the Seeing Hands massage parlor, where blind people give incredibly massages! So that was fabulous. We got caught in a terrible storm after that - storms here tend to blow in in about 10 minutes, DUMP water from the sky for another 10 or 20 minutes, and then stop completely. It´s actually really cool to watch, and unfortunate if you get caught in it! Last night we went to a Cafe Chevalos, a restaurant started by a former Peace Corps volunteer which brings troubled youths off the street, trains them in the restaurant business, pays for their schooling and helps them find employment afterwards. It´s an awesome organization, and I ate maybe the best meal I´ve had all trip so far!

Today we are heading to Ometepe Island on Lago de Nicaragua. Speaking of which, I have to run to catch my Chicken Bus! Hope everyone is well, I´ll try to get my pics up whenever I can. Take care :)

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