Granada (minus the Moors)

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So we arrived at Granada, Nicaragua. Not to be confused with Granada, Spain. Although the lack of any whacking great Moorish fortress starring down upon you would quickly set you straight if you did have a glitch in you personal radar. We had two goals for Granada that was to bed down for enough days to get our post travel plans into substantive motion and not eat any greasy food.

It is fair to say that we didn’t go out of our way to explore the delights Granada had to offer but the amount that we did it was somewhat limited and the place felt a little jaded. Granada is the traditional epicentre of conservatism in Nicaragua and was also home to the once formidable Somoza family who dictated here for 43 years of the last century. With the current government, Daniel Ortega’s revolutionary / socialist / decidedly corrupt crew, presiding over last months rather opaque (the jury’s out but likely fraudulent) local elections perhaps Granada has lost its former position of fortune. But politics is a complicated game here and we’ve far from even begun to unravel it.

The other rather unfortunate aspect of Granada is that the restaurant owners appeared to have got a little over enthusiastic with putting up the prices without mirroring that with service and food quality improvements. Having gotten used to the going rate of things in the Northern part of the country Granada’s menus felt a little out of kilter. Ironically, O’Shea’s (sorry not very cultured we know) the local Irish boozer was about the only place in town who could offer us decent priced non-greasy options (whoever invented baked potatoes was a genius).

We were in the not quite so resplendent Granada for six nights in total and the O’Shea’s lunchtime tally hit four. Besides the rather ingenious recycled plastic bottle Christmas tree in our hostel and the discovery that O’Shea’s culinary talents also stretched to some superb fajitas there was surprisingly little to repeat. We worked the wireless broadband in our hostel hard as we sculpted our plans. Then we left bound for the volcanic island of Ometepe.

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