Day 83 - Ready in 13 minutes

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This would have been our earliest wake up yet - the alarm was set for 3.15am. However we slept through this after a bad night’s sleep (and an ineffective but still 100 decibel fan) and awoke to find it was 4.23am. Our bus was leaving at 5. We made the decision to try and catch it, as the next bus was not for another 24 hours. 13 minutes later we had got dressed, cleaned teeth, checked out, got a taxi to the bus terminal and were in the queue to buy two tickets (turned out to be almost the last two tickets as the bus was pretty much full). Impressive stuff.

We were heading for Managua, Nicaragua. It was a very uneventful journey with even the border crossing organized by the bus company, TICABUS, so all we had to do was wait. A bit boring to tell you the truth.

We did get talking to a chap who had been traveling for a month and was making his way to Costa Rica to do some volunteering. “Oh yeah” Gemma said, “with who?” “Have you heard of Raleigh International? I’m doing a community phase with them.” he replied. Of course Gemma knows Raleigh inside out, having worked for them for 4 1/2 years, and ended up telling him what to expect to prepare for the month with Raleigh as he had missed the pre-expedition ‘Challenge Workshop’ briefing!

Arriving in Managua, capital of Nicaragua, we made a hasty exit (no guidebook or person ever recommends staying here). A quote that sums it up is “don’t worry about missing anything because there’s nothing there to miss”. We got ourselves onto another bus for an hour long journey to Granada, an historic colonial town on the north shore of Lago de Nicaragua.

Here we booked ourselves into a budget-busting hotel, Hotel Colonial (after some debate the 2 swimming pools with swim-up bar swung it for us - this is most certainly the way to go backpacking!), where we are going to stay for the next three nights to celebrate 3 months of marriage and Gemma’s birthday.

For dinner we were recommended, by all 3 local people we asked, a fantastic restaurant where we had great dishes straight from the grill. As good as the food was though, it was outshone by a number of Flor de Canas and Coke, which went down very well and very quickly.

Flor de Cana is something of a Nicaraguan obsession. It’s cheap but very, very good. The two of us didn’t even realize we liked rum until hitting it courtesy of fellow fan Richard, one of Ed’s colleagues at Newton. Our Lonely Planet book says that “…some connoisseurs consider it to be the finest rum in the world, better even that Cuba’s more expensive brands.” We vowed to ship some home…

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