Viva la revolution

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Roatan airport is a quiet place where small planes sit beside a short runway. When we are asked to board we walk across to a Czech turbo-prop. Eighteen seats and our little group are the only passengers. Effectively, a private plane to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras!

A minibus then takes us to the Nicaraguan border and we change money again, lempira into cordoba. Nicaragua is known for having lots of active volcanoes and soon three volcanoes are spotted to the north. No smoke, no lava, they look totally benign.

Leon is our first stop, home of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. A ramshackle museum is staffed by ex-revolutionary soldiers. Photos show Leon at war - rubble, ruins, gunmen and women posing for the camera with automatic weapons. Parallels between the photos and Syria and Ukraine today are inescapable. Our guide points at a young man in a faded photo. Me, he says, that's me before I was shot. He shows us a nasty old wound above his hip. Argh, he says, and pulls a face.

In the afternoon we decide to walk up an active volcano to see the sunset. The 2 hour walk up to the rim is over volcanic rubble. At the top we lean over and look down into the smoke filled crater. We can hear the lava and gases bubbling somewhere below. As the daylight fades, we start to see the glow of lava through the sulphurous smoke. We descend in pitch darkness, picking our way down the rubble by torchlight.

The next day we lunch in a seafood restaurant on the coast, overhead fly pelicans. The beach is long but it is not the brilliant white sand of the coral Atlantic coast. We have crossed Central America and are now on the Pacific side. The beach is black, this is volcanic sand.

Tomorrow we had further into Nicaragua, more soon.

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