Advertisement
Published: April 28th 2006
Edit Blog Post
We took the overnight boat from Ometepe to the village of San Carlos, located at the head of the Rio San Juan. We had planned to go down to El Castillo, the site of a Spanish fort, and spend a few days before returning to San Carlos and then up the Rio Frio to Costa Rica.
Some advice to anyone travelling this route: no matter what you hear or are told, you cannot access money using a bank card nor can you charge anything to a card once you leave Ometepe!!!!! No ATMs on Ometepe, and the bank in San Carlos wouldn´t even take travellers checks....!!!
We had enough $$$ to stay just one night on the river.....so sad....
Back to the trip....
When the boat arrived, it took on passengers, lots of plantains (like large bananas) and much other stuff in giant covered baskets. We had "first class" tickets, so in theory we had seats on the upper deck. In actuality, all the experiemced Nicaraguans travelling from Granada had staked out the seats, strung hammocks everywhere, and had settled in for the rest of the 14 hour trip. (Our leg was "just" 10 hours).
I
On the boat
The upper deck outside. The rooster was in the bag in the background. asked an older couple if we could sit with them, and they moved over for us. It turned out that they had lived in Jersey City for many years and had returned home to Nicaragua to retire. He loved to talk and gave us his very conservative outlook on politics and the situation in Guatemala. He is very wealthy, it seems, especially for Guatemala....The others who joined our table as the evening wore on were:
1. A German woman riding her bike through Central America (she had started in South Carolina after travelling by container ship from Germany). She had already ridden a bike the length of Africa a few years ago!
2. A South African young man named Dan who was headed to South America
3. A German man who has travelled almost everywhere in the world, named Hanno
4. A few more Germans and some French who came and went...
It was hard for us to sleep since we weren't backpacking and didn't have sleeping bags and pads..we did get a bit a of sleep towards the early morning...and then I was woken by a rooster! I hadn't realized there was one on the deck in a
On the boat
The upper deck inside bag!!!
We arrived in San Carlos at 6:00am and couldn't get a boat downriver til 11:00 which gave us plenty of time to confirm that there was no way to get $$$ in town...Dan had to go directly to Costa Rica (where there was a cash machine in the border town) since he was out of money and the rest of us headed down river....In Hanno's guidebook, we read about a new hotel at the mouth of the Sabalo River that sounded great and might take Visa cards...it was great, but only took cash...so we had to leave this very lovely spot after one day..the owner is a Nica, but maried to a German... Hanno ended up there too..we saw the German bicyclist go past in a launcha the next morning...but soon we all went our separate ways....
We were off by boat to Los Chiles in Costa Rica and then on to San Carlos CR for the night....
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 13; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0374s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb