El Castillo, Nica

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We got to El Castillo, on the San Juan river about midway between the atlantic and lake Nicaragua yesterday around 3. We checked into a decent place for like $4. The town was very strange. First of all, it was about 60% hotels/hostels but we only saw a few other tourists. We were the only tourists at our hostel. People were friendly in general but we also noticed pretty quick that the young people there seemed particularly unapproachable and would not respond when we greeted them...i don´t know why. We booked 2 tours. Our frist tour was for that night to catch some nocturnal camians (an alligator-like creature except smaller) they were about a meter in length. We on board a wide canoe with an outboard motor at about 7pm with our guide and a couple of guys that Becky and I decided were either from the netherlands or denmark. Our guide was very friendly and he explained some about the camians lives and about how to find them. He scans the edges of the san juan river with a headlamp beam and catches the camians eyes in the light beam. Their eyes reflect the light and stand out orange in the black water! Our guide then carefully eased over to the spot and killed the motor on the boat. The next part was pretty confusing for us. He went into the water and searched around with his headlamp for maybe 10 minutes and then all of a sudden he had a live camian in his hands! Becky and I were discussing and we think that maybe in the night his headlamp blinds and stuns the camian so that he can catch it. anyway once the camian is caught and out of the water you only have to hold onto its throat with a firm grip and the thing basically just chills. Don´t worry.. the camian doesnt get hurt. It thrashed away when it was time to let it go. We have some pretty hilarious photos with the camians that i´ll post up soon.
We caught the end of the argentina-bolivia match to see it end in a tie on grainy cable.
This morning we went on a tour into the indigo-maize nature reserve on horses. The tour lasted for about 3 hours. We had a great time in the beautiful area and took many pictures. We saw some different birds and butterflies. I really enjoyed the tour and riding the horse wasn´t as bad as i thought it might be! My horse liked to wander and i knicknamed him zig-zag. He always decided to go down all the hills zigzag instead of following the guide and becky´s horse. We have some beautiful pictures from the tour.
Next we got some lunch¨-fried chicken, rice, beans n banana! From there we wanted to get another tour into the nature reserve. We had asked around the previous day about different tours with some mixed luck. When we went around today.. no luck. No one wanted to take our money and show us around for a few hours. As i mentioned before, the town was pretty strange in that it was set up for a ton of tourists and we were just about the only ones there. Well we didn´t know what we were going to do and the town was really small and kinda boring.. We saw that the boat was leaving to go back to san carlos so we said ¨what the heck!¨ and decided to leave town to go back to san carlos and maybe check out some other tours. So now we´re back in San Carlos. We booked a tour for tomorrow morning into another nature reserve just south of the rio san juan. There are supposed to be lots of birds and iguanas! We´re not sure what to do after that. We´re thinking of either heading back to Managua and then to check out Leon in Northern Nicaragua or seeing what other nature-type tours are available in the south.

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