Granada / Laguna de Apoyo and Masaya

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Granada is the second biggest town in Nicaragua and a pretty colonial town with a very European main square and pedstrianised streets. The hostel was a pleasant surprise - clean (!!) dorms with decent warm showers and even a pool! The hostel in San Juan had not only caused my backpack to get soaked during the rain storm despite being in my room but had also had people removing cockroaches from their faces during the night and also having to witness the odd sexual experience in a huge dorm room of 14 when everyone else was trying to sleep. Some people!!

Granada has a lot of nice restaurants and bars which we explored en masse in a group of about 10 of us who had randomly met up at various points along the way. I had arrived with 5 others from San Juan del Sur and when we got back to our dorm after dinner we met another 5 who had travelled together including the Swedish girl Elin I traveling in Costa Rica with and another two guys who had met my travelling buddies before. So it was all happy families. The nice thing about it was finally being around more mid-20 year olds rather than the 18 year old Americans that invaded Costa Rica! Between us we were a couple of English, 3 Canadians, 2 Amreicans, a dutch girl, a Swedish girl and an Australian. It seems that everyone who had been flooded out of places and unable to get anywhere else had ended up in Granada at one of two hostels so as soon as we went to a restaurant or bar everyone inevitably knew even more people.

As i said, Granada is a pretty place but pretty small and so walkable in a day. It is on the coast of lake Nicaragua with access to the island I never made it to - Ometepe. We had a walk around the town on Friday and then decided to spend the following day at Laguna de Apoyo - a massive lake in the crater of a dormant volcano which is so deep that the bottom is apparently the lowest point of Central America. We did some swimming and kayaking to explore the lake and then chilled out in the hammocks on the shore for a few hours. Those few hours also inspired me to buy a hammock seat the following day at Massaya the nearby handicrafts town of Nicaragua.

Masaya was only about 20 mins away from Granada but the chicken bus (old American yellow school buses) went so slowly (I think he was coasting and trying to save petrol and therefore limiting himself to 20km/h) that it took us around an hour to get there. After going to the wrong market, a very smelly and dirty food market in a dodgy end of town we found a pratcially empty handicrafts market where they mostly sold leather goods and hammocks. I eventually chose to buy a huge seat (which i am determined to hang up before too long for you to try!) from a lady whose stall caught on fire while we were looking at them. I kind of felt sorry for her but she also had the best hammocks in the place so i wasn't too much of a sucker and paid all of 7 pound for a huge seat which would cost 10 times as much in Ikea!

I decided to extend my trip in Nicaragua (I was planning to head straight to my diving course after Granada) as the group I have been travelling with are off to Leon to sand board down a volcano and it sounds pretty fun! So I'll go there on Sunday for a couple of nights before starting my diving towards the end of the week.

Photos to come!

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