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Published: April 12th 2008
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The ferry was less rough than we had been warned, the rest of the travelling was not. From the ferry terminal we took taxis to the bus terminal for the first bus to San Pedro Sula. It was actually a first class bus with quite a lot of room which required our photos to be taken before we got on but that doesn't make it fast. A wait of around an hour in a bus station in San Pedro Sula before another 4.5 hours to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. From there we had a short taxi ride to the hotel in the Downtown area - a large but very shabby and underused place with little to recommend it. However, dinner a couple of streets away was a big success with the most enormous platefuls of Chinese food for not very much money!
Another early start for another long bus journey the next day right across the border into Nicaragua arriving late afternoon into the capital Managua. From there we took a taxi to the nearby mini bus station but the queues were so bad that we ended up going by cab all the way to Granada, about an hour
away, held up even longer by catching all the traffic coming out of a baseball match which is apparently pretty big there.
There was great relief when we finally arrived at our hotel in hot and sticky Granada, another small colonial town that was once the capital of Nicaragua. The hotel was beautiful with little courtyards gardens and small but pretty rooms with rather funky mosaics on the walls.
We had 3 nights in Granada - a relief from all the travelling and a pretty place to hang around for a while. It was very hot and humid so everything happened quite slowly but over a couple of days we visited various churches, a small pre-columbian museum and an old fort which had more recently been used as a prison during the Sandinista/Contra civil war. This had apparently been restored somewhat since it was last used in 1990 but it still looked pretty unpleasant to us.
In addition to all that, late one afternoon we went out on a small boat around an archipelago of 365 small islands, called Las Isletas, on Lake Nicaragua. This turned out to be amazing for birds with cormorants, coots, kingfishers and
herons but all sorts of other birds which we couldn´t even recognise. There´s a few photos here and a prize for any twitchers out there who can name them.....
The following evening we took a trip out to the nearby Volcan Masaya, a huge smoking crater belching out sulphurous fumes which you could get rather closer to than was probably safe. Masaya is surrounded by a number of other craters and was rather beautiful, especially when the sun began to set. The volcano is surrounded by numerous caves which was the next destination....at least for Hugh - I took one look in the mouth of the cave and decided to stay outside with a couple of the park rangers. They showed me lots of bats flying in the mouth of the cave and told me lots about other wildlife in the park. They also played me some typical Nicaraguan music on their MP3 player so I was well entertained. Hugh took some great bat photos inside the cave....
And finally, before leaving the volcano we were taken up to the other rim of the volcano wearing gas masks to peer over into the crater where we could just
make out glowing pools of lava - rather freaky!
Dinner that night was the best we had had for a long time, at a training restaurant for local young men who would not otherwise have such opportunities. While a little more expensive than other nights it was not outrageous and the chocolate pudding was out of this world. In fact, I´m sure H will want to add a comment to this....! We spent the rest of the evening in a garden of a nearby bar listening to a fun Cuban band.
Next time from Granada to our last Nicaraguan destination....... Sorry we´ve got a bit behind with the blogs - just been very busy and problems with getting photos on (I´m informed that the text is not that interesting on its own!) but we should catch up in the next few days.
Hope all are well out there.....did we really hear that there was snow in london a few days ago?
Lots of love
S + H xx
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jon peacock
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twitching
Thanks for the bird identification challenge, only one to see though. I think it's a ringed kingfisher (Ceryle torquata) but it's difficult to be sure without the scale - it is the largest kingfisher in the western hemisphere at about 40 cm. Looks like a male, did it have a rusty breast? I confess I did have to look this up... Great to keep up with your travels. Still winter here, snow this week and the allotment is flooded, I think my Cambridge Gage is dead.