Corn

After the news of our jobs hit, the realization came that our trip would be ending soon. Well not too soon, we´ve got 5 weeks and a couple days left here. But anyways, we finally decided we would have to get our butts in gear if we wanted to still do all the things we wanted to do in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and get down to Panama City to fly home in time (March 29th). So we booked it towards Granada, which turned out to be a pretty town but nothing worth sticking around too long for. Lots of gringos, a serious lack of cheap street food, too many nice cars on the street, it all felt a little to clean for Central America, it being the doody capital of the world and all (this will be explained in a future blog). In Granada, we went to a cool museum in an old convent that had a bunch of statues carved by the natives sometime between 800-1200 a.d. and a really nice looking old church that you could go up in the lookout tower of for $1, we didn´t pay that, but from below it looked like the people were enjoying themselves.

We only stayed one night in the city and the rest of the time was spent walking the streets, enjoying happy hours, and watching the International Poetry Festival that was was going on.

The next morning we headed off for Isla de Ometepe, an island formed by 2 volcanoes that emerged from the Lake of Nicaragua. It was a fun boat ride to get out there, although the boat itself was a little creeky. Here are the views from inside and outside of the boat.

Immediately after getting off the boat, as expected, we were bombarded with a hundred people trying to get us in taxi´s, hotels, tours, and just about anything else you can think of. This always puts me in a foul mood for a little while, Rachel got so mad she told one of the guys to shut up. Their favorite thing is for 2 or 3 of them to get in your face when you stop to collect your thoughts as they are shouting over each other. But, we got outta there and found a nice little spot to camp right on the water. Here is the view from our campspot, and me the next day practicing my escape from an erupting volcano.

We headed to the other side of the island, with plans of hiking up the volcano. Everything we could find says you HAVE to have a guide to go up it, but after Rachel did a bit of asking around we found out it wasn´t actually illegal to go up without a guide. Apparently a couple years back some people got lost and died, and everyone decided to make guides mandatory for the saftey of the tourists, right uh huh. Needless to say, we went up without a guide and had a very good time not getting lost and not dying. Rachel was sooo excited to get to a volcano with a lake on top. The hike up was great, not very hot but extremely humid

The hike down was nice, the skies cleared up and we saw this view and this little guy.

After coming down, we used the money saved by not using a guide to buy some beers. We Win! We left the island the next day.

Now the fun journey of reaching our next destination, the Corn Islands, begins. 1 hour ferry ride, 2 hour buse ride to Managua, 7 hour overnight bus ride to El Rama, and a 1 1/2 hour ride down the river to our beautiful Hotel El Dorado in Bluefields (only 6 dollars a night). Only 4 more hours on a boat tomorrow and we´ll be on the Corn Islands!