Granada is a beautiful colonial town with lots of sun, churches (everywhere!), a fort, a lake that was once considered for a canal instead of lake gatun in Panama, and all the houses are painted like flavors of ice cream. We counted pistachio, blue raspberry, cotton candy, rum raisin, strawberry, and lemon sorbet. Granada is one of the wealthier and more conservative cities in Nicaragua (read: somoza supporters) but because of this it is very well maintained. One feels safe at all hours, there is no trash in the streets, all of the colonial buildings look as pretty as a colony, and some of the main streets have huge sections blocked off for pedestrians. Interestingly, people are also hugely obese. We have not noticed this since we left America but gosh darn if there weren´t some lard butts in Granada. I´m talking Texas sized rears.
This became especially noticeable the next day when we hiked to the top of Masaya Volcano, which awesomely sports five craters. One normally thinks of ¨summiting a volcano¨as an aerobic activity. Not here. Everyone took a bus to the top and climbed the last couple of steps only if they were particularly determined. THere were over a hundred people at the top who had participated in no exercise other than sitting upright in a van. We (the fat lazy americans) forwent the 2 dollar shuttle and hiked 12 miles in, up a volcano in the heat of a Nicaraguan day. We might just be stupid. One of the craters is very active and spouts smoke constantly. Sometimes, at night, you can see the intense fire burning from the molten lava still chilling (so to speak) in the center. Another older crater is marked by a cross to guard the world from the gateway to hell. It was placed there by a priest in the colonial era and stopped the natives from sacrificing virgins to the hag god within (all true). With huge black volcanic boulders perched craggily all around, one can understand why they thought it looked like hell. We suspect walking across it would certainly feel like hell. The third crater we saw was much older and filled with green trees, bushes, birds, and stuff. Stew peed in it and felt like the king of the world. We never found the other craters. Weird.
After the volcano, we caught a bus to downtown Masaya, a small town about twenty minutes outside of Granada. Masaya is famous for its large market of Nicaragauan handicrafts, and as we have assiduously avoided all earlier market opportunities for fear of spending too much money, we (Tori) figured (demanded) it was time to give this one a shot. The market was full of every variety of ceramic object, beaded jewelery, and woven cloth a girl hs always dreamed of. Too bad we had seen so much artesania on the streets that it all looks kind of the same too us now. Honestly, a person can only look at so many beaded bracelets before they all look the same. Stew tried on a bout a million belts in quest of something to hold up his now too big pants, but there wasn´t anything right or for the right price. He did, however, find a pretty awesome Sandino T-shirt that has now magically morphed into a tanktop. Despite our lack of purchases, we still had fun giggling at all the tourist traps. It was a nice, relazing afternoon after our hike.
We spent the next morning in Granada checking out ¨La Polvora,¨ known in English as the White Fortress, built by the Spanish in 17something9 and later converted into a prison by Somoza. We climbed the tower and got a great view of the icecream city. The fortress also had some colorful gardens full of strangely shaped flowers we´d never seen before. We swear some of them looked like flourescent dragon babies.
After La Polvora, it was time to hit the old dusty road again. We were itching to catch another island. We jumped on a bus to Rivas and then on a smooth-riding, albeit crying baby filled, ferry to la Isla de Ometepe. Ometepe means ¨island of the two breasts¨in Nahuatl, the ancient Aztec langauge (also true). It is so named because of all of the women on the island expose their breasts (false). Actually, it is composed of two different volcanoes and a strip of land that forms the cleavage.
Our first day in Ometepe was spent climbig Volcan Concepcion with our righteous dude of a guide, Jesse. He´s our favorite guide thus far. Jesse went at our speed, cracked lots of jokes, spoke Spanish slowly enough that we both could understand, and cut us a good deal on top of it all. However, he also convinced us that it would be a good idea to hike back from the volcano to Mayogalpa, the city we were staying in, rather than taking the normal bus back from the base of Concepcion. This tacked on a solid 3 extra hours to our journey. There were definitely benefits to this: we walked over volcanic rocks through a dried magma river (totally sweet), Jesse taught us how to crawl like guerrillas under farmers´barbed wire fences, checked Capuchin and howler monkeys, saw magic mushrooms growing on cow poop, and met some cows on the dirt road at the bottom. However, by the time we got to back to town, we were ready to collapse. Which we did, immediately.
After an hour of delicious sleep, we were rudely awakened by our hotel owner´s grand children playing soccer on our door. By the way, our hotel was not really a hotel. It was more of a family complex, one of which owned a restaurant with a giant courtyard behind that included three extra bedrooms. It was, however, the only hotel in town that would let us use their kitchen. The ¨baño general¨was half price compared to the rooms with a private bath, but that was fubar. We enjoyed our private room where we didn´t have to wade through chickens, pigs, wild dogs, parrots, and children in order to use a narsty loo. Anyway, with children kicking a soccer ball at our door, we decided we had to get out for a little bit. Thus we wound up at Jesse´s bar drinking beer and eating steak before we went to bed at 7 p.m.
9 a.m. the next morning came surprisingly quickly for our tired feets. Jesse had planned a full day starting at 5 a.m. in order to see the island, but since it was raining, we decided to scrap the plans of motorcycles and beaches. Eventually, after a bus, a hike, a hitchhike, a hike, and a bus, and a hike, we were 25 kms from our hotel at a place known to have the best petroglyphs on the island. This was the main reason we came to Ometepe. THis is also, evidently, the worst possible reason to come here. If you want to see something more exciting, do anything else. Tori saw one on the walk up and declined to take a picture on the grounds that ¨the ones we have to pay for will be better.¨ Wrong. That was the only interesting petroglyph, standing in a cow field and on a rock about 3 feet high. The carvings at Tikal and Ceibal were much better, as are the Nasca lines. Plus we had to pay a dollar each, got led around by a crazy maid that didn´t know where the glyphs were, and ate a lemon that had crazy numbing chemicals on it. We hitch hiked back to our hotel with the help of the ministry of health (no joke) and got off the island.
Everyone on the island had assured us there was a bus waiting to take us to San Juan del Sur but this was not the case. Side Note: they re-use saints´names so frequently for cities that there are two San Juan´s in NIcaragua and are distinguished as ¨north¨and ¨south¨...we´ve been in 5 Santa Cruz´s since beginning this journey. After a fierce ¨piedra papel tijeras¨(rock paper scissors) battle, we decided to pay our taxi driver an additional 8 dollars to take us all the way to San Juan del Sur and skip the bumbling metropolis of Rivas. We later found out that Rivas is the site of William Walker´s grave. If you don´t know who William Walker is, he is the boldest of American imperialist swashbucklers. ¨My own company? Psh, my company needs its own country,¨ said Walker with a flourish of his gallant hair and a flash in his grey eyes.
Anyway , now we´re in San Juan del Sur which is a great beach town that looks like Myrtle Beach if every surfer from San Diego had moved with it to Nicaragua. Surfers really do have a way of transforming the culture of an area faster than the boldest imperialist. It looks nice though, so we´re going to go check out the beaches.
Gustaf and Anna have a blog ,too. Here it is, with some pictures. If your Swedish is rusty, use google translate (www.google.com/translate) and your imagination.
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