Leon, Granada, San Juan del Sur, and at long last, Costa Rica!

We spent three days in Leon (I'm using a hybrid American/Spanish keyboard and can't figure out how to make the accent mark dangit), mostly near the pool in our hostel as the heat was intense.  We saw a lot of churches, and had some truly excellent pizza, the best we've had since we were in Xela.  We did go to a terrific museum, that had some Picasso and Chagal and Matisse, and a lot of great pieces by Central American artists.  I generally have a pretty low threshold for enjoying museums, but I really enjoyed this one.

We stayed at the Lazybones hostel, which overall was great (did I mention the pool?) however we did get some visitors in our room at night.  It was hot, so we weren't using the mosquito nets because they blocked the fan.  The first night David felt something crawling on him, which in his half asleep daze he thought seemed like a cat, although it was too small and there was certainly not a cat in our room.  I'm thinking it was a mouse, as there were some nibbles to some food we had.  The next night something hit my face.  Something fast and leathery.  A bat!  I actually think bats are pretty cool, but getting slapped in the face by one while you are trying to sleep is decidedly uncool.  Anyway, we used our nets after that, guess they were there for a reason, cause we didn't see any mosquitoes.

From Leon, we jumped in bus to the capital, Managua, where we stayed just long enough to get off the bus and get on another to Granada.  We sat next to a local guy named Alan, who is a medical student and spoke pretty good English.  He was getting ready to go to Germany to get his PhD, and was nervous because his german wasn't very good.  Can you imagine going to college in a third language?  But he got a scholarship, so that was his best option.  We asked about the weather, wondering if it would be as hot as it had been in Leon.  He said not as hot, but he promised it would be very dry. "We only get rain maybe twice a year."  Cue rain for the next three days straight.

Granada is a lovely colonial town, making comparisons with Antigua, Guatemala hard to avoid.  But it hasn't yet had quite as many coats of polish, and still retains a slightly grittier feel, in the good sense of the word.  It has had more coats of paint however, making it quite pleasing to look at.  We holed up at the Oasis, a sister-hostel to the Lazybones, also with a pool which we enjoyed.  I even met a friendly Peace Corps Volunteer who was taking a little vacation from her rural outpost, and I think I may have talked her into going to nursing school in Albuquerque when she finishes.  It is hard to resist such a great path!

Granada is on the shores of Lake Nicaragua, a huge freshwater lake.  The lake used to have maneating bull sharks in it, the only freshwater shark in the world.  But a lucrative trade in shark fin saw the quick decimation of the species, which supposedly still exist in small pockets down the river that leads to the Caribbean coast.  We rented bicycles and rode several miles down a peninsula.  It was raining a bit, and we got splattered with mud from the tires.  But at the end of the road we saw a family of howler monkeys, much bigger in size than the ones we saw in Guatemala, and a beautiful species of jaybirds that we've been coveting since we saw their picture in a bird book in Honduras.  It was a great ride.

From Granada we decided to head to the beaches of San Juan del Sur.  Though still overcast, our luck held and it didn't rain, giving us one last chance to get some sun.  You know how sometimes walking the beach you will see some dumb little fish washed up on shore?  Here we saw three pufferfish (still puffed up!) and a large parrot fish with a huge set of teeth on him.

We were up early the next day to head to the Costa Rican border.  We had been warned this would likely be our most difficult crossing, and indeed it was.  By far.  Approaching the border we passed miles and miles of semi-trucks, which were stopped along the side of the road, single file, inching so slowly toward the border that the drivers were wandering around the street in little groups.  I can't even imagine how long it takes them to get through, but I can't see how they would all get through in a day.

Once we got to the border, the usual group of "helpers" attached themselves to us hoping we would change money with them.  But they proved quite useful in navigating the maze to the immigration office.  After paying three different sets of "fees" (all of which were supposedly legit, according to our guidebook), we got flustered and jumped on an international bus.  These busses are far more comfortable than the chicken busses, and also far more expensive.  But we were confused and decided just to splurge for the convenience.  After waiting a bit for the people who came through on the bus to finish at Nicaraguan immigration, the bus drove us over to the Costa Rican side and we got in line.  Luckily the rain had stopped, because we were standing outside in line for over two hours. At one point, there was a mass movement as 50 - 75 people in line ahead of us suddenly left the line and walked away.  I have no idea what they were doing or where they were going, or why they all decided to leave at once.  But it probably saved us another hour of waiting, so we were grateful for the mystery. Once we finally made it into the building, we saw that there were exactly two officials moving people through.  They were friendly and efficient, but hopelessly backlogged.  There must be some rhyme or reason to why the Costa Rican government doesn't just hire a few more people, as this crossing is notorious for being long and awful, but I can't imagine what the reason is.  We made it through, the officials making a show of everyone on the bus getting their bags out to be inspected, but then just waved all the backpackers through without checking anything on us, though they did a cursory check of the locals.

Next came the intrigue of us finding our stop.  The bus was express to San Jose, but we wanted to get off before that at the turnoff to the cloud forest reserve of Monteverde.  The guy who sold us our ticket said it would be no problem, but of course he was now nowhere to be found.  We talked to who I thought was the driver and one of the assistants, but we didn't know the name of the place we wanted to be dropped off, and that seemed to be confusing them.  We weren't even really sure what would happen when we got dropped off on the side of the road, we just assumed that we would be able to find another form of transport to the reserve.  The drivers sort of smiled and nodded and blew us off, so as we took off we were stressed that they might not stop where we needed to go, but were also stressed that they would, because we weren't sure what we would do then.  Then the rain started, which is never a friend to a backpack.

But, as usual, it all worked out.  They dropped us off at the right place, just after the rain stopped.  A cabbie tried to get us to pay $50 to take us direct, but he also admitted the public bus would be by just over an hour later.  We waited (and looked at bugs, natch) until the bus came, and we paid about $3 for the ride to Santa Elena, the town outside of the reserve.

Sorry there are no pictures on this post (and I got a great one of the parrotfish!), but this afternoon I was checking out the camera and the bus hit a bump and I managed to format my camera card.  groan.  I'm pretty sure I will be able to recover the pics once I get home (at least I hope!), but there is no doing it from here.  Technology is the best thing ever, until it isn't.

Butterflies and murals in Nicaragua

There are two ways to tell the story.  I can say we spent 12 hours on a microbus, two taxis and four busses to cross two borders through sweltering heat and torrential rain.  Or I can say, breakfast in El Salvador, lunch in Honduras, and dinner in Nicaragua!  I tend to like the second version better, and hope to forget as much of the first version as possible.  Except we found a friend on our last bus, a Nica cowboy complete with hat and gigantic belt buckle.  Despite our inability to understand much of what he was saying (at least we got the gist), he talked with us for a while in a dusty bus stop waiting for the bus to arrive.  (We were afraid we were going to have to wait for an hour in the heat, but the bus arrived and soon took off early, much to our relief.  It stopped at a store and the driver bought a drink, then we returned to the bus station.  We sat for about 20 minutes and we took off again, where he picked up a few people along the way, and then returned to the station again!  D´oh!)  Our bus eventually arrived at another tiny town, and we all crammed and I mean crammed into a little microbus, where despite having my pack in my lap I still was getting very friendly with two other passengers sitting opposite me.  All the travel had taken longer than we had expected, and we were arriving at the Nicaraguan border right at 5pm, in the rain, and we weren´t sure if we were going to be able to find a bus on the other side or if we were going to have to get desperate and hitch.  But after making our way through, with no bus in sight, we found our cowboy waiting for us on the other side with a taxi.  He even negotiated a decent price for us.  Our stop was only about 20km down the road, and he was off farther into the highlands.  I can´t say it enough, we just keep meeting these super friendly people who go out of their way to help us, despite the language barrier.  People are awesome.

We were in the town of Somoto, a small town that had made a claim to fame based on the recently discovered river canyon that is the start of the Coco River, which is one of the longest in Central America.  Of course by recently discovered, they mean discovered by us white people.  Anyways, we hired a guide who hiked us in through gorgeous farmland to the canyon.  When the water was deep, we swam down along, letting the current help push us through a beautiful and, at times, deep canyon with steep rock walls.  We got out and clambered along the sides and over huge rocks when the river turned into shallow rapids.  It was great.  At several points along the bank we came across huge numbers of yellow butterflies drinking along the banks.  When we would walk by, they would all start flying around all at once, leaving us to walk through what we termed "Butterfly Cloud".  Our guide was great at talking slow and simply, so we were able to feel all fancy talking in Spanish all day.  The only issue we had was the water itself.  We had imagined some sparkling mountain spring, when in fact it was very brown, full of all that farm runoff and who knows what else.  We kept our shirts on to protect from the sun, and lets just say they were nowhere near as white when we were done.  Anyway, it might not have been as magical as we´d hoped (except for those butterflies!), but it was still beautiful, and a very fun day.

We spent another night in Somoto, and then moved down the road to the college town of Estelì, which is notable for being full of murals.  I am a huge fan of graffiti art, and have been taking photos at every opportunity all along the way, so I was pretty excited for a city full of murals.  Some were political, some were for kids, and some I have no idea what they were.  We just walked through the city like we were on a treasure hunt.  We found a terrific little restaurant, but unfortunately Estelí is also a cigar factory town, and it is impossible to enjoy eating anything when someone behind you is smoking a stogie.  I´ve been spoiled by living in so many cities where public smoking is illegal, and while the smoking down here isn´t as bad as it was in Asia (in fact most of the smoking I´ve been around has been by the Europeans, not the locals), I sure will be glad when I get home and can eat in a restaurant without fear of nasty smoke defiling my meal.

We are now in León, another college town, historically the arch-rival to Granada, where I think we are heading tomorrow.  Back around the time of the US Civil War, the city of Leòn thought they could finally defeat their poltical enemies in Granada by inviting William Walker into town.  He was an American who came down with a bunch of mercenaries he called "fillibusters", which apparently is another way to say pirate.  He did indeed defeat Granada, but instead of handing the city over to León, he decided to stick around as the new "President of Nicaragua".  You see he thought he could make some improvements, little things like reinstituting slavery, and hopefully give some backing to the Confederacy.  What he did do was to unite the bitter political enemies who, with some help from the Costa Rican army (back when they still had one), were able to drive him out.  Being a good sport about it, he had the good grace to burn the city of Granada to the ground on his way out, and posted a sign "Granada was here."  His awesome sense of humor somehow wasn´t enough convince the locals to let bygones be bygones, and he was captured by the Honduran army and executed.  The truth is I find this embarassing tale terribly interesting, and having found out that William Walker himself wrote a book about his exploits (I assume while he was still happily president) which I am desperate to find.  If not here, I´m hoping ebay will be good to me when I get home!

If we were in the mood to hang out, I think we would enjoy León a lot, but for whatever reason we are both feeling pressed to move on.  I don´t suppose that has anything to do with the horrible realization that we only have about 5 weeks to go!  Ack!  We still have so much ground to cover if we want to make it to Panama City.  And we are still thinking we want to go to the Corn Islands, and down into some other out of the way places in Nicaragua.  Will we make it?  Stick around to find out!