Louging on Beaches and Living In Jungles

Last week I disappeared from the beautiful beach life to enter the jungles, hence, a good lack of correspodence recently.

By the time many of you read this, I will have left Nicaragua and headed back to Costa Rica. Yes, Nicaragua. I decided after Santa Teresa to head up to Tamrindo which was gringo (American) city. I spent two days there, which was probably two too long, had it not been for some awesome people I met there.

After that, I decided to chicken bus it to Nicaragua to save me some money as Costa Rica isn´t as cheap as I thought it would be. I decided to stop in San Juan Del Sur, a beautiful beach/surf town just north of the Costa Rican boarder.

There I met some really awesome people. Jazz (Jarrad) from Australia; Marielle from Holland, and Kim from France. The four of us decided to head to Ometepe, the large island on Lake Nicaragua. While on the bus we picked up a fifth person, Simon from Montreal and headed out on our journey. When we got off the ferry we were greeted by numerous taxis, aka pick up trucks. The five of us piled into the back of one and decided to head for Finca Magdelena onthe north east side of the island. (A Finca is a farm). We hiked up Volcan Maderas, and inactive volcano with lots of cloud cover and rain. We came back down caked in mud.

After some very rowdy card games, followed by a drinking game instigated by me, we called it a night. The next morning I woke up and Kim and I decided to go riding. We scored two extremely healthy horses for only $4 an hour, with no guide so we had complete and total freedom. We rode to some petroglyphs, on the beach and to a beautiful laguna. We came back, we all played cards and Simon and I decided that we would hike Volcan Concepion, the largest of the two, not to mention the active one.

We got up super early to take the 6am bus to Altagracia. We found a hostel we wanted to stay at in with in 5 minutes we had arranged a guide and ordered breakfast. The entire trek up the mountain was 9.5 hours thanks to me being a chicken shit and busting up my knee part way down. At the top it was very clear. Peering into the crater all I could see was smoke. I sat on the edge and the ground was so warm.

Our plans afterwards consisted of dinner, a nap and then the midnight ferry to Granda as we were both trying to get to Managua (the capital of Nicaragua) to get me to Costa Rica and him to El Salvador. We ended up bumping into Kim and Jazz , who we had left behind at the Finca, at a restaurant. It turns out that they had missed their ferry to the San Jorge and decided to try and meet us. So we all napped and got out to the ferry for 11:30. W started boarding around 12am which was great except for the fact that it had aleady started in another port and was full of people. And we had even paid extra to be upstairs with seats and less people. So we found a nice little spot on the side of the ferry to chill with our bottle of rum (we were pretending to be pirates). The ferry took so long to load that we didn´t leave until 3:15ish and we got into Granada around 7:30.

It was really cold on the lake and we were sleeping on the floor, all four of us cuddling for warmth and we all made decent attempts at sleep. After arriving, we dropped our stuff of at a hostel for free, grabbed some breakfast, made a bank run and explored a bit of the city. Then we parted ways with Jazz and Marielle. It was such a nice littel colonial town, but very touristy at the same time. I finally bought a hammock!!! After, Simon and I grabbed some lunch and headed out to Managua, where we hav found a hostel, with internet. We are currently running on the 5 hours of sleep from Monday night, the 45 minute nap Tuesday, and whatever random bits we got while on the ferry. We have to be up at 4am to catch our buses, his is at 5am, mines at 6am, but we are leaving together to be safe.

Next time I update (and hopefully with pictures) I will be back in the jungle in Monteverde, Santa Elena and La Fortuna in Costa Rica.

And just think, a week tomorrow and I will be heading home.