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After a possible drug drop (we all kept quiet with our eyes straight ahead), our lancha boatman dropped us off on a seemingly abandoned stretch of beach which was apparently the borderland of Nicaragua. Unconvinced, but desperate to get our bags off the boat and check the contents thoroughly, we hopped off and walked along the beach for a bit. After a few minutes, we saw a faint track through some trees which we followed, and happily stumbled upon the Nicaraguan border control and arrived in Potosi.
Jumping on the chicken bus to Chinandega, we started to make our way to Leon. Told it would only take 2 hours, the journey naturally took 4. This was a chicken bus that earned it's name: 3 fat, unhappy roosters sat in bags on the floor, their heads poking out at people's feet and occasionally emitting disgruntled chicken grumbles (imagine your grandpa snoring in a slightly higher pitch and with a bit more of a gargle). On the seat in front of us, unbeknownst to us, was a straw bag full of chicks. We only realized this when, after a couple of hours when a rather large woman sat on said seat, a tiny little chick foot started poking itself between the seat cushions in front of us. Concerned, I let it rest on my finger. Every now and then it would retreat, only to poke itself back out and re-grip my finger. Eventually it disappeared and a whole chick head took its place.
Then, out tumbled an entire chick. It plopped onto the floor, righted itself, checked its surroundings, and legged it into my foot. I scooped it up and considered hiding it in my rucksack.
Mike said no.
So I tapped the woman in front of us and asked her, "Disculpa, este es su pollo?" She frowned and said no. Then she noticed the bag of chicks she had sat on, shuffled across, and put the escapee back in with its fellow siblings.
After a full day of no food, no water, searing temperatures and grumpy cockerels, we arrived in Leon as grumpy chickens ourselves. Nothing some Nicaraguan-cooked Mexican food couldn't fix, though.
Leon is immediately felt as a university city. There are students everywhere, niche-y cafes and restaurants, and prices that aren't exorbitant despite being a big tourist city. Having said that, it's Nicaragua, so nothing is really exorbitant anywhere. As in El Salvador and Guatemala, the after-effects of a similarly nationally-devastating civil war are still being felt and remembered. Murals depicting battles and heroes are scattered throughout Leon, untouched by vandalism or graffiti, and there are numerous museums and galleries dedicated to the "Heroes and Martyrs" of the war, as they are known.
We spent a couple of days wandering around the city and being confronted by teams of boys sporting gigantes y cabezudos. These "giants and big heads" are papier mache figures led around by drummer boys that dance towards you until you are entirely surrounded. The tradition is that the figures represent religious or historical persons of interest… and that's as much as I can tell you. Now it seems like an easy way for groups of boys to make a bit of money, and run around with giant papier mache heads on their own head as a good buffer between them and a lamppost.
Leon is hot. Really hot, and really dusty and congested. So we headed to Surfing Turtle, a hostel on the Los Brasiles island, renowned for… well, I'm sure you can guess.
Disappointingly, their group of sea turtle eggs weren't ready for hatching and releasing, so the turtle side of our trip here was a bit of a bummer. But the surfing was great. I finally stood up! Mike and I caved, shelling out for a lesson even though we both knew the basics, and it was definitely the right decision. Not only were we standing up every time, we were also in the middle of a torrential rain storm, the drops musically pinging off our boards and fork lightning flashing on the horizon. We also got a free Tshirt each.
Determined to release some baby turtles into the sea (whether they wanted it or not!), we went back to Leon and booked a tour. Because it was just the two of us, the girl who booked it for us tagged along to practice her English (detrimental to our Spanish practice) and brought her 6-year-old son, Juan, too. We also checked in on her 2-year-old daughter who had the flu and was very unhappy at being left at home with the babysitter. Yesenia, our guide, explained that she was a single mother, which was great, she said, because she still got to go to salsa bars and karaoke bars. She was determined for Juan to learn English, but because it's not taught in state schools in Nicaragua, she was reduced to bringing him on tours so he could interact with tourists. None of us thought that Juan minded this too much.
We caught a boat from Las Penitas along the river to the turtle reservation. Here, we discovered over 15,000 eggs had been collected and protected (from natural predators, as well as locals who sold them for their rumoured medicinal properties), and 200 had hatched that day, ready to be released into the sea. Giddy with excitement, we took our bucket of wriggling, sand-covered baby Olive Riddley turtles away from the group of 40 German tourists doing the same thing, but probably much more efficiently. Again, because we were such a small group, our official guide from the reservation had brought his wife and 2 children along. Exchanging wide-eyed can-you-believe-this looks with the 3 kids, I donned my surgical glove and gently scooped up my first turtle.
It was so small! And wriggly! Scared to death I would drop it on its head, I put him or her on the sand. Looking at it and then the 6m distance it had to wriggle across to get to the sea, I thought it would take forever. Especially because as soon as I had put it down, it stopped moving. Thinking the wee baby needed a bit of stimulating competition, I put one its siblings next to it, and the same thing happened. Everyone else's turtles were legging it to the sea, except mine! Worse, the second one I'd tried to liberate had turned around and was facing the wrong the direction.
Worried I was the world's worst turtle liberator, I picked them both up and put them a metre closer. This spurred them on, and suddenly they were rapidly flinging their flippers around and zig-zagging their way to the shore. This was all well and good until the waves reached them and pushed them back to where they'd started. Eventually, though, they all disappeared into the water, so that the only thing left were the weird little flipper marks they'd dug into the sand.
After nearly a week of relatively relaxing activities, we signed up with Nicaragua Quetzeltrekkers to embark on the Telica walk. Telica is the nearby active volcano, an easy walk up to a huge crater, at the bottom of which sits a little pool of luminescent lava. I say an easy walk, and that would have been true if I hadn't been carrying 19kg (we all weighed our bags before we left) of water (8 litres) plus dinner (nice, heavy carrots and onions, of all things), as well as standard camping stuff. Mike's bag weighed in even more at a hefty 23kg. This, plus the mid-30 degree heat and the final near-vertical climb to the volcano ridge, made it a very difficult walk up a very easy route.
Leaning over the crater edge to look into the sulphorous pit of an active volcano made it all worthwhile, though. More impressive, however, was the sheer amount of noise the volcano produced. It sounded as if we were standing in a motorway underpass at rush hour; heavy booming echoes that sounded as if they were coming at us from all directions, but in actual fact were all coming up and out of the crater mouth directly below us.
We built a big fire that finally scared off the herd of cows who had rudely infiltrated our campsite, and I finally got rid of the bloody vegetables from my bag. Being a predominantly American and Canadian-led group, we naturally followed dinner with smores.
Woken at 4.45am, we stumbled up a steep, dewy, prickly hill to watch the sunrise over the various volcanoes scattered around Nicaragua. With the steaming crater behind us bellowing huge, perfectly white clouds, and the Pacific in front us stretched out silver and pink and endless, it was a memorable sunrise, to say the least.
With foot arches nearly crippled from the day before, the walk back to humanity wasn't as fun as it should have been. But we were with a great group of people, and we all complained and joked about complaining together, which helped pass the time. We reached the boiling mud pits I had, for some reason, been so eager to see. They were pretty cool. But the heat that extended from the boiling mud to the surface just below our feet, underneath the midday sun, was too much to bear, and we all gave up the idea of a detailed inspection of the mud pits in favour of finding some dense shade.
By the time we reached Leon, all any of us could think about was showering. Then sleeping. We were disgusting. Filthy, smelly, sweaty, dusty and limping or hunchbacked, depending on what footwear and what backpack you had worn.
Deciding it would be a good idea to rinse our clothes before we got them professionally washed in Granada, our next stop, Mike and I dropped our hiking clothes in the sink and let the water run. It was a mistake to watch the process. As the wet clothes blocked the plughole, we were confronted with the yellow-brown water that only got darker and darker as more and more water ran through our clothes.
Disgusted, we both decided maybe one shower wasn't enough to wash off that amount of sheer filth.
Granada is a lovely city (once you're clean enough to enjoy it and no longer offend anyone), with more colonial architecutre and a rather cosmopolitan main strip of restaurants and bars, as well as a good number of Irish pubs. Upon the recommendation of a friend who'd visited recently, we passed a few days wandering the streets and sitting at numerous bars drinking 2-for-1 macuas - rum, orange and guava juice. YUM.
Next, we travelled to San Juan del Sur for some more relaxation. Sort of. Mike went surfing, I got hit on the head with my board and decided not to do any more. That, and all the stingrays that were jabbing people in the foot.
San Juan is a great town with a huge variety of unique little cafes and restaurants, good coffee, and lots of colour. We had to get a taxi to any surfing beach, but for only $10 a pop it's not a bad deal. The beaches are beautiful, even if the surf, when we went, wasn't fantastic.
It was in San Juan that I discovered I needed a visa to transit through the US; my emergency passport wasn't valid in the states, so I couldn't apply for an ESTA. Unfortunately, this meant $160 as well as an interview at the US embassy, just to sit in an American airport for 4 hours while in transit. This, then, meant Mike and I have to cut short our time in Nicaragua and head to Costa Rica for my interview. Not, however, before a quick stop at Isla Ometepe.
Omtepe is, as one local told us, Nicaragua. We're not quite sure what he meant, but the island is an easy place to kill a good number of days. The only way to get around is by your own mode of transport, so we rented bicycles and scooters and explored the lakeside swimming spots, in between dodging herds of cattle, horses and pigs that huddled, galloped or scampered on the road.
In the scorching heat, dips and swims in the lake were much appreciated, I just had to ignore the fact that bull sharks used to inhabit the waters, and possibly still did... We learned that the Mayans on Ometepe used to worship the local bull sharks, and so fed them their human sacrifices. The result? Sharks who got used to human meat. So in the 60s, when tourism boomed in Nicaragua and on Ometepe, there was a rash of... well, non-consensual sacrifices, shall we say?
Nonetheless, Ometepe was a fantastic island for relaxation and exploration, and we were sad to leave it after only a few days.
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