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¡Hola!
For the last two days we´ve been staying in Matagalpa, which is about 2 hours North of Managua in the highlands and is off the backpacker trail a bit - it was a really fun place to stay; we both really liked it. Matagalpa is a very normal Nicaraguan town without a massive tourism industry, although the proximity to several coffee plantations that offer tours makes it a nice place to stay to explore the area. It´s a lot cooler up here, which makes a refreshing change, and the scenery is stunning - lots of small but very steep hills covered in cloud forests. Like everywhere else in Nicaragua at this time of year it is generally sunny, but it will rain heavily without warning for about 10 mins at a time then nothing for another few hours - it is playing havoc with our wardrobes.
Yesterday we went up to a place called Selva Negra (Schwarzwald), which is a coffee plantation that was set up by german immigrants in the 1800s and now operates (almost) totally self-sufficiently. It generates its own hydroelectric power, grows all its own food and livestock and it farms totally organically by recycling and reprocessing practically everything and making their own organic pesticides and fertilizers etc. We were lucky enough to be given a tour in a 4x4 by one of the managers, which was great… it was a real luxury to sit in a nice car! Oh, I forgot to mention that they make coffee too and employ an army of Nicaraguan workers to pick the beans in the autumn.
Travelling overland in Nicaragua is very inexpensive and great fun too. Most of the buses are of the old American school bus variety and are actually very comfortable. The operators (and the locals on the buses) are predictably bonkers, but very friendly, and the bus stations are crazy. You arrive by taxi to a scene of carnage where buses are arriving and departing simultaneously with thousands of people milling about and nearly getting run over all the time. The conductors stand on the step of the bus hollering their destination over and over again in a often incomprehensible loop, so that Jinotega, for example, sounds like Inoteyinoteyinoteyinoteyaahr! and Granada, G´noirgnoirgnoirgnoiranaaahr! More about Granada next time!
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