Rolo on Tour

If everything goes well tomorrow, I will reach Costa Rica and thus have spent the last 2 weeks in the country of Nicaragua. Lets sum up, what happened here during that time:

My first step was the city of León. It had many nice things to offer, including a nice stay in the hostel Via Via, some delicious street food (I could not get enough of those cheese pancakes) and good „real“ (I refuse to call toast or the stuff you put hamburgers in bread.) bread in a french bakery.

The second evening was quite eventful and started with a pictionary game, where our hostel group of Charles from France, Mary from England, Mack from Canada and me failed to win despite all efforts of Charles to draw a hippopotamus or a cockfight. Next door was time for Karaoke and after having waited for quite a long time I put on a great show in performing the song „Entre dos Tierras“, nevertheless the crowd was quite unimpressed. Maybe they did not like gringos at that place..

Entre dos Tierras estás….

Another thing worth mentioning should be Volcano boarding. Yes, it means you are going down a volcano on a board. The volcano is only 700 metres high and you are not going very fast, but it is nevertheless super exciting to do!

View from the Cerro Negro Volcano shortly before going down on a board

The track we went down: it is a little bit steeper than it looks like on this picture, but the rocks give enough resistance

The day I left I got into kind of a little competition, where we tried to place some number of coins on our elbows and catch all of them with the same hand. In the end we managed to do this with all 26 coins we had around, but I suppose you could do it possibly with maybe 40. The bigger problem may be to get that many coins as people never have change here…

Shortly before doing 26 coins…

Next place was Masaya which was supposed to be a good place to buy handcrafts. But it was different as I expected and I was a bit disappointed as there were just 2 big markets consisting of different shops where each of them sold more or less the same stuff which was possibly not even made there but in China or elsewhere…

Besides that there happened to be a funny kid dancing competition in the streets and I had the worst smoothie ever in my life. Funny thing, I discovered afterwards that exactly that smoothie in that restaurant was recommended in my guidebook. I have no clue what that person thought when he wrote that :-).

Having a break in Masaya

Granada was next on the itinerary:

A church in Granada

Lago de Nicaragua, as viewed from Granada

While being there I decided to do a Canopy (also known as Zipline) tour. There are lots of places nowadays where you can do that so I did a bit of internet research before. Doing this I came across a website which listed the (according to that author) 10 best places in the world to do canopy and the place near Granada was number 10, so I decided to do it there.

On the canopy track

And what can I say I certainly do not regret having done it there especially as the guides where very motivated. They made us do the „superman“ which was probably the most fun to do.

Doing the superman

The last stop in Nicaragua was the island of Ometepe, which is set in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. It is quite a beautiful setting here with 2 volcanoes on the island. Of course everybody wants to conquer that island, so I got into a machete fight, where luckily nobody was hurt:

The bigger one of the volcanoes, Concepcion, was then climbed on a 10,5 hours hike. After getting to the point of going up it was a 50 degrees climb for 4 hours straight and the way down was not less painful. On the way back to the hostel I felt half-dead, but the amazingly stunning crater view we got at the top was worth it:

After that day I really wanted to rest but our little travel group here dragged me on a little bike tour with bikes without brakes (which would be pretty exciting going downhill between a flock of cows), some kayaking and a „relaxing“ 6 hour walk to a waterfall around here. So it is not too bad I ran out of cash and leave the island now as they might otherwise make me ride on a horse or a motorcycle around the island ;-).

Stephen finding the gap

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