Nicaragua by Em

After our series of flights into Nicaragua we stayed one night in Managua, which was not fun! Really not a nice town, smoggy, dirty, shady and as usual we get a taxi driver who swears blind he knows where our hostel is, drives into the grotty burbs and then starts crawling around telling me my directions are crap and he can't find the hostel. Sadly my Spanish, though much improved (as John has already mentioned) is not up to calling him a lying git. We told him to keep driving, having agreed the price beforehand, and eventually he found us A hostel, a pretty grotty one but we were so tired we flopped down for the night and swore we'd leave for Granada in the morning. Whose bright idea was it to spend a few days in the capital anyway!?! (oops...)

So we got a local bus to Granada from the mad and hectic central marketplace (local buses in Central America are usually old yellow schoolbuses from the USA), because it was only a short trip of an hour and a half, and I really wanted to take more local buses because they're hilarious. John hates them because he gets squashed in, but it wasn't too bad because it wasn't unbearably hot.

The bus station is usually in a dodgy area, so we didn't think Granada was lovely at first, but after asking for some directions to the hostel we wanted we found ourselves wandering into a pretty, quiet suburb. After dumping our packs in the nice hostel (though hot – the fan was older than me and probably John too) we walked three or so more blocks to the central park and discovered the really nice part of town, with all the multicoloured churches, horse drawn cabs, colonial architecture, tat stalls and cafes you could want, as well as a healthy restaurant and bar community.

The food in Granada really was great too – the first day I had gorgeous grilled chorizo for lunch (dinner will be covered by John) and the next night we went to a restaurant run by an American, called Three-Finger Jimmy's (okay, not hugely authentic Central American, but obviously all local produce and local staff except the owner/chef). My steak was delicious, John's rack of ribs (ribs of what, we were not sure) was enormous and it was SO good to tuck into a big green salad after avoiding raw veg like the plague in most places.

With Mombacho Volcano in the background it was a great place to stay for three days, although we didn't make it up that volcano (we're climbing Concepcion on the island of Ometepe tomorrow, which is live, because we feel like living dangerously!! Seriously though, it hasn't erupted properly since the 50s and it only rumbles every few months, with no activity currently). We met some Americans in Granada who very kindly gave us their book on Costa Rica, as they were going north and we south, so we've got loads of ideas about the next leg too...

Em/Ometepe
We took the ferry from south of Granada to the island of Ometepe, a small bit of land formed of two volcanoes, Concepcion and Maderas. We had a go at climbing Concepcion (which is an active volcano and smokes constantly), but I didn't make it any further than the flat bit at the bottom before my knee gave up! We stayed for a couple of days in a hostel near Concepcion, and although the view of the volcano was impressive, the lake was an ominous brown and there wasn't a lot to do unless you were hiking up one of the volcanoes, which we couldn't.

We went from Ometepe to Liberia in Costa Rica, and really, getting into Costa Rica from Nicaragua involves THE dodgiest border crossing I've EVER seen!! There's a chicken-wire fence complete with hand-painted signs, which is in fact the exit from Nicaragua. We had no idea where our taxi driver had brought us, and we spent several minutes with him asking where the hell we were (which degenerated into me going 'That. Is. The. Border.?' in Spanish and him replying 'Yes. That. Is. The. Border.' a few times. ). There are guys trying to sell you the forms for immigration (and yes, they are giving them out for free at the IMMIGRATION DESK, but good luck finding that in the dirt-packed lorry park/prison compound that is the border zone), there are dozens of money-changers (a legitimate and useful border feature in Central America, but they can be pretty pushy, and they always tell you there is no ATM on the other side even when there is so you will buy currency from them at crap rates), and the whole time you can feel ghost fingers at your pockets and backpack so you're pretty frazzled anyway. We met some Canadians who had done it before and followed them through the gauntlet of gates, scams, dirt roads, fake signs and queues, for which we were hugely grateful.