Nicaragua Part 3

"Two weeks paid vacation, won't heal the damage done, I need another one."

At some point these postings, especially as they pertain to Nica. are going to turn more introspective. These lyrics by Cold War Kids, a great band to check out by the way, are a hint of the future. But it's too late for anything very deep tonight.

In case you don't know the Cold War Kids, you can check out this song We Used to Vacation... either right above or below this post. I couldn't figure out how to imbed in the post. If anyone knows, please clue me in. I'm a newbie.

Do yourself a favor, check out the song you've wasted 5 minutes in worse ways, besides you are probably at work now anyway.

So maybe today just some basics about the trip.

Why did we choose Nicaragua? Well, we traveled to Costa Rica in 2002 for our honeymoon. We both really liked Costa Rica. Shortly after returning I read an article about traveling to Nicaragua. The article said things like, explore places that wouldn't be legal in the U.S. (i.e. live volcanoes, etc) and it's what Costa Rica was 15 years ago. Additionally, my wife is fluent in Spanish, so we're comfortable traveling to Latin and/or South America.

Don't worry there was a 2.5 foot wall keeping us from falling in. These pics don't do justice it was dusk. Just google volcan masaya.

Is it safe? Nica is either the safest or second safest (depending on the source) country in central america. Not so safe right now is El Salvadore (due mostly to gangs) and Guatamala. My wife is also not real keen on Mexico City.

It felt safe here.

This is laguna de apoyo. A lake formed in an ancient crater. It is over 200m deep of very clean water. No motorized boats allowed. Hot springs of 45C feed it. The water all around stays at about 85 F.

These guys weren't too scary either.

This was a little scary. We went soaring over a coffee plantation.

All the time I was in Kentucky I never met anyone named Jethro. We go to Nicaragua and hire a tour guide who's name was.... Jethro. He's the one in the Brewers t-shirt. A gift from me.

Do people travel there? We weren't sure. Once we got there we realized there were a fair number of tourists, more than we expected actually. However, our home base Granada, only has about 100,000 people with a fairly small downtown so travelers really stick out. At first this was dissapointing. As time went on we grew to enjoy this, it was easy to have conversations with other travelers. Most of the travelers we met were European or Canadian with a few Americans sprinkled in.