Nicaragua (Nee-ha-ra-wah*)

Nicaragua (Nee-ha-ra-wah*)

Our primary objective in Nicaragua was to organise our United States B2 tourist visa and our Honduran visa, to allow us to cross Honduras into El Salvador. And so we made a bee line to the capital, Managua, from the border. On the way we visited Rivas to withdraw some money from the ATM, have our visa photos taken and photocopy documents for our visa applications.

As it was the weekend, we decided to camp a couple of nights in the hills (900m) before dropping into Managua on Monday to visit the Embassies. It was another welcome break from the heat. On our way down, we had a great view of the fuming Masaya volcano, one of many Nicaraguan volcanoes – this one active.

We can stay 90 days in total in the so-called C4 countries of Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala – and we were not sure how long the US embassy would take to process and return our passports. In the event, we collected our passports the day after our interview. The Honduran embassy processed our visas and returned them on the spot. We are very pleased to have these visas in place and were not at all sure that applying for them in Nicaragua (and not our home country, the UK) would work. We did explore downtown Managua, but in truth, there is not much to see.

After a couple of days in Managua, we headed over to Granada which is located on the shore of Lake Cocibolca (also called Lake Nicaragua). We camped on the banks of the lake, enjoyed the cool breeze coming off it and explored the town. It’s very much a tourist town with mostly single or double storey buildings painted in a variety of different colours. The rich and the famous keep houses here and it shows!

There are a large number of very small islands on the lake created by the eruption of near by volcano Mombacho. Some of these islands are inhabited by villagers, others by rich Nicaraguans and gringos in single mansions and some by monkeys. We took a boat tour early in the morning before it got too hot and explored.

There are plenty of good restaurants in town and Dave celebrated his birthday at Boco Baca with a charcuterie platter followed by the speciality – steak flambéed in rum.

The next day we set off back to Managua, via the the lookout at Catarina, and to visit the Honduran Embassy once more for our updated visa. After that we headed to the Honduran border.

Near the border is the Somoto Canyon and Dave took a morning tour involving some hiking, scrambling over rocks, wading through a river, floating in a rubber ring and a boat ride. It was terrific fun and Dave was the only tourist there. The canyon itself was deep and very scenic.

The next day we arrived at the border and entered Honduras with minimal fuss.

*Google “Nicaragua David Sedaris” to listen to a hilarious excerpt from his show “Innocents Abroad”.