Today we’re promised the best day of the trip, at least this two week part of it – a bit of everything around Granada, we’ll see.
Tasty breakfast in the hotel, fruit granola and muesli for me, omelette for Florence who is now 90% recovered from yesterday.
Leave the hotel at 9:00, first stop is the supermarket three minutes later, not sure why so we stay on the bus. Next is the old railway station, this is now a business school but an old steam engine and a couple of carriages remain. Students at the school get most of their fees paid as long as they do community service in the local area for 6 months after graduation.
Granada is on the edge of Lake Nicaragua, the second largest lake in Latin America behind Lake Titikaka. Our next activity is a boat trip on the lake. There are many islands around the edge, some occupied by very poor communities who subsist on what they can catch in the lake and some occupied by luxury houses costing hundreds of thousands. There are many birds and a few monkeys around too.
We stop briefly at the main cemetery – Central America’s oldest and the resting place of six former presidents of Nicaragua. The graves are all mausoleums above ground because of flooding in the area, there is no cremation here. One area is called the boneyard, this is where the remains of people who couldn’t afford a grave were left.
We leave the town behind and head for Laguna de Apoyo, a crater lake in a volcano which last erupted 26,000 years ago. The panoramic view across the crater is spectacular. We move on to a resort on the lake shore, we have over three hours here. This feels too long after we’ve been rushed between sites all morning.
Drink a few cups of coffee, have some lunch, write a few pages of our diaries and watch the comings and goings on the lake and the time passes quickly enough. The resort has a couple of resident green parrots who are very entertaining, they seem to be endlessly bickering like an old married couple.
Stop at a handicraft market, it’s dark inside – we’re told that the whole of Central America is suffering a power cut because of trees falling on some cables in Honduras; this seems entirely plausible.
Final stop, and the highlight by a long way is visit to Masaya Volcano. I’d like to say we hiked for hours to reach the edge of the crater but actually this is one of the few, if not the only active volcano where there’s a road to the edge of the crater. We queue for a while on the main road, there’s a maximum of 60 people allowed at the top at any one time and we’re only allowed fifteen minutes on the crater edge.
Seeing an active volcano has long been on my list of things to do; this was an unexpected surprise here. It’s an incredible site, 70m below us the glowing red lava bubbles and moves around, above it there are clouds of steam and smoke swirling around, lit by the fiery glow from the crater. Fifteen minutes pass in whats feels like seconds – a definite highlight of our trip.
How do you follow that?
When we’re back on the bus our guide Ramon breaks out a gallon container of Macua, the national drink of Nicaragua, a cocktail of rum, guava, lemon and other fruit juices, puts on a party mix from his phone and puts on some flashing lights on the bus. The journey back to the hotel is a surreal mixture of AC\DC, Justin Timberlake and Britney, people are dancing in the aisle. When we pull up outside the hotel there’s still some cocktail left so we convince the driver to drive round a few blocks until it was all gone.
Keep partying! Macua sounds like a great Punch.
Who would think that a trip to Central America would be required to broaden your music taste. Judging by the photos, the bus was on the Highway to Hell.