Well it is that time again when I felt I needed to pick up and explore a new area of the world so this time I've chosen to start in Nicaragua travel through Honduras, Guatemala and end in Belize. I've been so lucky do the first two weeks of the trip with three awesome mates, Kat, Rob & Cherie. We all flew into Managua, Nicaragua on Nov 9th and immediately made the 2hr shuttle ride to San Juan del Sur a picturesque surf town on the west coast of Nicaragua. The charms and what it has to offer goes on and on - surfing, fishing, kayaking, sailing and simply being... Watching the pacific sunset from a hammock, Tona (beer) in hand while reading a non-nursing book is what I call paradise! The town is full of surfers who send off a very chill but party vibe. We spent our days checking out various beaches - us girls trying to surf and the boys just ripping it up. The first day we visited Playa Maderas north of San Juan del sur, the finest surf beach in the area. White sand, best fish tacos, slowish left and right breaks... Not a bad place to hangout! The second day we headed south of San Juan del sur to Yanqui with a really cool crew we met back at the hostel, loaded into the back of a truck with surf boards and shipped us off to the beach... This place is not advertised very widely to keep it from being overpacked; as we walked down the trail we discovered a white sand, untouched, majestic beach with not a soul to be found besides a couple local fisherman off in the distance on the rocks. This was to be our playground for the day... We set up our spot and headed for the surf! The following day we visited a new beach called Hermosa and again tried to get better at surfing this time with a sore body while the boys caught waves left right and centre... I eventually retired to the beach and resorted to tanning :)
The night life in San Juan Del Sur has been lots of fun - live bands, bussing bars with beer and Nicaraguan rum makes for good times but also prevents us from getting up before 9am. It is a pretty nice life here waking up at 9, rolling out of bed to get our favorite breakfast Barrio de gallo pinto, surfing and tanning at beautiful beaches, visiting our favourite burrito stand and watching colour sunsets before having some drinks with other travelers and the locals. Last night we visited Refugio de Vida Silvestre La Flor which is 20km south of San Juan Del Sur - its one of the worlds principle nesting areas for olive ridley and leatherback turtles. You visit the beach at night when the female turtles return (approx 16000 throughout the night) and invade the beach like a slowly breaking wave, they exit the sea, dig a hole and lay approx 100 eggs. The moon was full which lit up the beach and we used red light to actually observe the turtles laying their eggs. Unfortunately we did not see hatching turtles but I was lucky enough to find our own (Cherie and I) baby turtle in the sand smaller than the size of our palm. Cherie named him Jethro which I thought was brilliant... I really wanted to keep him but instead just helped him in his journey to the sea and said our goodbyes. This was such an amazing experience and was so blown away but the numbers of turtles on the beach, they were so many of them it was like a traffic jam of turtles.. Running into eachother when trying to find space to lay their eggs.
Now the original group made out way to Isla de Ometepe an island formed by twin volcanoes rising out of the lake. The two large volcanoes are Concepion which rises 1610m above the lake in almost a perfect cone and Maderas at 1394m - which we will be climbing bright and early tomorrow. Lava flows created an isthmus between them creating the island, whose name means 'two hills' in Nahuatl. Concepion is still active; its last major eruption was in 1957. Ompetepe is famous for its ancient stone and petroglyphs depicting humans, animals, birds and geometric shapes which I hope we'll see tomorrow
Well it's bed time now since we are up at 6am for our 8-9 hour journey up the volcano. I hope to post pics soon! Love to all back home Xx
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