Granada – Welcome to the Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

Getting to Granada

After a long day on a busy bus and waiting for hours to cross the border, we arrive in Granada as the sun starts to fade from the sky. There’s just enough daylight left to admire the pastel coloured buildings and remnants of colonialism in this quaint city nestled on the edge of Lago Cocibolca.

We find our way to Hotel Il Padrino, we’re welcomed by Gabi and Toby the husband and wife owners, Maxi their son and Milan and Lola their dogs. Toby is actually English, but stayed out here after travelling this way back in 2009. Our room has a nice view of the interior garden and we enjoy being able to spread out again after being cooped up in claustrophobic hostels in Costa Rica.

Now we’re in Nicaragua, we can have a nice meal out without it costing a small fortune so we head to the Garden Cafe just down the road. It’s a beautiful setting, we sit in a courtyard surrounding a garden and enjoy a green curry with fish and dahl. We both left our phones on charge at the hotel so this image from Google will have to do:

Exploring a ghost town

We spend our first morning here having a wander around and getting our bearings. We walk past the iconic cathedral with it’s custard coloured walls, bright white accents and topped with a stunning dome of white and burnt orange. We see dozens of horses lined up on the main square with their Cinderella like carriages waiting to transport tourists around for a hefty fee. It seems cruel to have these horses out in the midday heat for long periods of time and it doesn’t seem like they are particularly well cared for.

Alex suggests the lake should only be around ten minutes walk away so we head there next. It’s slightly unnerving how quiet it is. We barely pass another tourist and there are only a handful of locals at most. We wonder if it’s because they’re hiding from the heat but even at night it’s eerily quiet. The few locals we do see are either trying to entice us into their restaurants for lunch or ask us to spare a dollar as they’re out of work. Considering it’s supposed to be peak season it’s a strange atmosphere and feels like a bit of a ghost town. Still, we reach the lake and it is pretty stunning. We walk around a boulevard surrounded by palm trees and agree this could be a good place for a run in the morning when it’s not quite so hot.

We spend the rest of the day planning, blogging, food shopping, withdrawing local currency and cooking in the shared kitchen at the hotel. The less glamorous side of travelling for a year but it has to be done!

Mazy markets and the magic of magma

To Alex’s surprise, I am actually up and ready to go for a run at 6.30am. Back home I barely get out of bed before 9 but I find it’s best to make the most of the daylight here and I’ve become used to early starts. We retrace our steps from yesterday and with a few laps around the sports pitch we manage our first 5km since Chile, way back in November!

After a well earned breakfast, I convince Alex we should go to the local market I’ve read about on a blog and don’t want to miss out on. This is one of those situations where the blog article had very much raised my expectations and I believed we were heading to an undiscovered gem. It turned out to be a typical chaotic Latin American market… Full of hustle and bustle, noisy, dirty, busy, locals giving us confused and slightly irritated glances, all of the usual stuff. We squeeze through the narrow channels where women sell clothes and children’s toys, opposite meat that looks like it has been there for days splayed out across damp wooden blocks. Flies circle around it, only occasionally batted away by a lazy wave of a dishcloth from the stall seller. A man sharpens his machete on a grindstone. Another man hacks away at a huge block of ice with his hammer, freezing shards of glass fly in all directions. After passing rows of stinking fish we make for the exit. Along this corridor are giant pigs heads facing away from us so we get a nice look at the severed muscle, fat and sinew that once connected it to a body. I try to reason this is true Nicaraguan culture and we should see the ugly parts too not just the bits for the tourists. I’m not sure I even convince myself.

We crave something sweet to recover from the trauma. We find a local chocolate factory/cafe heavily inspired by Willy Wonka and his Umpa Lumpa’s. We order a brownie with ice-cream and a cup of cold cacao with cinnamon. Both are delicious and hit the spot. In the background a couple of tour groups pass through, stopping at a wooden board where they “help” make chocolate. Each time a tourist does this activity, their guide bursts into song and dance “Bate Bate Chocolate, Bate Bate Chocolate”. We hear this at least a dozen times while enjoying our snack. It sticks in our head all day long.

After lunch at our hotel, we’re picked up for our afternoon activity to visit a volcano, we’re excited and hopeful we will be able to see some actual lava. On the way to the Volcan Masaya we stop at a viewpoint over-looking Laguna Apoyo which we’ll visit tomorrow. We’re both grateful for the strong breeze that keeps us cool, we don’t have air-con at our hotel and the room gets pretty stuffy, so this is our first time not overheating in a while. We chat with a German girl in our group who has been teaching German in the Costa Rican capital San Jose. We exchange travel stories and some tips, she’s in her early twenties and has ambitions to do much more travelling. I’m impressed by all of these younger people (usually German or Dutch) that have their lives in order and believe in themselves enough to travel at that age. I suppose I am a late bloomer to this nomadic lifestyle.

Dramatic scenes greet us as we arrive at the volcano. The gas seeping out of the crater creates a giant misty cloud that obscures the sun. Even though it’s over an hour until the sun will go down, it’s a fierce red colour you usually only see during sunsets.

We explore the area, trying out a few viewpoints desperate to spot some lava. Unfortunately it’s hard to see into the crater and the sulphuric gas makes us cough and wheeze as we lean over the wall for a better look. We try and follow the road that leads to the edge of the crater but a park ranger advises it is off limits and we should hike up to a nearby Mirador to watch the sunset. We follow his instructions and race up the hill just in time to catch the sun disappear behind the volcanic peaks. It’s amazing having a 360 degree view, uninterrupted by mountains or skyscrapers as the sky fills in with various hues all around us. The volcano continually chokes out gasses straight from the core of the earth, even if we don’t get to see lava the trip has been worthwhile to see this natural wonder.

On our way back down towards the car park, we hear a guide tell his group the best time to see lava is after sunset. Relief! We return to our original spot on the edge of the carpark where we have the best view to see into the belly of the volcano. We wait patiently, we can faintly feel the heat of the Earth’s core as we look over the edge. After a while I try using my phone camera to see if it can spot something my eyes cannot. I think I can see a faint glow somewhere down in the pit of darkness and fog. I revert back to using my sight and a stream of magma glows for a few seconds, almost pulsating with light before fading back into the dark. This happens a few times and Alex and I both get a good look at what we came here to see. It’s not the spewing lava fountain you see on some travel photos but it’s more than good enough for us.

Bliss by the lakeside

We’re back in a minivan just after brekkie, on our way to spend the day at Laguna Apoyo. The lake sits nestled in a vast volcanic crater a couple of hundred meters down from the viewpoint we were at yesterday. I’m not 100% sold on the idea as I’ve seen plenty of lakes and spending all day by one seems a bit odd to me but I go along with it. We arrive at a resort where we’re given a card to use as a tab, a wifi password and a QR code to scan for refreshments. We walk down through the resort to the lakefront, there’s pool tables, table tennis, a big bar and restaurant, hammocks, sun loungers, rubber dinghys and kayaks included. I’m starting to see the appeal. We find a spot under the shade of a palm tree where the strong breeze bellows off the lake right over us. Idyllic.

After a couple of hours of relaxing we grab a rubber ring and attempt to elegantly sit on them without being thrown over by the strong waves. It takes several tries and some gymnastics but we get there. We swim out to a floating platform and soak up some sun while watching other tourists fight with their rubber rings or attempt somersaults off the platform with varying degrees of success. We chat with an American guy who’s big into his cigars, always has a bottle of beer in his hand and has tattoos of a few countries he’s been to. Some of which we’ll be visiting, so we pick up some tips and make a note of a few famous tattoo parlours! He tells us he’s arranged to go and see the Masaya volcano later on so we advise him it’s best to see the lava after dark.

We make our way back to land and order lunch while looking out at the waves lapping across the lake. We both order hamburgers, I have a fruit smoothie while Alex inhales a chocolate milkshake with added rum, why not. We’re slightly envious of the $27 tomahawk steaks being served to other tables. Perhaps another time. Our cigar enthusiast sat behind us, devouring a steak and lines up a few cocktails, clearly enjoying his day in style.

With time running out before our minibus comes back for us, we just have time to digest lunch and hop in a kayak. We battle against the waves and the wind to make it about 100 meters out from the beach. We decide against trying to cross to the other side of the lake, if only we had enough time… For a while we just sit there and let nature do it’s thing, spinning us and throwing us around on the water.

Back on land, as we wait for the minibus we ask our American friend with a new drink in his hand what time he’s going to the volcano, “AHH I got drunk. I’ll have to do it tomorrow”. Living his best life, good on him.

Later on, as we are preparing dinner at the hostel we get talking to a German guy called Jan. He’s travelling for six weeks with his wife and two year old daughter. He caught the travel bug from an early age and is seemingly passing that onto his infant daughter. He’s been to some amazing places in the world, Iran, Myanmar, he’s got friends who have been to Yemen, Syria. Places that as Westerners we only know as dangerous, war-torn countries you’d never even consider going to. He talks about the friendliness of the local people and it makes you wonder about what a twisted view we have of the Middle East thanks to our biased news channels and political rhetoric. We ask him Juan Carlos’ question of “if you only had seven days left, where would you spend them?” He surprises us by saying he would go somewhere he hasn’t been before, Nepal or Machu Picchu. Every answer so far has been somewhere nostalgic, a place from a romantic memory or of significance in their past.

Would you go somewhere you already know or take the plunge on a new exciting adventure for your final seven days on this planet?

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Adventure – Running Granada first thing in the morning, exploring the lake by kayak and inflatable ring, walking the volcano in search of lava

Excitement – seeing magma!, having our own room again and lovely cooked breakfasts made for us, finding not one but two proper supermarkets, being able to afford things again

Trauma – seeing a man shit in the street. Bate Bate Chocolate x 16