April 3 – April 7, 2018
We got an early start the next day in order to drive towards the Pacific Ocean for a little beach time. Before leaving the town of Somoto, we stopped to get some Rosquillas, a corn flour and cheese baked treat that the area is known for….sweet and savory and really yummy!
April 1 – April 3, 2018
We were happy to be back on the road and after a few hours of driving on good roads we arrived at our campsite at Somoto Canyon. We parked in a green field next to the river with a great variety of birds, including the national bird of Nicaragua, the Guardabarranco, which looks like this, I have yet to get a good picture of one, but, as you can see, they are pretty gorgeous. Feathers like that and you may imagine that this beauty lives in an elegant nest, surrounded by eider down throw pillows and firefly lanterns, but no, they live in a hole in the dirt banks alongside roads, trails and rivers (thus the name which translates to the guard of the bank). Could be quite nice inside I guess….
We did manage to do one of the tours while we were at El Pantano, and that was the tour of Finca de San Antonio. The finca is run by four brothers and is home to them, their families and their 80 year old parents. Manuel, one of the brothers, picked us up at El Pantano and we began the walk from there to the finca. The dirt road was steep and the day, even at 8 am, was already hot and muggy.
March 24 – April 1, 2018
The drive to the small town of Jalapa near the border of Honduras and Nicaragua took us through several small villages. The road was so much better than the ones in Honduras….it was made of paving stones and we came across a few crews working on repairing sections of it along the way. All along the road, power poles, traffic signs, trees and boulders were painted black and red with the letters FSLN painted on them, a reminder of the recent civil war in the country and the highly political nature of life in Nicaragua. Very often, even peoples’ clothing seems to reflect this colour combination with red shirts and grey pants or skirts.
We knew that Semana Santa (week long Easter celebration) in Latin America would be a crazy, crowded week, full of parties late into the evening, closed businesses and intense traffic, some of it impaired by too many Easter cervezas. Everyone we consulted advised that we would be smart to find somewhere quiet to hang out for the week and to stay off of the roads. But we thought the week began on Good Friday. We found out at the last hostel that the week actually begins the weekend prior to Good Friday, leaving us only one week to make plans as to where to stay before Semana Santa celebrations started.
Lanquin is the town that many backpackers base themselves out of to visit caves, do hikes and see attractions in the area, Semuc Champey being the highlight. We had been warned that the road to Semuc Champey was rough, had a few precarious bridges that might not support our 5 tonne plus rig, and after the drive the day before, it wasn’t really appealing to us. We opted for a return trip on the hostel’s shuttle to Semuc Champey and back at a cost of about 10 CAD each.
We looked at the different routes we could drive to get from Rio Dulce to Lanquin. There were a few options given by Google Maps, but our iOverlander application warned that the roads of some of the routes were bad…really rough, unpassible bridges, rockslides, that kind of thing.
Many travellers have heard of Lago Atitlan in Guatemala, but the largest lake in Guatemala is the less visited Lago de Isabel, at the outlet of which lies the small harbour town of Rio Dulce. The Rio Dulce river then flows about 40 kilometres out to the town of Livingston and the Caribbean Sea.
We wanted to head towards Rio Dulce, so to break up the trip we spent a night at Las Pozas. The family owns a large piece of land along a river, where the water gathers into pools for swimming. We arrived in the afternoon on the weekend and there were many local families in the park enjoying the water, the rope swings, the picnic shelters and the soccer field. The owner told us to wait until a little later in the day when the crowds thinned and then we could move our truck to the river and set up for the night.
We crossed into Guatemala, worried that we would struggle with our spanish after having been in english speaking Belize for two weeks, but the words came back to us and the border crossing went very smoothly.