The morning after our final Spanish lesson, we took a tour up Volcán Mombacho. A couple of guys picked us up in a Toyota Land cruiser along with six other tourists and drove us all the way to the top of Mombacho via a paved, narrow, steep road only accessible by 4WD. We sat on two bench seats facing each other, four people on one side and four people on the other holding onto whatever was available to stop ourselves from sliding down and squashing the two people sitting at the back.
The other tourists were a family of three from Holland, the parents were visiting their son who was taking Spanish lessons in Granada before going to Southern Nicaragua to work as a Doctor, and another family of three, a mother and her son and daughter, from Granada, but now living in San Francisco. The son from Granada told us he’d walked up the volcano, from the bottom to the top, with his mates when he was about 15 years old. Great fun, possibly illegal, but what you do when you’re that age.
From the car park at the top, we walked for about two hours out to and around the Sendero crater. Volcan Mombacho was more of a cloud forest tour than a volcano tour. It’s still active; we saw steam vents here and there, if you kick the surface with your shoe the ground beneath is hot, and there was a fissure in a rock that we walked through that I wouldn’t have wanted to be in, in an earthquake. But, Volcán Mombacho hasn’t erupted since 1570 and we couldn’t see right into the crater for all the lovely green trees and vegetation that have grown since then. The best things about it were the great views over Granada and the Isletas, how cool and breezy it was at the top, and the troop of howler monkeys we saw on our way back out. They ignored us to start with, but after five minutes, they began viewing us with the same intensity that we were viewing them. Then they began calling to one another and I’m pretty sure they were coming up with a cunning plan that somehow involved us.
The next morning, we took a 20 minute shuttle to Laguna de Apoyo, a lake in the crater of an extinct volcano. I’m not sure why, but I had expected long, gracious, green lawns going down to a small sandy beach with a laguna of clear water, and an enclosed dining area with air-conditioning overlooking the lawn and the laguna. In reality there were concrete steps going down to a black sand beach with deck-chairs, a laguna of cloudy green water with a swimming platform, tubes, and kayaks, and a rustic open-air restaurant overlooking it all. Laying in the sun and swimming is not our usual thing, but we really enjoyed our day there and found it as relaxing as Katya the owner of our hotel had promised.
The following day was Monday the 1st of May and a public holiday in Nicaragua. Katya had organised for the owner of a lancha to pick us up in his car and drive us five minutes down the road to lake Nicaragua, where his cousin would take us out on the lancha to cruise among the Isletas. The centre of town was quiet at 10am when the lancha owner picked us up, but the lakeside was full of people enjoying the public holiday. The edge of the lake was full of people swimming, and between the lake and the road there was a 20 metre wide section of grass and dirt that stretched for a kilometre or so, where young guys were playing football, and between the grass and the road there was a line of huge trees under which families had strung up hammocks, laid out mats and chairs, and were picnicking. In the middle was a jetty that took us out to the lancha. It was an overcast day, so I don’t think we saw the isletas at their prettiest, but it was a lovely boat ride and we took about 100 photos. I won’t post all of them.
The Traveling Wilberries 