Goa Nights

Crossing the border to Nicaragua made us shift into Latin-America mode. The Nicaraguan border crossing was hectic – there are no signs and you don't really know what it is you're supposed to do. The "officials" don't look very official, there are no clear paths, and the entire procedure is very hazy. Eventually though, we made it across and hopped on a taxi to the town of Rivas, a place which most tourists skip. We decided to stop there, have some lunch, and think about our next step.
While we were having our lunch we noticed a sign in the street announcing the "8th street fiesta" for that same day. The waiter explained that Rivas has a local celebration of Miami's Calle 8 Festival and said that it should be fun so we decided to stay for the night. The fiestas were indeed amusing, although on a much smaller scale than the fiestas we joined the previous night (in Costa Rica's Palmares). People were dancing in the streets and it was a very interesting experience. Unlike Costa Rica's parties, this one had an undertone of danger so we decided not to stay too late and leave before people got too drunk.


The following day we took a ride to the neighbouring town of San Jorge and boarded a ferry to the island of Ometepe in the great lake of Nicaragua. The ferry ride was a bit bumpy as the lake is very large and has a nasty demeanor. We sat on the front deck and were slightly splattered by the crashing waves. We didn't mind it too much especially when we saw this guy whose job it is to jump off the ferry with a cable which is later tied to others which help the ferry dock.


The island is made up of two huge volcanic craters with little towns dotting the shoreline and the piece of land which connects the two craters.


We found the people on the island to be very welcoming and the life there to be slow and simple.


After a couple of days of exploring Isla de Ometepe we decided to make our way back. We decided to take the night ferry to the colonial city of Granada. Big mistake. The last publicly available transport to the ferry dock leaves at 21:00. The ferry "leaves" at 00:00. Which actually means that it leaves at 02:00. So that gave us a nice, solid, 5 hour wait for the ferry to leave.


That was the good part of the trip. Once we boarded the ferry we discovered that all of the benches inside had been claimed by people who boarded the ferry in some previous, mystery port. We decided to sleep on the deck but after we got wet for the first time we chose to try our luck inside again. We decided to sleep on the floor under the benches. This was ok except for being occasionally stepped on, being tossed around by the waves, or waking up to find an ugly German guy using your leg as a headrest.
After several miserable hours we finally stepped on the blessed shores of Granada. After checking into our hostel we wandered about the city and its intriguing market.



Later that night we ran across some Israelis we had met in Costa Rica and realized that we were actually in "Nicaragoa" as the guy called it (and he wasn't joking, he really thought that was the country's name).
I stayed in Granada for a couple of days because I didn't feel all too well and after that made a quick exit from Nicaragua - a short ride to the capital Managua and from there to the capital of El Salvador - San Salvador.

Stay tuned for stories from El Salvador.