Nicaragua to El Salvador

Our last night in León was La Gritería festival, a Christian celebration of the Immaculate Conception. It´s celebrated all over Nicaragua, but particularly in León. At 6pm on the 7th December the fiesta is kicked off by the bishop in the cathedral, who shouts out "¿Quién causa tanta alegría?" - "Who causes so much happiness?", to which the crowds reply; "¡La concepción de María!" - The conception of Mary! Then everyone rushes out into the streets as the bells ring and fireworks explode. Throughout the town people set up small altars inside their home, which people visit and repeat the cry. As a reward, they are given sweets, biscuits and other small gifts. At one house, we were given a box of matches and a sachet of coffee! As you can imagine, the whole thing is pretty crazy and I was amazed by how much booty some people managed to get during the night; some children had huge sacks full of goodies!



Although this picture isn´t great (it was hard to capture the event in the dark), it does show the slightly manic atmosphere pretty well! You can see the women inside (always shielded by some sort of gate) calling back to the crowd and, if you look carefully through the clouds of incense, you may just about make out the Vigin Mary altar in the background.



On our way towards the Honduran border, we stopped off for a night in the city of Chinandega. The town itself is remarkable only for its proximity to the legendary Flor de Caña rum factory (and for being the hottest city in Nicaragua)! We both really enjoyed the fantastic national rum during our time in Nica and had heard rumours that a tour of the factory could possibly be arranged. "Worth a try", we thought!

Unfortunately, this front wall in the village of Chichigalpa is as far as we got. The guard informed us that visiting the factory was prohibido and we would need to speak to the big men in Managua before they would let us through the gates. He might have said it was "more than his job´s worth", but we didn´t catch it all.



Still, Chichigalpa is a pretty village with a pretty name and it wasn´t a totally wasted journey.



From Chinandega, with our bags strapped tightly to a mini-bus (see below!), we headed towards Honduras... and straight onto another bus through to El Salvador. It was a pretty mammoth journey, in 6 cramped, hot buses in total, until we arrived in the city of San Miguel, El Salvador.



El Salvador is now a peaceful, stable country, but, as recently as 1992, a bitter civil war raged. The country has a very sad history and, for a lot of people, it is still very much living memory. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the village of Perquín, Northeastern El Salvador. During the civil war it was a guerrilla stronghold and, tragically, also the site of some of the worst atrocities on innocent civilians. After the peace treaty was signed, ex-guerrillas set up a museum to document the area´s history. We spent a day there, visiting the museum, meeting the wonderful people and admiring the beautiful countryside.



On display are various relics, such as this helicopter wreckage, which was shot down near Perquín. There are also many photographs, testimonies from some of the massacre survivors and lots and lots of guns. They also have equipment from Radio Venceremos, the station that broadcast secretly from caves during the war.



Despite the horrors that people endured so recently, Salvadorans have emerged to be amongst the most friendly people we have met in Central America so far. They have an incredible optimism.



From San Miguel we also took a day trip to the beach at El Cuco, on the Pacific Coast. The waves were huge and the beach stretched for miles into the distance, but sadly it just wasn´t a great place to spend much time. The seafront was crowded with shops and there were lots of dead fish laid out to dry in the sun. I think we may have been a bit spoilt by the beaches in Costa Rica and Panama, so we didn´t stay long.



Oh well, you win some, you lose some!

Rachel x

3 Months!

So, it's been 3 months to the day since we set off and we're more or less a third of the way through this trip. It's definitely safe to say that it's been the most exciting (and strange) 3 months of our lives so far. We've done so much, and it feels like a long time since we were saying goodbye at Birmingham airport or sitting at work. The good things are that: 1) we've still got twice as much time left to do twice as much stuff; 2) although we're having so much fun, we've realised how much we like home and miss the people there, and it won't be too long until we return.

We're now in El Salvador having arrived yesterday in San Miguel. Watch out for blog posts to follow. The photo here was taken in the mountains near Perquín, Northeastern El Salvador.

Rob

Volcán Momotombo

Nicaragua is indeed the land of lakes and volcanoes. On Wednesday I took on the local ´big one´: Volcán Momotombo. It rises 1280m from the shore of Lake Managua and is fairly active. The last proper eruption was in 1905, and in 2000 it caused a few tremors, raising fears of an eruption. On the lakeside at the foot of the volcano, a geothermal power station provides one third - or 10%, depending on who you speak to - of Nicaragua´s electricity demand.



I climbed with David (on the left in the above photo) and Seth, a couple of New Yorkers whom we met on Ometepe and caught up with in León, and our guide, Anry.



The route up above the vegetation line is pretty tough going. The surface is covered in an ever-changing assortment of volcanic rock, varying between sand and small rocks to fairly big chunks. It´s hard work when each step you take slides back down half the length of your stride! Hopefully you can see from the photos the weird but beautiful moon-like landscape. There are also incredible views of the lake and around.



It took us about 5-6 hours to get to the top. Here, the ground looks like rock but is actually hot mud, with steam coming out of holes everywhere. You have to be careful - David lingered too long with a foot in the mud without realising it and later discovered that the sole was coming off his boot!








The loose surface that had hindered our ascent was, our guide assured us, going to help on the way down. Having already smashed his 4-hour estimate for the climb up, we became less confident of his 2.5-hour estimate for the descent. It turns out that a 45º incline of mixed sand and rubble covered in loose (and very sharp) volcanic rocks is not at all easy to get down. We were advised to "go with it"; not too hard on the sandy bits, where you can be fairly sure you´ll stop, but trickier on the patches of firmer ground where you could keep sliding for some distance without stopping.



Of course, one option is to adopt the ´crab´ technique, as demonstrated here by David. It looks effective, but in the end we all went for ´sliding down occasionally falling with much swearing´ technique, which proved the most expedient.



Volcano 0, us 1. Go team!

Rob

León; City of religion and revolution

It´s boiling in León. Boiling hot and incredibly sunny, with a clear blue sky. There are Christmas decorations for sale all over town but it´s impossible to believe this is December!



This cathedral dominates the parque central and is the largest in Central America. Yesterday we witnessed an incredibly crowded mass, where people were having to peer through the doorways to see in. It really shows how important Catholicism is here and it´s also evident in the large numbers of beautiful churches.



We arrived in León after a brief return to Granada and, though the colonial architecture has the same feel, this is a very different city. You can really feel the recent suffering experienced during the civil war and the years of struggle after the revolution, because there are images of heroes and martyrs on every corner.

The most famous symbol of the revolution is this man, Sandino, or rather, his hat. He actually pre-dated the 1970s insurrection by about 40 years, but his fighting spirit even inspired the main revolutionaries to call themselves Sandinistas.



There are still many murals around town depicting events in Nicaragua´s painful history and Sandino´s shadow can often be seen cast across them. We thought this looked pretty cool so decided to make shadows a bit of a theme in some of our photos, too!





As we were looking around, this lovely lady, Maria, offered to explain the symbolism of the murals. She´s lived in León all her life so is very knowledgeable and, thankfully, spoke very clear Spanish!




The martyr culture is very strong in León and spots like this, where four protesting students were murdered by the dictator´s soldiers, are tragically common throughout the city.



Maria managed to sneak us into a crumbling old building that was the scene of a very significant event in Nicaraguan history and, I´m pretty sure very few other tourists ever see. It was where the poet and revolutionary (that´s a very common combination here) Rigoberto Lopéz Peréz assassinated the first dictator from the Samoza dynasty and was then killed himself, becoming yet another martyr. Now it is a Sandinista office and almost entirely empty, but the bullet holes are still in the walls. Pretty atmospheric.



Rachel x