Granada, Nicaragua

Daryll writes:

Whilst in Leon, we met a retired Canadian couple (David & Theresa) from Ontario that now call Nicaragua home.  David had given us some rough directions on how to navigate through Managua and together with my GPS, we made easy work of the city.  We also benefited from the fact that it was Sunday morning and most people where either at church or still in bed as the roads were relatively quiet.  I’m using Open Street Mapping for Central and South America on my Garmin GPS and it is able to auto-route through the bigger cities which it has the information for, but sadly isn’t able to auto-route through some of the non-descript towns that we travel to which makes navigation a pain as some towns don’t even have street names.  As we rode through Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, there was very little signage directing traffic to Granada.

Granada is another of the colonial cities in Nicaragua and located along the shore of Lake Nicaragua, and at the foot of Volcan Mombacho, it has some amazing architecture and old churches.  Along the way, we stopped at a mirador (look out) to take a photo of Volcan Masaya and Lake Nicaragua when a soccer club making their way to an afternoon soccer game stopped.  There were about 15 teenage guys and they all took an interest in us, our bikes and where we were going.  Under normal circumstances, one would be afraid of a group of teenagers all ganged together; however these guys were extremely friendly and invited us to their game - we had to decline though.  I never did get the name of their team.

Volcan Masaya & Lake Nicaragua

Soccer team

It is meant to be going into the dry season; however it still rains almost every day on queue in the afternoon for a few hours.  It is a funny sight as most street vendors pack up when the rain comes and set-up again once it is dry for the rest of the evening.  It is humid and am glad that the hotel/hostel rooms we have been staying in so far have fans or it would be virtually impossible to sleep at night due to the heat.  Some hotels/hostels offer aircon. for and additional charge so we just settle on the fan.  For some odd reason the watch that I am wearing moves the time forward, so this morning we ended up having a super early start as my watch was almost an hour and a half ahead of the actual time.  I have another watched strapped to my handlebars which I now need to take off.  Good thing I carried a spare watch.  We made ourselves our usual breakfast of oats and the hostel had free coffee and decided to walk around the town and soak it up, before it got too hot.  We also took a stroll to Lake Nicaragua to see it bursting at it’s banks.  Due to the heat, most homes have their living rooms at the front of the house with large garage type doors that open onto the street and all of them have rocking chairs.  There are rocking chairs in almost every home that we walk by.

Parque Central Cathedral

Street view of a typical living room

New photos added to the Nicaragua photo album.