2/26/16
We got up early and took the uncomfortable and long (we were on the lento instead of rapido bus this time, so it was an 8+ hour ride) bus to Managua's Caribbean terminal. We then took a taxi to the north terminal and got a minivan to Leon. From the Leon bus terminal we hired a pedicab to our hostel. The pedi cab driver was nice and let me bike him and Elisha halfway to the hostel before we hit the busy streets. We checked into our hostel, which was a run by an extremely obese woman who was proud of it and called herself and her hostel La Gordita (the little fat girl). She was chock full of information on the best places to eat and visit. She has an interesting story in that she was born in Guatemala but her parents immigrated to Manitoba, Canada, but she moved back here after getting her college education b/c it was too darn cold up there. Now she's a successful business woman in Nicaragua and runs the hostel for fun. It was one of the first hostels I've seen in an awful long time that recycles! The best part of the hostel may have been Chirpy the parrot she rescued from a market who loved to ride along on my shoulder, though it took quite a long time to warm up to Elisha.
After checking in, we quickly headed out on the town to take advantage of the last bit of daylight left. Leon is known for the vast amount of churches it has (it's known as the city of churches), so we toured around to some of them as well as visiting the central park. The highlight was seeing Volcan Momotombo erupt in the distance as you looked past the central cathedral. We had a yummy dinner at some outside bbq place.
2/27/16
"Today is gonna be a volcano day" -T-shirt we saw later that day
After breakfast we got picked up to go hike Volcan Cerro Negro, which is the youngest volcano in Nicaragua. It's small and an easy, though extremely windy, hike to the top. What's special about this volcano is that it has a steep slope and fine rocks on its slopes so something called volcano boarding has become quite popular. The volcano is completely black, thus the name. On the way up we went by the new crater, which had some sulfur vents steaming. From the summit we had nice views of surrounding volcanos including Pilas and El Hoyo. On the summit, our guide dug down into the scree about 6 inches and the rocks were so hot you could hardly touch them. This was b/c there was a lava tube about 50 feet below.
After taking in the summit views we took our specially crafted volcano boards and slid from the top of the volcano down to the bottom at a pretty decent speed. Basically it's a lot like sledding, except that you're on the black scree of an active volcano
After we got back to Leon, we had a couple of hours to grab lunch and do a bit of walking around before being picked up for the sunset tour of Volcan Telica. It was a 4WD road to get to the trailhead, which was a lot of fun. We met a guy (name forgotten) from Idaho(!) in our jeep who was really nice and cool and probably a bit younger than us. He was born at and lives again now on a reservation near to Pocatello. But again, I can't remember what tribe he's from. He's doing a trip from Mexico down to Brazil and mainly hitting Native American (mayan, olmec, toltec, aztec, inca) holy sites where he is learning more about them and doing spiritual exercises. He is trained in Native American spirituality. This volcano was a holy volcano for the Native Americans in the area before the spanish came, so he did a little ceremony and some chants up there. The hike up to Telica's crater was pretty easy. Peering into the crater was really cool and quite exhilarating as it was super steep and straight down. There were a couple of sulfur vents smoking and at the very bottom you could see a small little lava lake glowing red even in the daylight. We hung around the crater enjoying the views down into the crater as well as the views along the entire Maribios volcano chain. You could see all the volcanos from Momotombo and Cerro Negro in the far South to San Cristobol in the far North. A guy was selling beers for a bit over a dollar on the crater, so we also enjoyed a Tona while watching the lava. As it got closer to the sunset, we walked around one side of the volcano to get a beautiful view of the sunset as it sunk below the Pacific Ocean, which you could see from the volcano.
After watching the sunset, we headed back to the crater to watch the little lava lake glow and hiss in the dark. On the way back to Leon, our tour stopped at a very tasty local eatery for dinner. Back in Leon we made a late night and last minute decision to book a hike to climb Volcan San Critstobol, Nicaragua's tallest peak.
2/28/16
We woke up at 4:30am to get picked up for our drive to the trailhead of San Cristobol. The reason to start so early is 2-fold: avoid the heat and b/c it takes a lot of people 5 to 6 hours for just the climb up. It was another 4WD road to the trailead, which started at a small coffee farm. Supposedly the only coffee farm on the Pacific side of Nicaragua.
As we started the hike up through the forest, we soon saw a turquoise-browed mot mot, the national bird of Nicaragua, which is super beautiful. It didn't take long before we were above the forest and into some grasses. But then soon enough we were above the grasses and just on volcanic scree. There were lots of dead trees still standing in the volcanic scree from either a previous eruption or a fire. Scree is of course quite difficult to hike up b/c for every 2 steps up, you slide one down. But we are in somewhat decent shape, so the hike up wasn't too tough. The hardest part was that for a good portion of the hike up (though not the hike down), the wind was blowing so that the sulfur gasses were blowing down the volcano towards us, so you'd get a bit of a burn and cough in your lungs. We made it to the summit (5,725 ft) in just under 2 hours, which our guide said was a great pace. Our guide, by the way, was awesome and was self-taught via youtube videos on a lot of geology and volcanology. From the summit, there was of course nice views in all directions and you could see the entire Maribios chain of volcanos, leon, chinandega town, El Salvador and Honduras, and the Pacific Ocean. The crater was cool. It was a double crater and the farthest crater away was spewing out quite a lot of sulfuric gasses. The view was hard to enjoy; however, because it was insanely windy. Almost hard to stand. But all you had to do was go down about 5 feet, and then no wind.
We went down a few minutes below the summit and enjoyed a snack. Then it was scree skiing all the way to the bottom. Took us only about 15 minutes to go from the summit back down to the forest. Back at the coffee farm we feasted on some watery watermelon. There was a momma dog and a puppy who were entirely to skinny. The crazy thing is they were so hungry that they snarfed up the watermelon, bananas, and peanuts that we gave them. The tour owner who had driven us to the trailhead told us that Nicaraguans love pets, but they really can't afford them. He said something like over 60% of the country lives on $1.25 per day and most of the rest lives on $2.50 per day. So feeding a pet is quite difficult.
Something kind of funny. Carlos had bought us some gatorade for rehydration upon our return. We told him that the University of Florida had invented gatorade for their football team. At first he thought they were giving gatorade to actual alligators until we explained that our football teams have mascots. Elisha told them that on campus they give out free gatorade. Both Carlos and Eric could hardly believe this was possible. They both wished they could see such a thing. In Nicaragua, gatorade is quite expensive. The small gatorades are nearly $2 and remember that a large majority of Nicaraguans live on less than $2 per day. So the thought of a free gatorade fountain was like thinking of a liquid fountain
Something that I come across quite often is that Coloradoans tend to congregate to mountains and mountainous areas. Whenever I'm in mountain areas or on high peaks I seem to run into lots of Coloradoans. On trip advisor, when I was reading reviews of climbing San Cristobol, of the 4 reviews, 3 were from Colorado folk, including one group that seemed pretty impressed that they had climbed the volcano in 2 hours 15 minutes, which Elisha and I had smoked! There was a guy managing the coffee farm and when he asked where we were from and I said Colorado, he got all excited and said there were so many people from Colorado coming here and then kept talking about this gal from Colorado who had been there a couple of days ago. When we were enquiring about climbing San Cristobol, most of the hostel folks and tour guides and said it is an extremely tough hike and that we are crazy to think about climbing it b/c it's so hard or they suggested an easier hike. But in the end it really wasn't tough. When we arrived back to the hostel before 1pm, they were so surprise to see all already. They had expected us around 5pm.
So we made it back in time to explore some more of Leon, do some souvenir shopping. grab a last 2 for 1 mojito, some icecream, and fruit smoothies before we had to take our ride to the airport that night. We also went back to our favorite taco place Tacos de Marlene for dinner. Super yummy tacos!
We got picked up about 7:30pm for our ride to the Managua airport. Our fight wasn't until 1:30am, but this ride was very cheap b/c the driver was going to pick people up at the airport already, and so he had to go. He was a nice guy who had worked in Miami for awhile. On the way there, we passed by Momotombo on which we could see a bit of lava near its base. Interestingly enough the night before Momotombo, which has been recently active and erupting and off-limits of course to hiking, had a major eruption about 9pm. It was funny b/c as we sat watching it from atop of Telica around 7pm, I had been saying, "c'mon Momotombo, blow your top!" But just 2 hours later it went boom! All the locals, including our hostel lady, La Gordita, had asked if we heard it b/c they all heard it. But honestly, neither Elisha nor I heard it. Probably b/c the city noises were still very new and loud to us, so when we heard the big boom, we probably thought it was a car backfire or one of those crazy driving boombox cars. One of the hostel gals showed us a sweet picture on fb that her friend had took that showed the whole volcano glowing. Would have been super sweet to see! Here's a video link to it erupting that night. Impressive!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nArnNjQenkQ
And here' s timelapse video from the the Nicaraguan seismic research organization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO6vhS_7P1U
It seems like the volcano activity in Nicaragua is really heating up. Momotombo continues to erupt, Masaya continues to have its lava lakes, and Telica started some small eruptions. There's a website with the smithsonian museum that I use to look at activity status and warnings and when I looked today (March 3), Momotombo is listed 4 out of 5 and erupting, Masaya is listed as 4 out of 5 and erupting, San Cristobol is listed as 3 out of 5 with minor activity or eruption warning, Cerro Negro is listed as 3 out of 5 with minor activity or eruption warning, and Concepcion is listed as 2 out of 5 restless. So an exciting time to be in Nicaragua.
2/29/16
We had the very early flight from Managua to Houston and then on to Orlando.
It was a great trip in which we saw a lot of awesome thing, though of course it was too short. So many cool things to see. But it makes me feel good about visiting Central America again since it's quite inexpensive and flights to central america are very quick and in the same time zone.
When I told people of my parents' age that we were going to Nicaragua, they had worried about how dangerous it is. I know that all of latin america has its dangers of mostly petty theft or really bad things if you're in the wrong neighborhoods, but I didn't have near the concern that others had expressed. In fact, I had read that Nicaragua is probably the safest country in Central America. We learned that the gangs that can be quite dangerous in other central american countries actually own a lot of the tourist stuff here, so it is in their best interest to keep the tourists safe. So actually it someone hurts or steals from a tourist, that person is in quite big trouble with the gangs. And as Elisha pointed out, we're always getting text alerts from UF PD and Gville PD about all the armed robberies going on around Gainesville, which is supposedly a pretty safe city.
Well, doing some reading and listening to guides, I learned why people of my parents' age had such fear of Nicaragua.
Back in the 1910's Japan and Germany were working on a deal to build a transcontinental canal through Nicaragua. This was of course in direct conflict with the USA's Panama canal, which is of course a huge moneymaker. A canal through Nicaragua would give ships another option, plus it'd be even a bit shorter than the Panama canal for shipping (Elisha had read that the reason the US didn't build their canal in Nicaragua was b/c someone had warned them of all the volcanic activity in the area). So the USA obviously didn't want this 2nd canal built. They sent in mercenaries to assassinate the president of Nicaragua at that time in the hopes that the new government would side with the US and wouldn't build the canal. The mercenaries were captured by the Nicaraguan president and hung. So the US sent in the marines and overthrew the president and occupied Nicaragua for a time. While baseball was big in Nicaragua before this, this is when it became really big b/c the marines played a lot of baseball apparently. Eventually the US put in a puppet president of Nicaragua who they supported and was anti canal. The US would have their chosen government in power for more than 2 decades before they left. When they left it caused one series of dictators and revolutions after another, which of course were quite violent. Eventually a pretty bad dictator took control for quite awhile. There was a big revolution, led by students in Leon in 1972. After 7 years of guerrilla warfare and 52 days of all out battles, the revolution is victorious. However, Reagan didn't like the new government b/c he feared they were too socialist and were friends with Cuba and Russia, so he had the CIA mine the harbors in the country. The US was later charged by the International Court of Justice for this.
The court found that the US was in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to use force against another State and ordered it to pay repatriations to the Nicaraguan government, but the Reagan administration rejected the findings and no payments were ever made. Shortly afterwards, the the existence of a CIA drafted Contra (The Contras were the rebel group the US was hoping would overthrow the current socialist nicaraguan president) training manual promoting the assassination of Nicaraguan officials and other strategies illegal under US law was found out and caused further embarrassment for the Reagan administration.
The US put a trade embargo on Nicaragua that would last for 5 years and that basically crippled the country and sent them into extreme poverty. Public opinion in the US of this war started to deteriorate so congress rejected any more funding of the Contras rebels in 1985. Reagan got around this by having the CIA illegally sell weapons to Iran and then diverting the funds to the Contra rebels. This was the famous Iran-Contra scandal you sometimes hear about.
One of our guides was telling us that currently the "elected" president is really a dictator and has been forcing laws that allow him to continue to be president and that will allow his family to be president later. But under this guy, Nicaragua's economy is growing rapidly, they have the highest GDP they've ever had, and life seems to be improving. But a lot of people don't like how he is making tons of money off of it all. Our guide said there is some talk of revolution, that it's small now, but that he wouldn't be surprised if it eventually happens again. There's a history lesson for ya.
We got up early and took the uncomfortable and long (we were on the lento instead of rapido bus this time, so it was an 8+ hour ride) bus to Managua's Caribbean terminal. We then took a taxi to the north terminal and got a minivan to Leon. From the Leon bus terminal we hired a pedicab to our hostel. The pedi cab driver was nice and let me bike him and Elisha halfway to the hostel before we hit the busy streets. We checked into our hostel, which was a run by an extremely obese woman who was proud of it and called herself and her hostel La Gordita (the little fat girl). She was chock full of information on the best places to eat and visit. She has an interesting story in that she was born in Guatemala but her parents immigrated to Manitoba, Canada, but she moved back here after getting her college education b/c it was too darn cold up there. Now she's a successful business woman in Nicaragua and runs the hostel for fun. It was one of the first hostels I've seen in an awful long time that recycles! The best part of the hostel may have been Chirpy the parrot she rescued from a market who loved to ride along on my shoulder, though it took quite a long time to warm up to Elisha.
After checking in, we quickly headed out on the town to take advantage of the last bit of daylight left. Leon is known for the vast amount of churches it has (it's known as the city of churches), so we toured around to some of them as well as visiting the central park. The highlight was seeing Volcan Momotombo erupt in the distance as you looked past the central cathedral. We had a yummy dinner at some outside bbq place.
2/27/16
"Today is gonna be a volcano day" -T-shirt we saw later that day
After breakfast we got picked up to go hike Volcan Cerro Negro, which is the youngest volcano in Nicaragua. It's small and an easy, though extremely windy, hike to the top. What's special about this volcano is that it has a steep slope and fine rocks on its slopes so something called volcano boarding has become quite popular. The volcano is completely black, thus the name. On the way up we went by the new crater, which had some sulfur vents steaming. From the summit we had nice views of surrounding volcanos including Pilas and El Hoyo. On the summit, our guide dug down into the scree about 6 inches and the rocks were so hot you could hardly touch them. This was b/c there was a lava tube about 50 feet below.
After taking in the summit views we took our specially crafted volcano boards and slid from the top of the volcano down to the bottom at a pretty decent speed. Basically it's a lot like sledding, except that you're on the black scree of an active volcano
After we got back to Leon, we had a couple of hours to grab lunch and do a bit of walking around before being picked up for the sunset tour of Volcan Telica. It was a 4WD road to get to the trailhead, which was a lot of fun. We met a guy (name forgotten) from Idaho(!) in our jeep who was really nice and cool and probably a bit younger than us. He was born at and lives again now on a reservation near to Pocatello. But again, I can't remember what tribe he's from. He's doing a trip from Mexico down to Brazil and mainly hitting Native American (mayan, olmec, toltec, aztec, inca) holy sites where he is learning more about them and doing spiritual exercises. He is trained in Native American spirituality. This volcano was a holy volcano for the Native Americans in the area before the spanish came, so he did a little ceremony and some chants up there. The hike up to Telica's crater was pretty easy. Peering into the crater was really cool and quite exhilarating as it was super steep and straight down. There were a couple of sulfur vents smoking and at the very bottom you could see a small little lava lake glowing red even in the daylight. We hung around the crater enjoying the views down into the crater as well as the views along the entire Maribios volcano chain. You could see all the volcanos from Momotombo and Cerro Negro in the far South to San Cristobol in the far North. A guy was selling beers for a bit over a dollar on the crater, so we also enjoyed a Tona while watching the lava. As it got closer to the sunset, we walked around one side of the volcano to get a beautiful view of the sunset as it sunk below the Pacific Ocean, which you could see from the volcano.
After watching the sunset, we headed back to the crater to watch the little lava lake glow and hiss in the dark. On the way back to Leon, our tour stopped at a very tasty local eatery for dinner. Back in Leon we made a late night and last minute decision to book a hike to climb Volcan San Critstobol, Nicaragua's tallest peak.
2/28/16
We woke up at 4:30am to get picked up for our drive to the trailhead of San Cristobol. The reason to start so early is 2-fold: avoid the heat and b/c it takes a lot of people 5 to 6 hours for just the climb up. It was another 4WD road to the trailead, which started at a small coffee farm. Supposedly the only coffee farm on the Pacific side of Nicaragua.
As we started the hike up through the forest, we soon saw a turquoise-browed mot mot, the national bird of Nicaragua, which is super beautiful. It didn't take long before we were above the forest and into some grasses. But then soon enough we were above the grasses and just on volcanic scree. There were lots of dead trees still standing in the volcanic scree from either a previous eruption or a fire. Scree is of course quite difficult to hike up b/c for every 2 steps up, you slide one down. But we are in somewhat decent shape, so the hike up wasn't too tough. The hardest part was that for a good portion of the hike up (though not the hike down), the wind was blowing so that the sulfur gasses were blowing down the volcano towards us, so you'd get a bit of a burn and cough in your lungs. We made it to the summit (5,725 ft) in just under 2 hours, which our guide said was a great pace. Our guide, by the way, was awesome and was self-taught via youtube videos on a lot of geology and volcanology. From the summit, there was of course nice views in all directions and you could see the entire Maribios chain of volcanos, leon, chinandega town, El Salvador and Honduras, and the Pacific Ocean. The crater was cool. It was a double crater and the farthest crater away was spewing out quite a lot of sulfuric gasses. The view was hard to enjoy; however, because it was insanely windy. Almost hard to stand. But all you had to do was go down about 5 feet, and then no wind.
We went down a few minutes below the summit and enjoyed a snack. Then it was scree skiing all the way to the bottom. Took us only about 15 minutes to go from the summit back down to the forest. Back at the coffee farm we feasted on some watery watermelon. There was a momma dog and a puppy who were entirely to skinny. The crazy thing is they were so hungry that they snarfed up the watermelon, bananas, and peanuts that we gave them. The tour owner who had driven us to the trailhead told us that Nicaraguans love pets, but they really can't afford them. He said something like over 60% of the country lives on $1.25 per day and most of the rest lives on $2.50 per day. So feeding a pet is quite difficult.
Something kind of funny. Carlos had bought us some gatorade for rehydration upon our return. We told him that the University of Florida had invented gatorade for their football team. At first he thought they were giving gatorade to actual alligators until we explained that our football teams have mascots. Elisha told them that on campus they give out free gatorade. Both Carlos and Eric could hardly believe this was possible. They both wished they could see such a thing. In Nicaragua, gatorade is quite expensive. The small gatorades are nearly $2 and remember that a large majority of Nicaraguans live on less than $2 per day. So the thought of a free gatorade fountain was like thinking of a liquid fountain
Something that I come across quite often is that Coloradoans tend to congregate to mountains and mountainous areas. Whenever I'm in mountain areas or on high peaks I seem to run into lots of Coloradoans. On trip advisor, when I was reading reviews of climbing San Cristobol, of the 4 reviews, 3 were from Colorado folk, including one group that seemed pretty impressed that they had climbed the volcano in 2 hours 15 minutes, which Elisha and I had smoked! There was a guy managing the coffee farm and when he asked where we were from and I said Colorado, he got all excited and said there were so many people from Colorado coming here and then kept talking about this gal from Colorado who had been there a couple of days ago. When we were enquiring about climbing San Cristobol, most of the hostel folks and tour guides and said it is an extremely tough hike and that we are crazy to think about climbing it b/c it's so hard or they suggested an easier hike. But in the end it really wasn't tough. When we arrived back to the hostel before 1pm, they were so surprise to see all already. They had expected us around 5pm.
So we made it back in time to explore some more of Leon, do some souvenir shopping. grab a last 2 for 1 mojito, some icecream, and fruit smoothies before we had to take our ride to the airport that night. We also went back to our favorite taco place Tacos de Marlene for dinner. Super yummy tacos!
We got picked up about 7:30pm for our ride to the Managua airport. Our fight wasn't until 1:30am, but this ride was very cheap b/c the driver was going to pick people up at the airport already, and so he had to go. He was a nice guy who had worked in Miami for awhile. On the way there, we passed by Momotombo on which we could see a bit of lava near its base. Interestingly enough the night before Momotombo, which has been recently active and erupting and off-limits of course to hiking, had a major eruption about 9pm. It was funny b/c as we sat watching it from atop of Telica around 7pm, I had been saying, "c'mon Momotombo, blow your top!" But just 2 hours later it went boom! All the locals, including our hostel lady, La Gordita, had asked if we heard it b/c they all heard it. But honestly, neither Elisha nor I heard it. Probably b/c the city noises were still very new and loud to us, so when we heard the big boom, we probably thought it was a car backfire or one of those crazy driving boombox cars. One of the hostel gals showed us a sweet picture on fb that her friend had took that showed the whole volcano glowing. Would have been super sweet to see! Here's a video link to it erupting that night. Impressive!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nArnNjQenkQ
And here' s timelapse video from the the Nicaraguan seismic research organization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO6vhS_7P1U
It seems like the volcano activity in Nicaragua is really heating up. Momotombo continues to erupt, Masaya continues to have its lava lakes, and Telica started some small eruptions. There's a website with the smithsonian museum that I use to look at activity status and warnings and when I looked today (March 3), Momotombo is listed 4 out of 5 and erupting, Masaya is listed as 4 out of 5 and erupting, San Cristobol is listed as 3 out of 5 with minor activity or eruption warning, Cerro Negro is listed as 3 out of 5 with minor activity or eruption warning, and Concepcion is listed as 2 out of 5 restless. So an exciting time to be in Nicaragua.
2/29/16
We had the very early flight from Managua to Houston and then on to Orlando.
It was a great trip in which we saw a lot of awesome thing, though of course it was too short. So many cool things to see. But it makes me feel good about visiting Central America again since it's quite inexpensive and flights to central america are very quick and in the same time zone.
When I told people of my parents' age that we were going to Nicaragua, they had worried about how dangerous it is. I know that all of latin america has its dangers of mostly petty theft or really bad things if you're in the wrong neighborhoods, but I didn't have near the concern that others had expressed. In fact, I had read that Nicaragua is probably the safest country in Central America. We learned that the gangs that can be quite dangerous in other central american countries actually own a lot of the tourist stuff here, so it is in their best interest to keep the tourists safe. So actually it someone hurts or steals from a tourist, that person is in quite big trouble with the gangs. And as Elisha pointed out, we're always getting text alerts from UF PD and Gville PD about all the armed robberies going on around Gainesville, which is supposedly a pretty safe city.
Well, doing some reading and listening to guides, I learned why people of my parents' age had such fear of Nicaragua.
Back in the 1910's Japan and Germany were working on a deal to build a transcontinental canal through Nicaragua. This was of course in direct conflict with the USA's Panama canal, which is of course a huge moneymaker. A canal through Nicaragua would give ships another option, plus it'd be even a bit shorter than the Panama canal for shipping (Elisha had read that the reason the US didn't build their canal in Nicaragua was b/c someone had warned them of all the volcanic activity in the area). So the USA obviously didn't want this 2nd canal built. They sent in mercenaries to assassinate the president of Nicaragua at that time in the hopes that the new government would side with the US and wouldn't build the canal. The mercenaries were captured by the Nicaraguan president and hung. So the US sent in the marines and overthrew the president and occupied Nicaragua for a time. While baseball was big in Nicaragua before this, this is when it became really big b/c the marines played a lot of baseball apparently. Eventually the US put in a puppet president of Nicaragua who they supported and was anti canal. The US would have their chosen government in power for more than 2 decades before they left. When they left it caused one series of dictators and revolutions after another, which of course were quite violent. Eventually a pretty bad dictator took control for quite awhile. There was a big revolution, led by students in Leon in 1972. After 7 years of guerrilla warfare and 52 days of all out battles, the revolution is victorious. However, Reagan didn't like the new government b/c he feared they were too socialist and were friends with Cuba and Russia, so he had the CIA mine the harbors in the country. The US was later charged by the International Court of Justice for this.
The court found that the US was in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to use force against another State and ordered it to pay repatriations to the Nicaraguan government, but the Reagan administration rejected the findings and no payments were ever made. Shortly afterwards, the the existence of a CIA drafted Contra (The Contras were the rebel group the US was hoping would overthrow the current socialist nicaraguan president) training manual promoting the assassination of Nicaraguan officials and other strategies illegal under US law was found out and caused further embarrassment for the Reagan administration.
The US put a trade embargo on Nicaragua that would last for 5 years and that basically crippled the country and sent them into extreme poverty. Public opinion in the US of this war started to deteriorate so congress rejected any more funding of the Contras rebels in 1985. Reagan got around this by having the CIA illegally sell weapons to Iran and then diverting the funds to the Contra rebels. This was the famous Iran-Contra scandal you sometimes hear about.
One of our guides was telling us that currently the "elected" president is really a dictator and has been forcing laws that allow him to continue to be president and that will allow his family to be president later. But under this guy, Nicaragua's economy is growing rapidly, they have the highest GDP they've ever had, and life seems to be improving. But a lot of people don't like how he is making tons of money off of it all. Our guide said there is some talk of revolution, that it's small now, but that he wouldn't be surprised if it eventually happens again. There's a history lesson for ya.
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| San Cristobol, which we'd later climb |
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| On Telica volcano |
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| Telica Crater |
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| Turquoise-browed mot mot |
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| Momotombo Eruptiong as seen from near parque central and La Catedral in Leon |
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| brushing teeth with Chirpy |
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| Climbin San Cristobol |
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| On top of San Cristobol |
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| skiing down volcanic scree |
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| Volcan San Cristobol |
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| biking Elisha and the pedicab driver to the hostel |
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| Cerro Negor |
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| View of Volcan San Cristobol, which we'd later climb |
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| "Today is gonna be a volcano day" |
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| some magma at the bottom of Telica crater |
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| Telica Crater |
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| San Cristobol Crater |
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| our hostel in Granada |
