Nicaragua

We’re getting dizzy with all these border crossings.  It takes a few moments stuttering before we are able to reliably state what country we are in.  Despite taking it slow, with a number of rest days along the way, Nicaragua flew by. The short report says, great road surface, fantastic hard shoulder, volcanos to blow your mind.

For those interested in detail, Nicaragua is absolutely peppered with volcanoes.  We found them all over the shop.  It’s said that the land masses of North and South America did not meet until the volcanos in Nicaragua rose up and solidified the land between the two.  Absolutely our highlight was cycling past a relatively small volcano with an incredible open crater.  We ambled off the side of the road and were whisked up the lava field in a bus to a great visitors centre which sported all the diagrams that we drew for geography GCSE.  The crater was spectacular, with molten rock churning, splurting and spitting away 30 metres below us, the lava a brighter orange than we could have imagined and the roar of the liquid rock emulating the roar of a raging sea.

Jazzing up the exhibition with cotton wool explosions 

'Man in the crater' (not really)

Our convening with volcanos didn’t end there.  Nicaragua sports a massive lake (Lake Nicaragua - obvs) which, back in the day, led many people to think this might be a good spot to cut a passage for boats through the continent - although enthusiasm waned and attention shifted to Panama instead, where you may have heard there is a canal. In the middle of Lake Nicaragua is the island of Ometepe, formed by two volcanoes rising picturesquely out of the water.  We camped at the foot of one for a couple of nights, possibly our best camping spot to date.  

Ometepe by moonlight

We also passed a day in the city of Léon.  We are getting used to the general ambience of these Central American towns - cobbled streets, big open squares, a host of churches, volcanoes looming in the distance, but Léon was notable for its frankly ridiculous cathedral.  For a town of its size, it is outstanding. In fact, it is the largest cathedral in Central America. There are two different versions of how such an oversized cathedral came to be built in Léon - one is that the Spanish were swindled, and that having given planning permission to some relatively modest affair, the Nicaraguans had a field day building a fantastically more elaborate structure instead; the other is that the Spaniards themselves got confused, and that the names Lima and Léon were all too similar for them and that plans for the Peruvian capital ended up in this sleepy Nicaraguan town. Either way, it has a great roof, which we enjoyed traipsing over, soaking up the magnificent views.

Nicaragua has been a bit of a cyclists convention.  It’s basically impossible to know the actual number of cycle tourers in any given area at any one time, but it’s a fair guess to say that over the course of a year, a few hundred tourers cycle through Central America. We definitely feel like we are part of a community (replete with online forums where people provide advice on riveting things like road quality) and yet, it takes quite a bit of chance to actually meet other tourers (going in the same direction).  

Forming a pelaton 

We met fellow Brits Sam and Laura back in Mexico on our second day when we chanced to lock our bikes up in the same place on a rest day outside a Mayan Ruin (what else do you do on rest days in Mexico?).  But varying routes and varying paces mean it’s taken nearly two months before we’ve met up with them again.  We met Canadians Andrew and Amanda sitting out the rain under banana tree one day in El Salvador and have played cat and mouse ever since.

Both these couples are on significantly longer trips that ours - one year; and ten, respectively (now you see why they were sitting out the rain). It’s been interesting to learn about their approaches and mentalities toward their trips.  For example Sam, like Ali, is indulging in not having to be presentable for some time and is growing a beard. Andrew is clean shaven, he considers having no home or job to speak of AND a beard to be a step too far.  We’ve discovered some amazing kit that we wish we had (a solar powered inflatable lamp - can you believe it! It is possible to get pretty geeky about this stuff), but the biggest impact of hanging out with other cyclists has been on our cooking.  Our stove has turned from a one trick pony into a gateway to culinary delight.  We’ve even started to follow Andrew and Amanda’s lead and carry eggs. They do this is a fantastically robust egg shaped plastic holder - fool proof.  We did it by chucking eggs in Lizzie’s front pannier.  Needless to say, ours haven’t all survived.