Saturday, April 3, 2010

Nicaragua travel report - Day 2

The 2nd day we arranged for a guided kayak trip of the Isletas de Granada. Our tour guide was an Austrian expat who was named Fernando or Ferdinand or perhaps both, just in different countries. Anyway, we started our day with a hearty nicaraguan breakfast at a nice little cafe that would soon be our favorite breakfast place:



I picked the traditional Nicaraguan breakfast of huevos rancheros, let me tell you it was the best huevos rancheros I've ever had:


My mates picked various things, but the standout was the bacon and also this pineapple pancake with real pineapple bits built in, they were really good pancakes with a combination of a crisp surface and sweet fluffy insides:


They also had great coffee there, it was strong and was the best cup o joe I've ever had! We proceeded to the isletas, passing through the crowded beaches (it was a Sunday) of Granada. Our tour guide says the favorite past time of nicaraguense is to go to camp out at the beach over the weekend and have lots of sex, I don't doubt it!

On to the Isletas!



The isletas are basically small islands, some of them get completely submerged in the wet season while others are large enough to support houses and small communities. There was an isleta with a house built by two gay men from New York City:



We took a break on one of the isletas:


...where two of our mighty explorers professed their undying love for each other:


...over fresh coconut juice:



And our fearless misunderstood/sleazy? austrian guide:


We would save these coconut meat for some monkey feeding/drama later on:


The story is that, on a nearby isleta, many moons ago, some ingenious person took 6 or so monkeys to this isleta and let them loose. The isleta is the size of a football field, maybe smaller, surrounded by water and the monkeys can't swim. So they're pretty much trapped on the isleta. Thus is borned a tourist attraction. The monkeys survived all this time on food given by tourists who go by on tour boats. Tourists like us. Although typically they would just come on a motorized boat. Feeding the monkeys was a little complicated, we would have to paddle close and put coconut meat on the end of our paddles and reach over to the monkeys so they could pick the coconut off the paddles. We did this for quite a while and it was fun, until the monkeys got...violent. They were grabbing paddles left and right and they were charging us from land when we got too close, mind you they didn't dare get in the water. but it was scary nonetheless...I of course was not scared....although I did get yelled at by my boat mate who had extreme monkeyphobia...sorry no pictures, I was busy feeding monkeys...

So we continued on our way back home


Afterwards we had a nice lunch in town where we found another lunch time deal, tons of food for $3 or 60 cordobas:




...then we walked around the city where the girls got many catcalls for their sexy dresses....i didn't get any catcalls from the hot nicaraguan women...i guess they don't dig asian guys, they don't know what they're missing.


In the evening we had arranged to meet up with Ferdinando at a salsa place. Actually, he invited himself to our festivities, because zees is how zey do it in Austria ya!


The story is that, he was either trying to make friends (4 hot tamales in our group) or trying to get more business out of us because we said that we were interested in horseback riding the following day. He said he'd help us set something up for horseback riding before he parted earlier in the day, but later in the day we'd setup something through our hosts at the guest house, Alvaro and Meghan. So basically at the end of the night we told him we were good with our plans and he offered to drive us to the horse place for $10 each, which is highway robbery in Nicaragua. So thus ended our relationship vith zee Austrian. Misunderstood? Sleazy? You decide for yourselves, he was, however, knowledgeable about the isletas and the kayak trip was great I thought. Perhaps zees is just how zey do it in Nicaragua no?

The salsa place was great, we had some live music too:


Overall a great and memorable day that was!

2 comments:

Hoang said...

nice to see this blog still have life.

Hoang said...

nice to see this blog still have life.

looked like an awesome trip. Glad u were able to unwind and escape philly's winter.