Granada´s Masaya
Trip Start
May 03, 2011
1
58
129
Trip End
May 10, 2012
Where I stayed
Hostal Mochilas
Granada, Nicaragua
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Another bus journey took us from Honduras´ capital city through to Nicaragua. This is clearly a popular route as every seat on the bus was taken. Journey time was 9 hours including an hours delay at the Nicaraguan border where we had to hike our bags into the customers office for inspection. We arrived in Managua, Nicaragua´s capital city at about 5pm and after a bit of argy bargy with a taxi driver managed to get a lift to pick up a small minivan bus that would take us to Granada. Transport in Nicaragua is seriously cheap, we caught a minivan bus for the 50 km trip to Granada and this cost us approx €1 each. Luckily we had seats this time as once again they rammed the minivan full of people.
We arrived in Central Park, which is the main square in Granada and our hostel was literally a 2 minute walk. The budget was positively glowing as our hostel was a steal at just €6 each per night for a private room and eating out in Granada is also an absolute bargain. Really nice traditional Nicaraguan meal and drinks was about €6. Arriving in a city you get a feel for it straight away and both of us had a great feeling about Granada.
After a hearty (and cheap) breakfast the next morning we set about locating a tour that we could take that afternoon. After a bit of top flight negotiating from Nick we settled on a tour to the Masaya Volcano for late that afternoon.
In the meantime we headed to lake Nicaragua which was a short walk from Central Park. Lake Nicaragua (or Cocibolca) is a vast freshwater lake of tectonic origin. With an area of 8,264 km2 (3,191 sq mi), it is the largest lake in Central America. The vast lake holds Ometepe and Zapatera which are both volcanic islands, as well as the archipelago of the Solentiname Islands. We took a boat ride to see the archipelago, which is a collection of 365 small islands.
The lake holds even more excitement as it contains bull sharks but unfortunately we didn´t get too see a fin trailing our small boat L. The sharks have been able too adapt to living in both salt and freshwater and they move between the lake and the open ocean but no one is 100% sure how they do this. The "captain" of our little boat was able to point out who lived on each island in his broken English, and they were either some rich coffee producers in Nicaragua or somebody from North America. One of the islands is called Monkey Island as it is home to a family of monkeys. They all came to see us on the branches near to the water's edge as our boat pulled up and it did look as though they may hop aboard. This caused much screaming amongst the school children who were on our boat.
After our trip on the lake we headed to meet our tour guides for the active volcano tour. Volcán Masaya National Park is a popular tourist site. Tour guides and equipment are provided for treks inside bat caves created by lava flows from past eruptions. Today, lava can be visible in the volcano’s crater. We visited the museum first to get all the background information about Nicaragua´s volcanoes and in particular the one active and two dormant Masaya volcanoes. On the drive up to the active volcano you could smell the sulphur immediately and this got stronger the nearer you got. You have to park facing outwards at the volcano site so that you can make a hasty get away if the volcano erupts. Looking down into the volcano and seeing all of the gases escaping was an incredible sight. We couldn´t spend too long at the volcano as the gases are dangerous if inhaled for too long. A couple of the Japanese tourists there had gas masks on, which seemed a bit excessive. We also visited the dormant volcanoes and the lagoons created by the last eruption in the 18th century but these were not nearly as exciting as the live volcano. Another highlight of the tour was a visit to one of the caves created by the molten lava of the volcano. It was pitch black by now and so getting to the caves was spooky. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of bats at the opening to the cave. Nick got in there and took some photo´s and you could feel the bats wings on your face and hands as they were all flying about in every direction.
We had an absolute fantastic few days in Granada, and so far has been the highlight of Central America. For this we give Granada, a volcanic erupting score of 10/10.
Comments
Cute hats!