Gnarly

We finally achieved escape velocity and made it off Utila, through La Ceiba to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. It turns out there are many ways to pronounce this word without ever hitting on the correct one and we have forgotten all our Spanish, but we got there in the end. We stayed there one night, lured by the fact that the hotel room had cable TV and hot water (the latter was a lie) and then caught the Ticabus all the way through to Leon, Nicaragua.

Leon is another colonial city rather like a poorer version of Antigua. The weather has vastly improved, in fact it is hot and sunny so we washed every item of clothing we owned - after two weeks of rain on Utila everything was damp and horrible. It was nice to be back in civilisation but all the hostels were full so we moved on to Granada after one night, bypassing the capital Managua. We are becoming very practiced at getting the local buses now. In Granada we stayed in a lovely hostel that had a courtyard with hammocks, a bar, and a kitchen that served nice food. It was the election weekend so they weren´t allowed to sell any alcohol but we spent a lot of time there just reading and relaxing. Granada is also a colonial style city and is right on the shores of Lake Nicaragua so was very nice to wander around.

After a couple of days we then jumped on a chicken bus to Rivas in the south of Nicaragua, and from there to the pacific coastal town of San Juan del Sur. SJdS is famous for surfing, so today we are going to give it a go, but last night we took a tour to a wildlife reserve 22km away to see the sea turtles nesting. For $30 each, twelve of us packed into a van whose radio was tuned to "power ballads of the 1980s", and rattled along a road that was 90% pothole. You may remember that 4 years ago, I spent the summer in Greece with a sea turtle conservation charity, but was only there for the hatching season so I have never seen the adult females laying and so I was very excited. It did not disappoint - hundreds of Olive Ridley turtles were crawling over the beach and making their nests. There were so many that they were laying nests on top of nests and there were dug-up eggs all over the beach. It smelled exactly like it did in Greece when we had to excavate the hatched nests (e.g. pretty disgusting). They are working very hard here to conserve these turtles and they weren´t obviously exploiting the turtles for tourism, so I was happy. Then we all piled back into the bus and rattled back to the hotel, wondering in silent horror why anyone would phone the radio station to request "Lady in Red".

Some friends we made here told us they have put a "beer fund" paypal donations button on their blog so friends and family can buy them a beer. I am definitely going to look into this!