Nicaragua take 3

  Yep, it was once again time for us to leave Costa Rica to get a new tourist visa on re-entry. This was our third trip to Nicaragua in eleven years and it has really grown on me as a destination. This trip we went with a couple of Costa Rican friends on their very first trip out of their country. It was fascinating to see their reactions, which boiled down to:
    1) This is really different from Costa Rica and has some really great things to see.
    2) Prices are really low.
 I agree with that and would add that Nicaraguan food is very tasty.
   Because we liked it so much last year, we returned to the Island of Ometepe and to El Encanto.  This small hotel has excellent food and is a relaxing spot for hanging out. One of our activities was a nice walk along the nearby Santa Domingo beach near sunset.

After two nights on Ometepe we went back to the mainland and proceeded towards Granada. We paid our taxi driver a bit extra to take us on a little tour along the way. We visited San Juan de Oriente, one of the Pueblos Blancos famous for handicrafts. At the Cooperativo Quetzalcóatl we picked up a couple of beautiful ceramic pots for shockingly little money and had a nice chat with the artist that was tending the store that day.
  Next stop was in Catarina to see the Laguna de Apoyo, a beautiful lake in the crater of a volcano. For a small tip we listened to some terrific marimba and guitar music. The marimba de arco is a local version of the instrument that is extremely portable. The arc makes it easy to carry and the player sits on the arc to play, eliminating the need for legs. A marimba expert informs me that they use a similar version of the instrument in West Africa.

   Nearby is Masaya, famous for its huge handicraft market. Unlike Costa Rica where many of the souvenirs sold to tourists are actually from Guatemala, there is a wealth of beautiful local handicrafts to choose from. If you get tired of looking at those, there is a very impressive fruit stand with massive papayas.

  Our tico friends were particularly impressed with Granada, which is a lovely colonial city with many churches and a fine central plaza. I knew from our first trip to Granada that it's very hot, so I was pleased to have AC in our room. We stayed at a sweet new hotel with just six rooms called Hotel Casa Barcelona. Thanks to our friends, we spent a lot of time exploring the fascinating local markets. Juan got his sandals repaired at an on-street shoe repair shop that doubled as a bike parking lot.

Also at the market, I paid a few cents to be weighed on a bathroom scale a guy was carrying around.
   While touring the churches we saw this funeral procession. (I held my camera down by my waist to be discreet in taking this photo.) A local resident told me that this is a standard hearse.

When we tired of being tourists we took a  coche for the living back to our hotel.

 The nitty gritty:
   We just found out that it's a myth that one needs to be out of Costa Rica for 72 hours to get a new visa. (That's only necessary if one has imported duty free goods into the country.) There are plenty of interesting things to do in Nicaragua but it felt nice knowing we were spending several days of our own free will.
   We took a Quality Transfers shuttle from Monteverde to the border at Peñas Blancas and then a private taxi onward. Since I blogged about the border last year they have been improving the immigration offices on both sides. Things seem to be moving more efficiently and even right before Semana Santa when everyone in Central America is on the move we made our crossing in about 40 minutes each way. Long distance buses now have an employee handle all the passports for their passengers. We were lucky and didn't get behind long lines of people who arrived on local buses. It seems that early afternoon is a very good time to go through. The restaurant is closed for remodeling, but fortunately we didn't arrive hungry. Important: have your airline ticket with you to prove you have a way out of Costa Rica within 90 days. If not, you may need to buy a bus ticket you will never use.

Macaws! Macaws!

In and near Carara National park one can see dozens of Scarlet Macaws a day. We saw 14 fly out of one tree at one time. Wow!

 We headed to Carara for a few days of birdwatching this past weekend to get away from the noisy festival happening near our house. With newly improved roads it only takes two and a half hours to get there from Monteverde.
  We were very pleased with the relatively new place we found to stay near the park. More details about Cerro Lodge and other logistical details at the end of this post.
  The trails in Carara National Park are quite short even though the park itself is 47 square kilometers (18 square miles). Even so, Mr. Rududu and I happily spent three mornings of six hours each birding the park. Birdwatchers are notoriously slow walkers. Excellent birding is when you walk 100 meters from the entrance and simultaneously see three really interesting species and need to spend a half hour in that spot watching them. It really especially slows forward progress when you see new species and on this trip we added five new species to our Costa Rican list.
  One of our favorite birds of all time is the Streak-chested Antpitta. It's so little yet rotund. It has virtually no tail so it looks like a little ball on legs. Maybe we just aren't serious birdwatchers; we really go for the cute factor.

 We also were amused by this Boat-billed heron, one in a large group of these birds we saw roosting. They need big eyes because they are nocturnal. For some reason they remind me of elderly tailors.

  There are several trogon species in the area. This Baird's Trogon was a cooperative photo subject.

Every late afternoon we went for a walk along the road near the lodge and saw numerous macaws, parrots, motmots, and even a trogon. The northern dry forest habitat ends at the Tarcoles River so the lodge is at the end of the range for some birds. Because it's several kilometers from the highway, it's very quiet—something which can't be said about Carara National Park, where the sound of trucks using their motors to brake mingles with the calls of antpittas and antthrushes. At the lodge we saw this common lowland species: the Turquoise-browed Motmot.

I want to stitch a temari in his honor. See my previous post about the temari in honor of the Blue-crowned Motmot.
The Nitty Gritty
We got to Carara with our friends at Quality Transfers. It's so luxurious to not have to drive. Once there the lodge arranged for a local guide to take us to and from the park in his luxurious Hyundai for $15 each way.
  Cerro Lodge is only a few years old and is on a hill over looking the mangroves and a distant view of the ocean if it's not hazy. There were no moderately priced options in the immediate area so it's a welcome addition. The cabins have screens and ceiling fans. They are planning to increase the natural ventilation of the rooms. In April, the hottest month of the year, the ceiling fans mostly push hot air around. Fortunately there is a pool and a nicely designed outdoor restaurant and lounge area that gets a breeze so there's somewhere nice to hang out in the afternoons. Everyone's favorite feature of the cabins is that each has an outdoor bathroom with a little garden surrounded by a privacy wall. There is something hedonistic about taking a shower outside.
  They serve meals semi-buffet style; you order your main course of chicken, pork, fish, or vegetarian and choose from a variety of sides and an excellent daily soup. They are very accommodating about cooking special meals to order. They told me they would prepare any Costa Rican style dish I could think of. The non-meat options that they made for me included Chinese Rice without meat (what we call fried rice in the US), macaroni and cheese, and a pasta dish they called ravioli and cheese that was more like a thin manicotti. The food was tasty and extremely plentiful. If you need to order off-menu you will need to be able to explain what you want in Spanish.
 

Visa vacation: Nicaragua

   Once every season, Mr. Rududu and I need to exit Costa Rica for at least 3 days and get a new tourist visa on reentry. These "visa vacations" have led us on many grand adventures, mostly to Central American countries. We also call these trips the Annual Roast-em Out since we usually go somewhere much hotter than Monteverde. This year we decided to keep things simple and go to Nicaragua. We went there ten years ago and had a very good time attending an intensive Spanish school in the lovely colonial city of Granada. However, an overwhelming memory of the trip was of extreme heat in March—and March is when we need to take our trip. This year we decided to go to the Island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua. It was such a great trip we are planning on going back in future years. See the end of the post for the nitty gritty details about the border crossing. Let's go right away to the pretty pictures.

    Ometepe was formed by two volcanoes emerging from the very large Lake Nicaragua. Here's a view of them from the mainland restaurant where we waited for our ferry. A stiff breeze was keeping us comfortable while we nibbled on a tasty fried fish appetizer.
The hotel we stayed at is called El Encanto and it did indeed enchant us. It has just 4 simple rooms and some dorm space. Our small room with private bath was very clean, had good mattresses, screens on the windows and a fan. Almost constant breezes kept us comfortable, although afternoons were a good time for a nap or some quality hammock time on the patio. The owner, Carlos, is developing a beautiful horticultural garden on the grounds instead of growing plantains as he used to. The hotel restaurant was excellent, with many fish, chicken and vegetarian options, all cooked from scratch.

   The hotel has stunning views of the lake and the two volcanoes. This is the view from the dining room. Of all the advantages of El Encanto, what really makes it a great place to stay is Carlos. He speaks both English and Spanish and is helps all his guests with advice and logistics. The first morning we were there he guided the two of us on a birding hike down to a wetland area near the hotel. (Note: this is not a casual stroll. There's very little shade and the rough ground surface makes walking all morning tiring but we found it well worth the effort.) It's always a very special experience to go with a guide that is so enthusiastic about birds and has local knowledge of where to find them.

   Highlights of the morning included hundreds of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, some Double-striped Thick-knees, and a White-tailed Kite. By the end of our stay we had seen over 50 species. The most common bird near the hotel and a fun one to watch is the White-throated Magpie Jay. They are extremely active and led Mr. Rududu a merry chase as he tried to get a decent photo of one.

  Our second day we spent the morning hiking part way up the Maderas Volcano to an overlook. Along the way we saw some of the many petroglyphs on the island, lots of monkeys, and some interesting birds. This howler monkey looked like  he enjoyed a good rest in the heat of the day as much as we did.

The border crossing
   Traveling in Nicargua can be both pleasant and inexpensive. The least pleasant part of going to Nicaragua from Costa Rica is the border crossing. The border area is about 1 Km long and there are numerous stops and checks you need to make, none of which are clearly marked. Long waits are common. An hour and a half seems typical but we've heard it can take 4 hours. Memories of waiting in very slow moving lines at temperatures of about 90F/32C had me dreading it.  Thus, we were a little disoriented when we got out of the cab that brought us from Monteverde and found no line at all at the Costa Rican immigration office.
  If you arrive on an international bus, such as the Tica Bus or Transnica, the bus employees will tell you exactly where to go and what to do. The buses are comfortable and inexpensive. A down side of the bus is that you arrive with a whole crowd of other people that instantly make the line a lot longer. We were lucky to arrive when there were no buses going through. We were told that they seem to be concentrated between 11 and 1; we arrived at 11 in each direction.
   There are lots of guys who want to help you navigate the border if you aren't on a bus. We found it worth a small tip to have one give us the forms and show us where to go. The forms are free, but only available at the head of the line; having them in advance gives you time to fill them out. On the way into Nicaragua, our helper on the Nicaraguan side also was a broker for finding a taxi, although I'm sure we could have done that on our own—and probably found one with seat belts. A cheaper option is to take local buses to and from the border.
  An important advantage of adopting a helper is that all the other ones leave you alone. You can take a pedicab part of the way within the border area to decrease how far you need to walk. It's a nice little splurge—think of it as helping the local economy. It only took us 30 to 35 minutes to make our crossings. The high season in Nicaragua is from December to mid-January and Semana Santa (Holy Week). Border crossings at those times are likely to take a lot longer.

The adventure of the ladder

Living in another country and trying to figure out how to get things done can be confusing or frustrating at times. One of my rules of thumb for living in Costa Rica is:

The things you think will be easy are hard and the things that you think will be hard are easy.

Here's an example from this week. Our house is varnished wood. The varnish looks pretty when new but requires a lot of maintenance. Every 3 years it gets so black and moldy we want to get it redone. Finding someone to sand it down and revarnish it wasn't hard this time and the part that is done looks great.

Here is the hard part. Our contractor, who just finished building a huge fancy restaurant downtown, doesn't own a ladder. (He just builds scaffolding when he has to get up high but we don't have lumber just laying around.) Our little wooden ladder that a friend built for us isn't long enough to reach the back of our house which is up on pillars because the lot slopes. Good ladders are very expensive here—perhaps double what a similar ladder would be in the States. So after various calls I located a friend with a long ladder who is willing to lend it to us. Whoops, the contractor only has a motorcycle and the friend's house is pretty far away. He suggested that we go and get it. We don't have a car.

Here comes the easy part. I call one of our favorite taxi drivers, Fabio, who drives us there and gets up on the baking hot roof to tie it on.

He spends lots of extra time on the hot roof because he insists on not cutting our long and inexpensive  rope because it would be a shame to waste it. Then drives us home and charges us what he would charge if he just took us to our friend's house.

Birding note: on the way there we saw a Black-breasted Wood Quail fly across the road. They prefer to walk or run, so it was surprising to see one airborne. Fabio backed up try to see it or the rest of the covey but no luck. Sorry, but I don't have a photo of it.

What's unusual about this motorcycle?

Yesterday morning I was on my way to the grocery store near our house and was almost blinded by the reflections off this motorcycle parked near our neighbors' house. There are only about 4 miles of paved roads around here and that most roads are dirt--or mud on days like Sunday when it rained, so getting a motorcycle as clean as this is a lot of work.

But in fact, there is nothing particularly unusual about the fact that this moto is spotlessly clean, including the tires. As I ran my errands yesterday, I saw others that were about the same. Ticos are almost fanatical about keeping vehicles clean. Maybe it's that they cost about twice as much as they do in the U.S. because of high import taxes. With the annual income here much lower, a motorcycle or car is a huge investment.

Taxis are also very clean inside and out. One taxista told me that he washes his taxi as many as three times a day. Even on a rainy day, even the floor mats are often spotless.
Another cultural note--besides putting dirty shoes up where they shouldn't be in a spotless van, the thing that most bugs Costa Rican taxi drivers is when foreigners slam the car doors. Many of the vehicles here have fairly light doors.