The Germes’ road trip in Nicaragua

Tita, Tomás and I initially visited the bay town of San Juan del Sur, a small town in the pacific coast. We had dinner at a nice beach restaurant, the place was so chic that it had mini-pool located aside our table, its water seemed so tempting with the pool’s blue mosaics that Tomás and I nearly walked back to our hotel room to get our swimming trunks. We shared Wahoo Carpaccio, my sister had grilled calamari kebabs served on salad, Tomás ordered fish and chips (for the best outside Camden!) and I tried the yellow-fin tuna (very rare cooked) covered with black sesame and wasabi.


After supporting our digestive systems by walking along San Juan’s bay, we went to our hotel and tried to sleep, that wasn’t easy at all since our hotel was located in the middle of the night-life district; the clubs played their music very loud, but we were lucky: there was a general electric blackout short after midnight, so finito, the music beats were gone.


We spend the following two days in Ometepe, an island formed by two volcanoes in the middle of the Nicaragua Lake (one of the largest in the world). We stayed at an eco-lodge on the slopes of the Madera’s volcano, during breakfast we enjoyed the restaurant’s magnificent view: Concepción, the island’s highest volcano. At night we could even hear howling monkeys from our cabin.


On December 31st we moved on to Granada, we stayed at a charming boutique hotel, there Tita and I had a cold beer with lime and salt (Since there is no prosecco or good white wine available in Nicaragua, I am drinking beer until I fly back to Austria), after that, we headed to the pier and took a boat-ride at the Nicaragua Lake. We visited a few of the tiny islands formed by an eruption of the neighbouring Mombacho volcano.


New Year was nice, warm and full of fireworks. As far as I’ve seen, Nicaraguan men love loud crackers, those noisy fireworks start at the size of a beer can and some were as big as a 1,5 litre PET bottle (and loud as hell!), nearly all of them triggered car alarms when exploding. Nearly all “beautiful” fireworks (the ones exploding in several colours) were either lit by tourists or women.
I think I am conservative when it gets to fireworks, I prefer the spark and bright ones, rather than those blasting ones, nearly provoking tinnitus; these are treasured by Nicaraguan men.


On the first day of 2010 we hired a private car, a beautiful Russian Lada 1200, to drive us to the Masaya volcano, an active one. Being on top of the volcano made me a little dizzy, it was surely caused by the strong sunrays and the intense smell of sulphur coming out of the crater.


We arrived in Managua at night, the Sushi bar was closed, so we had only pizza and salad instead. My sister’s last weekend before flying back home had started…

Here are some pics of the road trip.