Today was full of adventures, good and bad !
Since we arrived at our beautiful little hostel in the mountain on the south side of the island, we noticed a small problem : there are very few buses running here. That’s why numerous locals rent out scooter and sports bikes. Even though we don’t really have much experience driving this kind of vehicle, we decided to rent a scooter just to drive a few kilometers on the good paved road with very few people on it. But here, everything’s done without any paperwork, the scooter are just rented in cash to the tourists.
After taking a few pictures of our new ride (so as to be able to prove a lot of damage was already there!), we went to the Charco Verde natural reserve, located around a small interior lake and mostly surrounded by the Nicaragua lake. So we hiked in the forest, again!
We had heard of the howling monkeys, but really hearing them is something else! After a few minutes in the park we started hearing a big concert of noise somewhat strange. As we got closer, we saw dozens of monkeys in the surrounding trees. We edited a short video for you guys, but being there in person is much more impressive and somewhat frightening!
But the monkeys themselves are very nice, calmly walking around just a few meters from us. We even saw baby monkeys playing while just hanging by there tails, and they were very cute 🙂 .
Further up in the hike we had some nice views of the Nicaragua lake and the interior lake. We also saw many lizards stealthily running near the track, an agouti, a snake and a huge number of birds.
At the end of the trail we went by the beach, but as it’s the end of rainy season, water is high so the beach is tiny. But there were super cool trees to climb on and chill out over the water!
Once out of the park, we thought it was time to grab a bite, so we took our scooter down the 200m dirt road leading to the main road. And bam, we fell! So, yes Moms, we’re perfectly all right, we just look dumb with our scratches at the elbows and knees like kids after a biking accident (or tourist who screwed up in a dirt road because they didn’t really drive scooter before, but we’re probably not the first ones 😉 ).
So we didn’t grab a bite immediately, but we went back to the hostel to fix ourselves up, and then we ate there. In the afternoon we laid back to recover from the shock, and we had a look a the scooter, which unfortunately has a small plastic cache banged up.
In the end of the afternoon we went out to buy alcohol (as a disinfectant, not to get wasted!), and we tried the road to Merida a bit because we were thinking of going to a waterfall there tomorrow. But very fast the good paved road turns into a shitty muddy and rocky road, too hard to handle for our (clearly) poor driving skills. So we went back to the hostel to make other plans for tomorrow.
So it was a good and bad day, but mainly we’re gonna be a bit stressed until we know for sure how much we’ll have to pay the “repairs” to the renter. More news in the next post (which should be posted shortly, as this one is a bit late 😉 ).