Alice et Ben

Today, we left the beach.

Ok, we did get to swim in the pacific one last time (and do the burning sand dance to get there), as we stayed there all morning. Waves were big, so our surfer friends were out (but we were like 5 people there, so pretty cool). And Alice did a new watercolor painting!

At 12:30 we went to the bus stop, as we were told this was the right time to catch it. After waiting 30 minutes, a local guy came by and told us the real schedule was 1pm. So, the bus came at 1:30pm, and we rode back to Léon.

In Léon we went to our hostel, then went out again to do some laundry, and then came back to work on the blog (we didn’t have Wi-fi at the beach). By the time we did all that, it was already night, so we got to the central park were there was some celebration (people with drums and huge figures carried by other people), but we don’t know about what. We took some tacos to go and ate in front of the cathedral, but we were a bit tired (and a bunch of teenagers were playing with loud fire crackers, which gets old after a while), so we went back to get a well-deserved sleep.

So, once again not much info about Léon, but we promise to take some good pictures for you guys tomorrow!

P.S.: don’t forget to scroll down to yesterday’s article, which we posted at the same time as this one, so you won’t miss the AWESOME VIDEO OF BABY TURTLES.

This morning, we put some stuff in a bag and left the other one at the hostel, and we went for a 2-day adventure at the beach!

It is probably our last stop at the sea, and definitely the last one on the Pacific!

So, we went through Léon’s streets and took a bus that left us at a fork on the panamerican highway.

 

From there, we were hoping to find another bus, but the girls waiting for it told us that it would be at least an hour, so we decided to walk a bit. That’s when we started to break our record for crazy transportation! First, an old man selling vegetables to houses along the road took us for a while. He was nice, and his horse-drawn cart was shaky, so it was fun. Then he let us on the side because he as changing roads, and a nice couple in a pick-up truck picked us up immediately for the end of the trip on the platform.

 

This way, we arrived way sooner than we anticipated in our deserted perfect beach spot. We went for a swim in the waves and lazed around, waiting for the main attraction at the end of the afternoon… It was really hard.

As the shadows got longer (around 4 PM) we went to the Day Resort at the end of the beach, that belonged to the nice people in the pick-up truck. We had a beer and then continued breaking our record by getting in the trailer of the quad, meant for 3-4 people or 6 surfboards (but not both simultaneously).

Like this, we got to the turtles Vivero to watch and help around 500 freshly hatched babies. Aren’t they cute as pies?

 

Here, the 4 species of marine turtles come to lay eggs (each with their own rhythm and season) and since these eggs are a luxury commodity, the nests are often looted, and the eggs sold to the black market. The trick is to buy the eggs to the poachers at the same price to help them hatch instead of making omelets! So, Scott here (and other cool people in other places) finds donations and subventions, and teaches poachers to handle eggs correctly as to not damage the embryos (they have to be transported in the 3 hours after being laid, or they die in transport).

Once at the Vivero, they are re-buried but in bags, with the beach sand after being washed to avoid bacteria, insect eggs, crabs, etc. and after 45 to 55 days, they hatch and climb to the top of the bag! They are then put on the beach, imprint it so they know where to come back when they are about to make babies of their own, and shoo! go swim!

These days, the Vivero has around 29 000 eggs (if I remember correctly) and they have a 90% rate of hatching, against 60% in normal nests, and it’s high season for hatchlings! Once released, 1% of them will reach adulthood (life under the ocean is not that easy). Of course, the difficulty of this system is that, for now, with a few tourists everyday on the beach, the business plan is not stable, especially if you have to match the black-market price for eggs (which is not too appreciated by omelet-lovers…). So it’s only donations that allow the Vivero to function…

Today we visited a cigar factory.

This morning we were still in Esteli, where we visited a small cigar factory. We were only three doing the visit, us and a German woman, and the guide only spoke Spanish (which wasn’t expected), so the we were asked to translate for her. At first, we tried to translate from Spanish to German, but it was way to hard, so we did it from Spanish to English 😉 .

Aside from this linguistic training, the visit was very interesting. We started with a small course about the different types of tobacco leaves, and their usage in cigar making. So, a cigar is made from 3 parts:

• The heart of the cigar, the most important, giving it all its aroma. The tobacco used for this part is mostly cultivated here in Nicaragua, so as to keep an eye on the quality of the product. It’s the part that needs the most quantity of tobacco.
• The shell, wrapped around the heart so as to maintain it in a relative cylindric form. Most of the tobacco used for this part is imported from Ecuador or Mexico (where it’s cheaper to grow it).
• The skin, giving the cigar its perfectly cylindrical external look. For this part (as also a bit for the shell), more elastic leaves are used, so that they can take a cylindrical form without cracking.

The cigar factory buys all types of leaves and then assembles different mixes for the heart (the most important), using different quantity of different leaves so as to change the aromas. The buyers (big cigar producers) then come and try a few of them, and specify the details such as type of shell or skin that should be used. Once the cigar is selected, the factory has to produce exactly the same all along the production.

To do so, the cigars are controlled at every step, and any defect is rejected. Of course, the defect cigars are not thrown away, they are crushed and mixed again as a heart. But of course, as they are heart, shell and skin, it’s a low-quality heart, which is used to make cigars that are sold cheap in the tourist shops to the uninitiated, who is persuaded he’s making a good deal (even though no connoisseur would buy such cigars!).

For the production steps, it starts with harvesting and drying the leaves under controlled hygrometry and temperature. When we hear the guys here talking about tobacco fermentation, it really seems to us the whole field is at least as complicated as wine making! Once the leaves sorted in different categories (depending on color, intensity, aroma…), they are brought into the main processing room.

In this room they work (impressively fast) in pairs: the man rolls the leaves for the heart into half a leave of shell, and gives it a cylindrical shape. To keep it in place, these beginning of cigars are placed into molds and pressed. Once they hold their form, the woman carefully wraps it into half a leave of the skin, giving it its final form. The cigar holds together thanks to an « organic glue » (they didn’t say more).

In the end, it was a very interesting tour, but the working conditions do seem harsh. The rooms are small and without ventilation (or windows) and the air is saturated by the tobacco smell. Very few workers actually wear a mask, and we really wonder what the life expectancy for them is.

So, apart from this and taking a bus to Leon at 3pm (well, we tried to get into the 1pm minivan but it was full!) we didn’t do much else. We arrived at night in the busy bus station from Leon, where we (again) had to make our way through the hordes of taxis (motorized or not) and find our hostel. So even if the title says Leon because we’re sleeping there, we actually can’t tell you much about the city for now (well, there is a really good ceviche place… yes, we spared no expense 😉 ).

P.S : small bonus, a photo from the no smoking sign in a cigar factory (with a guy lighting a cigar right next to it!

Today, we went in a Provence-like forest ! It was in the Tisey reserve, where the woods are dry, the ground is covered in pine-needles and the rocks outcrop (there were also volcanoes but who cares ? 😉 )

To get there, we had to get up a 5:30, we were thrilled. We caught a cab for 4km down to the bus station, and we left on time, eating bananas and cookies, because at 6 AM, every bus is leaving, but no breakfast whatsoever is available.

We started with the visit of the Finca El Jalacata, where Alberto Gutierrez, his 3 brothers and his sister live. They are old, this is their family home, and Alberto is a sculptor. He’s been attacking the cliff for 40 years only with a chisel and a hammer (always the same ones) and he’s marking his obsessions in the rock : big animals, apostles, nicas historical figures and a few others. The result is impressing and he loves talking about it, even if he’s sometimes hard to follow, with his preferred topics always coming back (the recently sown cypresses and the beautiful forest, among the carved elephants and jaguars).

Since we arrived early, we were offered some coffee and a biscuit in the family kitchen where kittens were playing below the wood fire stove. Don Alberto’s sister, who was catering us, talked about the weather and at some point asked us to pay for the coffee, and took us to the mini-shop of “local” craftwork. We were a bit disappointed. When we signed the visitors log, though, we understood : around 30 tourists come every day down the rocky paths and through the forest to walk the paths of the carved cliff, since several years, for a grand total of around 80 000 people… And the only bus is at 6:30 ! Most people probably come with a 4-wheeler because we were the only tourists in the bus… It’s good that the views were nice !

We continued to the La Garnacha hamlet, famous for its cheese factory. There are also other crafts and nice walks with far far away views (well, cheese is cool, but one of us doesn’t like it and the other is from a famous cheese-making region, so we are not easily impressed !). So we visited and stopped for a bite to eat. Since some asked, here is a picture of a basic and cheap meal that we probably eat 10 times a week !

A plate with rice, beans and chicken. Some salad, tortilla (which here is more a patty than an omelet). Two seasonal fruit juice, here orange. It doesn’t look too big, but it’s hearty, so often, we share it ! (and today, there was a bit of cheese !)

The village is starting to open up to tourism, by offering visits of the cheese factory and bettering the walking trails, which are indeed in a very good state, with benches and bridges, but are still very small ! They try to install a community tourism, which consists of inviting the tourists into the day-to-day life of inhabitants and financially contribute as much as possible to the participating inhabitants.

We went on the two main trails (for a total of around one hour, nap under the acacia trees included), and went by the Cerro Apaguajil viewpoint, where you can see, we heard, all the way to El Salvador. We are not learned enough in the local geography to confirm, but we can believe it, and it was pretty anyway !

Once back, we headed to the very rocky road where we were supposed to find the bus, but we were so early that we decided to hitchhike. We were taken (for free) by a private driver (like Uber) going back to Esteli. We had not been in a comfortable car for so long (by that I mean decent shock-absorbers, radio and seat-belts) that we were almost happy that he was driving like a madman !

Once back to our room, we realized that we were going back to France in 16 days, and it was quite a shock. We still cooked some pasta in the hostel’s kitchen and went to bed, not without a last landscape because we love them !

See you tomorrow, X

Today we had planned to get to a remote village with nice hiking trails and cheese making skills

But there is only one bus per day to get there, and it’s at 6:30am, and we’re pretty far away from the bus terminal. But you don’t really have a choice, we asked around to see if hitch-hiking was possible, but were told there is not enough traffic because it’s really remote.

So went the alarm went off at 5:30am, we weren’t really up for it. Actually, we weren’t ready to do it at all, so we went back to sleep. We’ll go there tomorrow 😉 . So today we mainly visited Esteli and organized the rest of the trip.

For the organization part, it’s weird for us to (almost) know where we’ll be every night until the end of the trip. But as we fly from Managua in a week, we can’t really make the usual unplanned detours (ok, we might make a small detour, but you’ll see later!).

For the visiting the city part, there’s not much to see here (besides a recently painted cathedral). It’s a lot like Matagalpa : a big town surrounded by farms and national parcs. This town does seem more lively and loud than Matagalpa, with more stores and advertising billboards.

What we liked the most here are the mural paintings you can find in several places. Some of them were done by the local schools. And it’s really cool to see so many colored drawings where it could just have been gray walls. Here are a bunch of photos of them.

Tonight we went to the movies, to see Justice League. We were glad to be in a theater again, but the movie wasn’t really that great (ok, the fact that you could hear the next room’s movie didn’t help 😉 ).

That’s all for today, tomorrow we’ll try to get up earlier !

Today, we left Matagalpa. Our friends left to the beaches around Leon, and we stayed in the mountains to continue our tour of socialists strongholds (socialists as in rebels and guerillas here, not old dudes voting for bankers like in France).

The bus was probably one of the worst we took, because it was very full, and also because we were standing up ! The region is very poor and people travel in bus to go working in other cities (and see their kids once a month for 3$ a day, yay). This morning then, the bus was leaving every half hour, we got on and we went, for 2 hours, in a dust cloud, hanging onto the ceiling bars, pushed around by vendors of chicken or miracle herbs (did you know that fenugreek could cure hemorrhoids, cancer and tumors, impotence… it may be true, but certainly not in these small plastic bags going from clammy hands to sweaty pockets).

Esteli is a colonial city (like most cities we go through), but never like locals mean it. They all want us to go to pretty “colonial cities” with old houses, wooden balconies and colorful paints. Sadly, every city doesn’t have as much money as Granada to impress tourists (and the volcanoes erupting and rebels revolting didn’t help). However, every city here has a perfectly orthogonal plan. The houses are organized in blocks of a very regular size and distances are not told in meters but in blocks. It took us a while to understand that when told 100 or 300 meters, we should hear 1 or 3 blocs, whatever their size.

So, all central America cities are similar in these ways : one of the blocks in the center is the Parque Central, one of his neighbors is the cathedral and the city hall is another. One of the avenues bordering it is Avenida Central, streets and avenues are numbered, and just like in New York, only one road disturbs the nicely aligned squares. In New York, it’s Broadway, but here it’s the Panamerican Highway, which is not too bad either (but less lit).

Esteli was simple to understand after this. We went straight for the hostel that we had booked and had trouble finding it. Furthermore, our room had been given to a girl prolonging her stay with some story about a bag that we didn’t get, and we understood nothing. In the end, we went next door and it’s great. When we looked for a nice restaurant that was in the guide, we also had trouble finding it… Turns out, every address is wrongly indicated, which is crazy because they have a super organized street-system, it should be so easy ! I can’t imagine people from here moving to small French villages, with dead-end streets and curvy streets with funny names…

We also paid a visit to the non-profit touristic agency, before we went to eat. In the restaurant, we were acutely observed by the 3 to 6 girls on the next table, and in the end, they all asked us to translate their names. It was easy enough for Maria, but for others, which I can’t even write the name, it was harder. But they all say “Au revoir” in the end, which was nice !

All of this is now ending, we are fed and lying like slugs on our bed. See you tomorrow for more adventures !

Today we visited the highlands around Matagalpa.

As we’ve said in a previous article, the city itself isn’t really that interesting, but the surrounding area with its coffee farms and natural reserves are the main contributors to the region’s charm and rising tourism.

So we did an organized tour with a company that gives part of the benefices to the local communities. It was very nice, especially because we were only 4 people (we went there with Alix and Pierre, our french friends). The guide spoke well english, but we still tried to improve our spanish with him, and also with the other locals we’ve met.

The day started with a visit at one of the many farm plantations around San Ramon. There are several communities of farmers around San Ramon, but even if some of them reach 6000 souls, they mostly look like very tiny villages because the farms are scattered over big areas.

The visit was very interesting, and we learned a lot. Contrarily to the coffee plantation we saw in Colombia near Salento, who were very visible covering several hills, most if not all the coffee produced in Nicaragua grows beneath trees. The trees provide shade and nutrients (through the composting of the fallen leaves) for the coffee bushes. So the plantations look like rich forests with lots of animals (we saw two sloths!), it’s very cool!

Another benefit of this type of plantations is that you can plant “useful” trees if you want. So during the visit we ate cacao beans and oranges, both freshly picked on the trees above the coffee bushes, and also sucked the gelatin around the coffee beans. There are also cypress to form hedges and old eucalyptus trees to make tea or medicine, although they stopped planting those because they tend to grow big roots and steal all the nutrients in the soil!

Another nice aspect of the visit was to see the efforts done to keep a natural cycle of harvest. One of the big problem of coffee production is that the water used to clean and sort the coffee becomes really acid, so it’s not really cool to dump it into the nearby river. So here they form swamps to contain these waters, and wait for the swamp to ferment, which regulates the pH. And they can use the fermented swamp as a liquid fertilizer for the next crops! Same for the coffee flesh, which is dried and then used again to fertilize the soil. So there is a whole cycle where the coffee production waste is used to grow the next crops, and that’s really cool!

We also learned that coffee is sorted into 3 categories:

• Premium quality, mainly exported (the expensive coffee we find in France)
• Second quality, also exported (cheaper coffee) or drunk here in Nicaragua.
• The third quality, considered really shitty, sold to big companies producing instant coffee (Nestlé, Nescafé or even Nespresso!)

In any case, the once the coffee is sorted, it still needs to dry for about a week (which is done with the sun, on black plastic tarps around Matagalpa, where it rains less than in the highlands). Then it needs to be stored for about a month to get really green, and lastly a machine separates the last peel around the bean. Generally, the farmers sell the end product and do all the processing themselves (or with the help of cooperatives). The last essential process, roasting, is donne directly in the consumer countries by the big buyers.

At lunch we ate with an old local women, and it was very good (and yes, it was the standard rice-beans-chicken again!). We really liked the re-usage of waste (plastic bottles, cans, old tires,…) as flowerpots.

After lunch we hiked again (ok, only about 2h and mostly easy walking), so we had nice views of the surroundings. And to see waterfalls (which are always loved by backpackers because often free 😉 ). The first one had a pool underneath deep enough to jump in from the top! The second one, much higher, had a nice big cave with bats behind her.

In the end we went back to our hostel to chill out and also to decide where we’re going next (about time, we’re leaving tomorrow!). But as usual, we’ll tell you in the next post!

P.S : Small video bonus to show off Ben’s Olympic skills :p

Today was resting day !

We got up late, our friends had gotten up early and went back to sleep, we lazed around… We booked the tour for tomorrow, accommodations for New Orleans (it was about time ! everything is full and expensive…) and train tickets for December (the wallet is now hurting in comparison with transportation here).

At noon, we cooked and also prepared lemonade ! At night, we went out for cocktails and ate some nice stuff, and the day was gone…

Tomorrow, though, will be very much active ! X