Arrival in Granada was a pleasure after being in Managua, with colourful buildings, bustling streets and smiling faces. We found an abode right next to the market, which is a very rough and ready area of town but a lot of fun if you have the energy. Our hostel was beautiful inside the main entrance hall – built in the 1500s with 5m ceilings; it used to be a government building and then became a bus station, before being the hostel that it is today. The rooms are very basic, but fine, & there is one shared bathroom for boys and girls, which again, serve a purpose and are adequate. The key thing to say about the hostel is that it feels really safe and has a lovely outside area for eating/chatting, etc. The old people who run it are really sweet as well and were very happy for us to practice our pigeon Spanish. Look out for it – Esfinge – bright yellow & opposite the market & only 11 USD per room.
We struck lucky again with our timing, discovering that there was a festival on in the town that afternoon. We wandered through the town and the atmosphere was electric – different varieties of live music & pumping stereos everywhere, people dressed up in all sorts of outfits (especially cowboy) milling around the streets, women with big trays of toffee apples on their heads, men selling cashews, huge dancing ladies on sticks with their dresses swirling, children dressed up as little characters (looked like potatoes to me) and people merry-making in the streets. Mark and I got a great spot on the side of the street at a café and watched the parades, then came the horses! Big, beautiful beasts prancing along with sleek lines & proud riders swigging beer and looking very Western film-esque. A totally different and wealthy image compared to the sticks and bones beasts we had seen previously carrying heavy loads. There were also toddlers riding these huge horses, wearing dresses which nearly reached the floor & even some riding cattle. Next to our café was the ‘Marlborough’ sponsored tent, which had scantily clad girls doing an amusing parent-style side step to techno music and handing out free cigarettes, which I was quite suprised at – it’s been a while since the West has actively advocated and encouraged the public to take up smoking. For a change of scene, Mark and I walked down to the lake front, to catch some of the cool breezes. On our way back up, we got ‘caught’ in a crowd and it became quite an uncomfortable mosh pit – barriers on both sides of the road so we could not get out and horses stamping down one side & way too many people on the other – Mark and I got quite pushed around and then he had his pockets picked by a bunch of kids, which he knew was happening but could not hold onto the rucksack/camera/pockets etc all at the same time as there were quite a few of them. Luckily we only had 3 cards between us and had hardly any cash in his wallet, so it could have been much worse. On going to the police station which was a shack on the other end of the town, we were told to come back the next day as basically they could not be bothered to write a report (we later found out that about 90% of Westerners who go to the festival get pick pocketed in the same way that we did, making us think it was a total set-up). We returned the next morning, only to be told the same thing, so we kicked up a fuss and eventually someone took our details and wrote out a report on an old fashioned type writer. We had to go to a shop to pay for photocopies of passports as they did not have one in the station! I wish I could have taken pictures of the place as it was so unlike a police station with buckets of water catching the rain from holes in the roof, big puddles of sewage outside, etc, it was comical.
We stayed one more day in Granada as I need to wait for my card to send some cash, which was very pleasant – there’s a great café which serves breakfast called Edward’s – yes, run by Edward, who is a very entertaining Dutch guy with lots of stories and GREAT pancakes. We also liked the Europa café, which had a great courtyard off the street, good coffee and free wifi, which is quite hard to find.
We left the town by getting a chicken bus to Rivas for 1USD, taking another bus to San Jorge and then hopping on a cargo style barge thing to Ometepe, an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. JG
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