Backpacking in Nicaragua

Top Five Highlights:

1. Convento San Francisco
2. Boardwalk in Granada
3. Bird watching on Isla de Ometepe
4. Asadero.com
5. Colonial architecture in Granada

Quick Tips:

Granada is a beautiful colonial city and the Isla de Ometepe, a volcanic island in the middle of Lago de Nicaragua, is also worth a visit. Our trip through Nicaragua was unfortunately cut short, but my husband, who visited in 1999, strongly recommends Leon and the Corn Islands in addition to the places we visited together.

Best Way To Get Around:

Public transportation.

This is the best restaurant I have ever been to in my life. I would not hesitate to tell someone to go to Granada just to eat at this restaurant. The chef, Don Chepe as I heard him called by others, is a retired Spaniard who runs this small restaurant out of his lovely colonial house. There are seven or eight small tables, and each time we ate there, the restaurant was more than half empty. The first time was the best, but only because we didn't know what we were about to experience! There were no menus. Don Chepe greeted us very warmly and started a general conversation about food with each of us in turn - it was actually bizarre.

When the food came, I understood everything.

We were each presented with a large plantain leaf filled with a medley of ingredients. My husband had some sort of braised beef mixed with vegetables, whereas I had different vegetarian offerings. I am not going to try to describe the food, because it just doesn't seem fair. All I will say is that I imagine this is how the other one percent lives, the people who have private chefs and have never worn the same pair of shoes twice.

La Fortuna, the site of Volcan Arenal, was our last stop in Costa Rica, and so to avoid recrossing the mountain range that divides Costa Rica's coasts, we decided to use the Los Chiles border crossing into Nicaragua. Clearing immigration was unusually speedy and pleasant. Then we took an hour boat ride up the Rio Frio to San Carlos, Nicaragua. En route, we saw some beautiful cranes and a sloth.

San Carlos is a little port on Lago de Nicaragua. While dirty and sketchy - what port isn't? – its narrow, very steep cobblestone streets, wood buildings, and views of the lake serve as tepid justification for the visit. They do nothing to ameliorate the departure.

We had planned to take a boat from San Carlos to the Isla de Ometepe, but when we learned that we would be disembarking in the middle of nowhere at around 2 a.m. we settled on a bus to Managua. The bus drivers who ply that route are Nicaragua's least fortunate men. The 6-hour stretch from San Carlos to Acoyapa is on a bone-jarring gravel road tenuously linking a series of desolate ranching communities to civilization. The reluctant passengers cloak themselves in bandannas and attempt to so jam themselves between the seats that they won't be thrown from into the air. Most of the seats themselves are no longer attached to their legs and fly about as the bus bucks. And, of course, the former American school bus (virtually all Nicaraguan buses are of this provenance) has no shocks.

The paved road from Juigalpa toward Managua was actually worse. It was so ridden with potholes that we spent much of the ride skidding precariously along the shoulder trying to avoid the road, careening across the surface (and sometimes traffic) when the shoulder became too challenging. When my husband took this road to Rama in 1999, it was in much better shape. He doubts they've filled a pothole since. Only when we reached the Interamericanan Highway did things improve.

This is a wealthy city and it shows. Stately, high-ceilinged houses with tile floors and courtyard gardens. Palm-studded boulevards with tiled sidewalks. A beautiful plaza fronting the cathedral. A boardwalk along the lake. It's also a city with "people who matter" and "people who don't." Of course, tourists don't. That wears after a while. I can't imagine that expats are well received either.

The real high point of our stay in Granada has been Asadero.com. It is a restaurant with a very talented cook. He served me beef with sweet plantains, ripe plantains, and a salad of some sort of cabbage, all lumped together in a plantain leaf. By the ingredients, this is fairly typical fare, but it was one of the best meals I've ever eaten. Each perfectly seasoned ingredient complemented each other in both flavor and color. Meat with ripe plantain, salad with meat, ripe plantain with sweet plantain ... every combination was a pleasant surprise. The restaurant's promotional flyers term the food "erotic." Normally, I'd take that as a typo for "exotic," but not this time.

When my husband visited Granada in 1999 its tourist pretensions, while evident, were generally unfulfilled. Now, a new wave of expat-driven development appears to be succeeding. We stayed for a while at Hospedaje Central, the same hotel he stayed at last time. Then it was run by a Nicaraguan family and - while a bit run-down and already popular with backpackers - preserved the stately style of Granada's houses. The foreigners mixed with Nicaraguans on business trips - including a labor organizer, whom he failed to communicate with in broken Spanish. Now it is a bustling hostel replete with bar, tour booking, and accumulating graffiti and murals. It has an American owner and is staffed by a mix of Nicaraguans and travelers pausing to make a buck.

Granada's lakefront boardwalk is beautiful. You could take a horse-drawn taxi - we didn't - and the Convento San Francisco is a wonderful museum featuring Pre-Columbian statues and other artifacts. We passed through Granada twice and stayed at a bed and breakfast called Another Night in Paradise the second time around. This ran us about $13 US per night but the beautiful rooms, real beds with real mattresses, and shared kitchen made it seem like a bargain.

Granada is also a good place to take Spanish lessons. I was fairly ill, so my husband used the time to improve his Spanish.

We stayed in Granada for a week, then headed out to the beautiful Isla de Ometepe to stay on a cooperative farm. It was lovely to sit under the volcano and watch all the birds. We had a bit of trouble finding lodging on Ometepe due to an American university field trip. The cooperative farm - a former Sandinista commune - was on the far side of the island.

Reaching Isla de Ometepe is a bit arduous but well worth the effort. There are some notable petroglyphs as well as excellent hiking and climbing around the base of Volcan Concepcion.