southafrican.co.uk - Nicaragua Magnifica

August 19, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

STEPHANIE GRIMMETT visits Nicaragua in Central America for an action-packed adventure in a place few people have ever thought of visiting.
Nicaragua only seems to make the news when something bad is going down: earthquakes, political uprisings and of course, the infamous Iran-Contra Affair. But, currently this little battler of a country is enjoying a period of relative political stability and it’s a great time to visit. Nicaragua is clearly on the make.

Settled by the Spanish in the early 1500’s, much of Nicaragua was densely populated by indigenous peoples hundreds, probably thousands of years before their arrival. The Spanish quickly discovered the so called “womb” of Nicaragua: a large lake separated from the Pacific Ocean by only a narrow strip of land. Its umbilical cord: the Rio San Juan snakes its way from the lake all the way across the country to the Caribbean. This interesting quirk of geography meant that Nicaragua was nearly the site of the “Panama” Canal and several countries vied hotly for control of the region. For many years, the British also held interests on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, and this area was (many say it still is) the haunt of pirates.

Unfortunately, colonisation by the Spanish led to the subjugation of the local peoples, and much native culture has been lost. Poverty is still endemic in Nicaragua and life is hard for many of its residents. However, prosperity is returning, and today Nicaragua has a lot to offer the inquisitive traveller: beautiful colonial architecture, tropical Caribbean islands, bustling markets, lively music, surfing beaches, a remarkable political history, and if that’s not enough, a whole chain of live volcanoes for added interest. Travelling in Nicaragua can be intensely thought provoking. It has been said that Nicaragua’s volcanoes are similar to the country’s political situation; certainly both have tended to dominate the country’s landscape.

Nicaragua can be roughly divided into two distinct regions: east and west, and currently, no paved roads link the two. If you want to travel between coasts, you have to fly or take a boat. The west coast of Nicaragua, bordered by the Pacific Ocean is the most populated area, containing most of Nicaragua’s major cities: Managua, León and Granada. The people are mostly Spanish speaking mestizos (people of mixed indigenous and Spanish blood). All of the country’s surfing beaches are on this coast. The locals bop to Latino pop, or sizzle on the dance floor to sultry Salsa, and as you sit in a beachside bar sipping mojitos, watching the sun go down, you can sample the local staple: Gallo Pinto (rice and beans).

The Caribbean coast is very different. The tropical “Mosquito” coast is sparsely populated and locals speak English with the most fantastic Caribbean accent. The dress is pure Cuban, the music plays to reggae beat and life is quite laid back, especially on the islands. But despite enormous differences in appearance, language, culture and music, Nicaraguans are proud of their country. And they’re always willing to celebrate something, which is probably all due to the excellent local rum.

If you’ve only got a few days in Nicaragua, don’t spend them all in Managua. There are some great bars in Managua but there are also some very bad parts of town. A great alternate first destination is Granada.
There are several sights worth taking in on the road to Granada. The first is the still active Masaya Volcano. You can drive up close to the crater and after a short walk, you’re staring down into the volcano’s open maw. Interestingly, and somewhat disturbingly, a nearby sign warns you to park with the car facing down hill and to run if you smell choking gases.

Another good stop is the Masaya market. There are actually two markets in this area: the tourist market and the local market and both are worth a look. Buses go direct from Managua to the local market, where you can change to go to Granada, and when you finally roll into Granada, you won’t be disappointed there either.

Granada is the relaxed, old conservative capital and many of the beautiful, colonial buildings are being lovingly restored. There are some great spots to eat out and some funky little bars playing salsa music live. From Granada, it’s only a short bus ride to San Juan del Sur and Nicaragua’s collection of surfing beaches. The water’s clean and the waves are worthy of the serious surfer. What could be better than that?

Omotepe Island makes an excellent next stop. Formed by two volcanoes: one active, one dormant, Omotepe Island lies in Lake Nicaragua (home of the famous, fresh water sharks). Several eco-hotels have sprung up around the island, the mood is relaxed and you can actually climb both volcanoes. The active volcano is the more strenuous, but an interesting hike. Plan to spend a few days and do the hike early, your muscles might need some time to recover afterwards.

León has a very different feel to Granada. León buzzes with energy and is the home of Nicaragua’s more socialist ideals. Political slogans appear everywhere and near the main square is a memorial to those lost in the revolution. Despite this, the town does not feel at all menacing and it’s quite the cultural centre. León was also the birthplace of Rubén Darío, one of Latin America’s most famous poets.

Just out of town is Cerro Negro, another active volcano, the slopes on which the world mountain biking speed record was set. This volcano is easy to climb, easier to descend as you glissade on tiny balls of pumice and there is great bird watching on the road there too.

Having done the west coast, it’s time to pop back to Managua and take a plane flight to the Corn Islands in the Caribbean. The plane lands on Big Corn Island, but take the boat to Little Corn Island which is much nicer.
Be careful in this region: cocaine smuggling is active and theft can be a problem so you need to be sensible.
That aside, Little Corn really is like Paradise lost, it’s stunning. The island is covered with mango trees, banana trees and coconut palms, the beaches are spectacular, the diving is good, and the best thing? There’s hardly anyone else there.

When you’ve finished your intrepid travels in Nicaragua, there’s nothing left but to buy a bottle of the local rum and some salsa CDs to remember your trip by. When you’re back at home and it’s cold outside, make a round of stiff mojitos and pop on the local music. You’ll want to go back.

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mercurynews.com - Group lists top 10 ‘ethical destinations’

August 7, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

The Associated Press

Article Launched: 08/04/2008 05:25:41 AM PDT

BERKELEY, Calif.—In an effort to get travelers off the beaten path and support destinations in developing countries, a group called Ethical Traveler has published a list of the “10 best ethical destinations.”The organization said in a statement that many countries “are making noble attempts to preserve their natural assets, create a user-friendly infrastructure, and build an economy where their citizens share the benefits of tourist revenue. By bringing our commerce to such places we encourage their efforts, and inspire neighboring countries to support these values as well.”

To create the list, Ethical Traveler looked at environmental protection, social welfare and human rights in the world’s developing nations. The honorees on the Ethical Traveler’s list, in alphabetical order, are Argentina, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Namibia, Nicaragua, and South Africa.

The organization used various resources to make the determinations, including data collected by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network; progress made by countries in reducing infant mortality rates as measured by UNICEF; and reports on civil liberties and human rights from sources like Amnesty International and Freedom House.

For more details, visit http://www.ethicaltraveler.org.

Source:  mercurynews.com

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De propertywire.com - Property market reviving in Nicaragua as worries over political regime subside

July 31, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

Thursday, 31 July 2008 Property investors from the US are no longer buying in Nicaragua because of the economic downturn and concerns over the political regime, it is claimed.

But European investors are stepping into the breach and the country’s property market is starting to recover from a spartan period.

‘You have to be somewhat of a contrarian to buy real estate in Nicaragua right now,’ said developer and advisor Jeff Cassel. ‘Two years ago this Nicaragua was right up there in the property-buying popularity polls. Hordes of buyers, especially soon-to-be American and Canadian retirees, couldn’t get enough of it,’ he explained.

‘Pristine properties in Nicaragua were plentiful - beachfront, mountaintop, lakeside, and everything in between and best of all, they were very inexpensive. This was the fabulous frontier, waiting to be explored and settled.’

But the US buyers dried up due to the election of Daniel Ortega as president of Nicaragua and then the economic crisis.

Now Ortega is taking steps to encourage foreign investors and is openly talking about new regulations to encourage overseas investment.

‘It’s not for the timid or for those who are worried about the country’s political uncertainties. But contrarians may win big here, as the potential for gain is great if nearby Costa Rica and Panama are any example,’ said Cassel.

Others agree. According to Robin Donaldson, a real estate agent, things are picking up gradually. ‘As Ortega refrains from pursuing an aggressive policy foreign investors and the markets are coming back to life, Nicaragua has plenty of models in Latin America for growth in the real estate sector,’ she said.

Charles Southwell of RE/MAX Granada said there is potential. ‘Nicaragua is turning into quite a tourist mecca, and it has huge investment possibilities,’ he said. He compares it to Costa Rica which has succeeded in becoming a popular tourist destination, an inexpensive place to do business and attracted global players such as Microsoft and GE.

‘The countries that build the middle class are the countries that have long-term success, and that’s what’s happening here,’ Finch said.

And some Americans are also taking the risk. ‘We’ve been getting lots of inquiries from Americans posted in Afghanistan,’ said Cassel.

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Nicaragua has become the major hot spot of Central American tourism

June 28, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

Posted on Sat, Jun. 28, 2008 Nicaragua has become the major hot spot of Central American tourism BY ARTHUR FROMMER Of all the nations of Central America, Nicaragua is generally regarded as the safest for tourism — with less street crime and violence, and less pick-pocketing and robberies than even Costa Rica.And yet, though its tourism is growing rapidly in a percentage sense, Nicaragua still receives the fewest tourists of any Central America nation. The civil war between ”Sandinistas” and ”Contras” that ended about 20 years ago and a devastating earthquake that leveled the capital city of Managua are usually cited as the reasons why Nicaragua’s tourist industry is still in its infancy. Which creates an opportunity for a certain type of American traveler — an adventurous sort who seeks ”the Caribbean as it once was.” Someone who values the emptiness of Nicaragua’s beaches and rain forests, delights in the tiny, 10-room lodgings that make up the great bulk of Nicaragua’s ”hotels” and who enjoys an intimate contact with a people who are gracious to a fault. In one of the small hotels on Little Corn Island, about 30 miles off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, dinner is served at 7 p.m. sharp and consists of a plate of fish (caught that morning) with two sides washed down by beer, and served uniformly to both the staff of the hotel and its guests, who all eat at the same long table. If that’s the kind of Caribbean vacation you desire, you find it in Nicaragua. The other reason for Nicaragua’s growing tourism is less pleasant to discuss: The country suffers from abject poverty, and its price structure is absurdly low. A devastating article in the June 12 issue of The New York Review of Books pointed out that 80 percent of the country’s population subsist on less than $2 a day. Twenty-seven percent of the population is “undernourished.” Abandoned by the United States after our successful defeat of the Sandinista movement and left to drift without substantial aid or investment, Nicaragua is governed by a president (Daniel Ortega) who hasn’t the slightest knowledge of economics or a plan to improve his nation’s economy. He survives only because of essentially free oil shipments from Venezuela. The United States, preoccupied with the Middle East, pays little attention to a nation that once worried us a great deal. And because everything in Nicaragua is dirt cheap, the country is awash with real estate speculators throwing up retirement homes for elderly Americans, and additional hotels for tourists seeking a vacation in an area near the equator where the weather is hot in every month of the year. For the tourist interested in culture, the colonial capital of Granada shows the high aesthetic standards of the conquistadores, who left glorious structures that have been well-preserved and reflect the art and architecture of 17th and 18th century Spain. Several of those buildings have been converted into high-quality hotels. The Nicaraguan city of Leon is of similar but lesser interest. Among the beach areas, the Corn Islands are one of two popular coastal draws. You get there either by plane from Managua (about $175 round-trip) or via a daylong trip by bus and ferry from other cities. Once there, you find yourself in a different world of backpacker-like tourists living in extremely modest lodgings and enjoying nature and a laid-back form of life, to put it mildly. In addition to enjoying a pristine tropical innocence, you snorkel and scuba-dive or simply enjoy the outdoors, to which you walk on tiny Little Corn Island (where there are no cars) or hop a taxi on Big Corn Island, paying $1 as your fare to any point on the Island. The other tourist magnet is San Juan del Sur on the Pacific Coast, the site of considerable construction and development. Surfing is the chief draw here and surfers are a special type of visitor whose presence may or may not enthrall you. Surprisingly, the surfers are joined by growing numbers of elderly U.S. retirees, drawn by the claim that $15 a week can hire a sleep-in maid/cook and $20 a week a gardener who doubles as a chauffeur, enabling Americans to live ”like kings” on their Social Security income. I have been both horrified and offended by these sales pitches, and they highlight the ethical dilemmas posed by economies like Nicaragua’s. To live off another person’s poverty is a frequent decision in travel, justified on the grounds that you are creating a livelihood for the less fortunate. If you’re made comfortable by that rationale (I’m conflicted), then you’ll want to consider Nicaragua for your next vacation.

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© 2008 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com

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JOSEPH HOOPER said in New York Time

May 18, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

 

 

September 23, 2007

Nicaragua’s Ciudad of Dreams

By JOSEPH HOOPER

The last time I was in Granada, Nicaragua, was in 1984. My “solidarity gringo” friends and I, in the country to support the embattled Sandinista revolution, were taking a break from the capital city of Managua, where it seemed like every other person had an automatic weapon slung over their shoulder. But in Granada, it was as if we’d been airlifted out of the materially deprived, militarily consumed country and dropped into a charming Mexican colonial town. The houses had red-tiled roofs and brightly painted facades; the outdoor markets actually had fresh fruit and vegetables in them.

We took a boat trip to a nearby island in Lake Nicaragua, on whose northwestern shore Granada sits. At the time I regarded the experience as little more than a brief timeout from the country’s real business, which was defending and preserving the gains of the revolution.

Returning to Granada recently, I found that the city looked much the same, despite the increase of cafes, a expat restaurant or two and some hip backpacker hangouts. The Catedral de Granada and the Convento de San Francisco were still painted in hot, jazzy yellow ocher and baby blue, and the place exuded the same humid tropical beauty. From the top of the weathered bell tower of the Iglesia la Merced, I could see the hulking Mombacho volcano looming over those tiled roofs. The setting was book-cover perfect, down to the tree-lined Parque Central at the center of town, festooned with gazebos and peddler stalls and surrounded on all sides by colonial-style buildings from which modernity has mostly been expunged or simply failed to take root. The horse-drawn carriages that waited by the Parque were almost overkill. “Granada is like a time warp,” one well-to-do Managuan lady sniffed to me at a party I went to later. “Nothing happens … except tourists.”

Indeed, the tables have turned since my last visit. After a war-exhausted citizenry voted out the Sandinistas in 1990, the conservative governments that followed promoted a consumer economy and courted foreign investment aggressively enough that in the last three years or so, a tipping point has been reached. Tourism, once the dessert option in Nicaragua, is now the main course, and one of the country’s chief sources of hard cash. Understandably so. Packed into an area the size of Louisiana are some of the best aspects of the entire Central American isthmus: huge tracts of forests teeming with endangered species, like in Costa Rica; the kind of sultry colonial cities you’d find in Guatemala; and unsullied surfing beaches as good as those in El Salvador. Nowhere are these pleasures more centralized than in Nicaragua’s Pacific southwest, in and around Granada. There’s a local expression: “Granada is Nicaragua; the rest is just mountains.”

Founded by the conquistador Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba in 1524, Granada is the oldest city in Nicaragua — although Leon, to the northwest, vies for the title (it was founded the same year). Truth be told, austere Leon is better preserved, but its touristic comforts are still in an early stage of development. Granada, by contrast, is the showoff. Its felicitous location by immense Lake Nicaragua (the 10th-largest freshwater lake in the world) made it a wealthy trading center and a magnet for pirates and other firebrands, who once sacked and burned the city.

If the town’s most historic buildings have been rebuilt many times over, somehow the idea of colonial elegance is the one thing that has been flawlessly maintained. In fact, escaping many of the turmoils of Nicaragua’s recent past has been Granada’s particular genius; the city was mostly hors de combat during the revolution. The city fathers were — and still are — more preoccupied with family bloodlines and old historical battles, in a way that would be recognizable to anyone familiar with the American Old South. Granada is even famous for older folks passing the late afternoon on their front-porch rocking chairs, catching the breeze off the lake. This is a city of porch philosophers, not revolutionary martyrs.

One morning I paid a call on Granada’s leading citizen, Gabriel Pasos Wolff, 86, one of the owners of the venerable Hotel Alhambra and an owlish doyen of the rocking-chair set. Pasos and his wife live just cater-corner to the hotel (with its atypical Moorish-Vegas facade) in a mansion filled with dour oil portraits that could pass for a colonial museum. He served me an iced tea and graciously offered up a pocket history of Granada, with an emphasis on the defining catastrophe of another era, the sacking of the city in 1856 by the American William Walker. He led his own private army in a bizarre effort to conquer Nicaragua and install himself as president. (The United States government briefly recognized Walker’s claim before the warring Granada and León factions united to drive him out.) “Granada is like the Ave Fénix,” Pasos declaimed, the phoenix rising from the ashes.

A vivid sense of history and tradition is one of the place’s most enduring charms, even when it erupts at 6:30 a.m. Early one morning I was blown out of bed at the Alhambra by booming, cannonlike sounds. I rushed out into the street and caught up to the procession of San Antonio, a ragtag army of local schoolkids led by teenage girls in short brown skirts and high leather boots doing the pompom-and-baton shake and shimmy. Behind them followed younger girls dressed up in white nuns’ habits and little boys in monks’ cassocks, holding miniature prayer books. The whole procession, powered by a cacophonous brass band in the rear, redounded to the greater glory of San Antonio. Later that morning over breakfast, I asked an Alhambra waiter what San Antonio had ever done to deserve this. “He’s a saint, so we adore him,” he told me, “but I don’t remember. Ask a padre.”

The rhythm of a Granada stay often goes something like this: the early mornings and the evenings are for city pleasures. When the heat begins to build toward noon, it’s time to head into the surrounding naturaleza. Although a bunch of outdoor-excursion companies have lately sprung up here, I headed out with two friends of friends of friends: Pomares Salmerón, a young naturalist who runs his family’s private nature preserve near Managua, and Alain Creusot, a French volcanologist in his early 60s whose final ambition is to climb and study every volcano in the New World, from the Aleutian Islands to Tierra del Fuego.

In Salmeron’s S.U.V., we chugged up the paved switchbacks that took us to the upper reaches of the Mombacho volcano cloud forest, a curtain of green occasionally broken by the red flower of the malinche tree. We stashed the vehicle at the ranger hut and hiked a trail to a lookout above the volcano’s largest crater. Mombacho hasn’t had a proper eruption in centuries, which has allowed the crater to evolve into a huge sunken bowl of vegetation. It’s a nature preserve within a nature preserve, inhabited by howler monkeys and — so people say — some small jungle cats. Salmeron said the crater has become a kind of sacred site for the pagan shamans who operate out of the surrounding towns known as pueblos brujos (“warlock towns”).

As we cut back to the road and the steep climb toward the summit, Creusot expounded on the country’s state of affairs. One of the few foreigners who chose to stay in ’79, when the insurrection against the United States-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza erupted, Creusot directed journalists and Sandinista fighters to the abandoned cars and gas supplies at the French Embassy and joined them for rides through the urban battlefield. Having faced danger to witness a new country being born, he feels personally let down at how things have turned out. Nicaragua is enduring a severe energy shortage. Ortega, back in power, is now regarded as merely a man of the back-room deal. And the U.S. State Department pegs the country as the poorest in Latin America (which, for anyone who has spent time in Honduras, is truly remarkable). “Nicaragua, which is the richest country in Latin America from all points of view, is last,” Creusot said. “This I cannot accept.”

At last the cloud cover broke and we were granted a view down the lake. Zapatera Island emerged, known for its pre-Columbian archeological sites and, more grandly still, Ometepe, one of the largest freshwater islands in the world, with its smoldering Concepción volcano. Another spot gave us a view of Las Isletas, which stretch out just beyond the Granada shore. Formed by a Mombacho avalanche eons ago, they looked from this distance like pearls from a broken necklace scattered over the water’s surface. They are indeed tiny, as I saw later while exploring them by kayak. Most islands are big enough to accommodate only a single thing: a school, say, or a cemetery for the peasant fishermen who get around in old wooden rowboats. Some have been snapped up by wealthy Nicaraguans and foreigners for vacation homes. And others look like science experiments gone awry. One island has a resident population of scrawny kittens, another a fast-breeding colony of spider monkeys (reportedly descendants of an original few dropped off by a local biologist).

Another day we drove to Masaya, just outside Granada. Of modest size and lumpy shape, Masaya nonetheless impresses with its sheer volcanism. Plumes of sulfurous smoke rise from its crater with industrial constancy. As we peered down, a flock of parakeets zipped over the surrounding green field, hovered overhead and then dove in formation into the crater in what looked to be a highly organized suicide mission. The birds, Creusot explained, spent the night down there, breathing currents of fresh air sucked into the pit by the high temperatures. They can have it. At one point in our visit, the wind shifted and we found ourselves in a sulfuric whiteout.

We made it to the top of the crater’s lip and took the measure of the 33-foot cross planted there, first erected by the Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s to counter the bad vibes from the volcano, which they regarded, not insensibly, as the gates of hell. Local lore has it that the pre-Columbian Chorotega priests sacrificed virgins down there. In Nicaragua, Christian theology always seems to be at war with a landscape that feels more pagan. Even on Mombacho, as quiet a volcano as you’ll find, I had crossed the old battle lines. On a canopy tour, harnessed to a zip line cable and flying from giant tree to tree, I was joined by about 40 high school evangelicals on a mission from Omaha. One girl asked me if I was a Christian, and as there are no atheists 40 feet off the ground, I answered truthfully, “No, but I’m a fan of Jesus.”

Back in Granada, I paid a call on the Costa Rican expat Glenda Castro Navarro at El Tercer Ojo (the Third Eye), a cafe and restaurant decorated with Buddhist and Hindu icons that she opened four years ago with her husband, the French painter Jean Marc Calvet. “The Third Eye means ‘Open your eyes and see,’ ” Castro said. “I try to follow many of the teachings of Buddhism, and here it is very Catholic, so people say this is a very diabolic thing.” Castro can grow impatient with the town’s sedulous pace (“things pass so slowly here, it’s unreal”), lacking perhaps the native affection of her friend who joined us, the filmmaker Mariano Maran. “Mi Musica,” Maran’s film about Nicaraguan music, had been playing around town. “To die a Granadino is tremendously powerful,” he said. “My mother is 93, she still lives here, she still sings, she still drinks.”

For someone like MarÃn, Granada’s pull is internal, the force of family and shared history. (“I’m like an elephant; I always come back home.”) But as the very existence of El Tercer Ojo makes plain, all sorts of people are drawn into the city’s colonial vortex for all sorts of reasons. The paradox of Granada is that its aura of antique timelessness is the very thing that attracts the restless New Agers and the bohemians. And for this reason, there is a whiff of improbability: Granada of the somnolent heat and the aristocratic airs bring reconceived by foreign visitors as a model of town-and-country multisport efficiency and as an exotic stage for private obsessions. But the beauty of the place is that the different Granadas don’t collide. They rub off on one another in lively, unpredictable ways.

On my next to last night in town, I settled in for dinner at Alabama Rib Shack Bar and Grill, which everyone knows as Jimmy Three-Fingers, a few blocks from the Parque. (The baby-back ribs are first-rate.) After dinner, the proprietor, a singer-contractor-chef from Florida’s Gulf Coast by the name of Jimmy Three-Fingers — he had an accident with a table saw — belts out Jimmy Buffet and John Denver songs in a phlegmy, nicotine-stained voice to a barroom half full of nonplussed Nicaraguans and curious stray gringos. I suggested “Margaritaville.” (When in Rome. …) “Back on the Gulf Coast, the tip jar used to have a sign on it,” he shot back. “ ‘Requests: 5 cents. “Margaritaville”: $25.’ ” Repertory notwithstanding, his young Granadina girlfriend was enchanted. Hands beatifically pressed to her chest, she cooed, “I surrender every time he sings.”

The moment reminded me of something the poet and former Sandinista operative Gioconda Belli had told me before my trip. “If there is a city that has been changed by tourism, it’s Granada,” she said. But unlike some other picturesque spots I can think of, Granada hasn’t become an imitation of itself. There is room for both the ridiculous and the sublime — a festival in February, for instance, when some 200 poets declaim their verses from church atriums within earshot of Jimmy Three-Fingers’ microphone. “It feels much more cosmopolitan,” Belli said approvingly. But still, somehow, like Granada.

ESSENTIALS GRANADA, NICARAGUA

Getting There

There is a small airport outside of Granada, but it’s easiest to fly into Managua. From there, it’s about an hour by car to the city center.

Guides and Logistics

Tours Nicaragua (www.toursnicaragua.com) and Nicaragua Adventures (www.nica-adventures.com) can arrange private trips to the country, covering culture, nature and adventure. Both can plan either an entire trip or just basics like hotels and transportation. (Unless you’re comfortable with chaotic driving conditions, do not rent your own car.) Mombotour (www.mombotour.com) conducts day trips around Granada, including the canopy tour on Mombacho and kayaking tours of Lake Nicaragua (from about $25 to $51 per person).

Hotels

La Gran Francia Hotel and Restaurant. The top luxury hotel in town, with an elegant Nica-Euro fusion restaurant (entrees $9 to $20). 011-505-552-6000; www.lagranfrancia.com; doubles from $105. Hotel Alhambra. A venerable classic, if a little rough around the edges. 011-505-552-4486; www.hotelalhambra.com.ni; doubles from $55. Hotel Patio del Malinche. Basic but lovely small colonial hotel. 011-505-552-2235; www.patiodelmalinche.com; doubles from $67.

Restaurants and Cafes

Alabama Rib Shack Bar. and Grill First-rate American grub with a Latin American theme. Calle El Consulado; 011-505-552-8115; entrees $4.50 to $9.50. Las Colinas del Sur. Pure down-home Nicaragua outside of the city center, specializing in fresh fish from the lake. Shell Palmira; 011-505-552-3492; entrees $7 to $14. El Zaguan. Granada’s best traditional churrasco-style steakhouse. Calle El Arsenal; 011-505-552-6451; entrees $7 to $11. The cafes El Tercer Ojo (Calle El Arsenal; 011-505-552-6451) and Café Dec Arte (Calle Calzada; 011-505-552-6461) are Granada’s twin temples of expat bohemiana.

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From Canada.com - Tourists discover peaceful Nicaragua

May 5, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

	Monday » May 5 » 2008
Tourists discover peaceful Nicaragua The historic colonial city of Granada is a well preserved cultural oasis Silvana Saccomani Canwest News Service Saturday, May 03, 2008 If Granada invokes the heady smell of orange blossoms, the lavish Moorish-styled Alhambra or the rhythms of flamenco guitar, you’ve travelled too far. On this side of the Atlantic ocean, the Nicaraguan city of Granada is squeezed between the hulking Mombacho volcano and Lago Cocibolca, 20th largest lake in the world. Craig Baskett and Eva Logan have just returned from there. As Nicaragua celebrates its second decade of peace, tourists are discovering Granada as one of the most attractive historic centres in Central America. “Over the years we’ve spent a fair bit of time in Mexico and Guatemala, and have always enjoyed the culture and food of this region,” says Baskett, who adds they became curious about Nicaragua after hearing and reading about the country’s safety record, charming architecture and great value. MUST SEES, MUST DOS According to Logan, when it comes to Nicaraguan culture, new and old, nothing compares to Granada, which is an easy one-hour drive or cab ride from the country’s capital of Managua. Founded in 1524, Granada is today one of the oldest colonial cities in the Americas. Baskett says despite the frequent assaults from pirates and ambitious imperialists over the years, a good portion of the city’s colonial architecture remains intact. Add the narrow, cobblestone streets and courtyards cafes, and it’s no wonder this Calgary couple enjoyed the city so much. Like many towns, life in Granada unfolds in the tree-lined Parque Central. A vast square flanked by colonial mansions and an imposing bright yellow cathedral, here local artisans sell bracelets, rings and other jewelry, as well as other handmade items. Baskett says keep your eyes open for the Sultan Cigar shop. Like elsewhere in the country, these are made from 100 per cent Cuban tobacco and sell for as little as $1 apiece. After a day in the sweltering sun, Baskett and Logan retreat to their comfortable, air-conditioned room. Like the other nine rooms in Casa de San Francisco, this one overlooks a traditional colonial garden courtyard. (Casa San Francisco: 207 Calle Corral; 505-552-8235; casasanfrancisco.com; $60 a night for double occupancy and with breakfast.) By mid-afternoon, other hotel guests, also looking to cool down, join them poolside. Happy hour is well underway offering the second best bargain of the day: four bottles of Tona, the local lager, for $3. It’s here from this vantage point that Baskett comes to realize his imaginings of a dangerous Nicaragua, land of Contras and Sandinistas were clearly outdated. “At Cafe Deliet, which is on the spacious front porch of Hotel Alhambra overlooking the parque, you can feast on tender beef and tasty chicken dishes,” says Logan. “Grilled fish straight from the lake is also on the menu, and all meals come with the delicious fries made from tiny, locally grown potatoes.” After dinner she says, “It’s a good idea to pop into the Internet cafe in back of the hotel where they sell Eskimo ice cream treats, then head over to watch the teenage boys play soccer on the cobbles in front of the Cathedral.” (Cafe Deliet: Costado Oeste, Hotel Alhambra; 505-552-4486; dinner for two $40 with wine.) Another way to avoid the heat that begins to build toward noon is to head into the surrounding naturaleza. A number of eco-excursion companies have sprung up, each one prepared to take you to the upper reaches of the Mombacho volcano cloud forest. Mombacho hasn’t erupted in centuries, which has allowed the crater to evolve into a huge sunken hole of vegetation. It’s a nature preserve inhabited by howler monkeys, and some say, small jungle cats. Higher still, you are granted views of Lago Cocibolca (also known as Lake Nicaragua). Las Isletas — a cluster of 350 volcanic islands — were formed by a Mombacho lava flows eons ago. Baskett describes them as looking like “pearls scattered over the water’s surface.” Today the islands are easily accessible by taxi boat or kayak. Most are no larger than a big rock. Some have been snapped up by wealthy Nicaraguans (including the country’s president, Daniel Ortega) and foreigners for vacation homes. But hardworking fisherman and painters (whose works are on display in the local churches and elsewhere in town) make up the largest populations, and one island has a fast-breeding colony of spider monkeys. Tours, arranged through the hotel, run about $30 per person. According to this Calgary couple, some of the best aspects of Central America are packed into the area in and around Granada. There are huge tracts of forests like in Costa Rica, the kind of well-preserved colonial cities you’d find in Guatemala and unsullied beaches as good as those in El Salvador. According to Baskett and Logan, the local expression: “Granada is Nicaragua; the rest is just mountains,” pretty much sums up their experience. © The Vancouver Sun 2008

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Granada in the New York Time

April 20, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

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May 2, 2004

Granada, Nicaragua: Its Fall And Rise

By DAVID ALLAN CATES

I’ll start with this disclaimer: I love Nicaragua. I love the poetry of its pace, ox carts slowing traffic, shoeless boys playing baseball in vacant lots, men riding their lovers double on bicycles and the silhouettes of women reposed in doorways. I love its rum and cigars, rice and beans and green volcanoes towering over red-tile roofs and blue lakes. I even like the smell of horse manure and diesel exhaust, an occasional waft from an open sewer and broken sidewalks that force me to watch my step.

But mostly I love Nicaragua because of people like Róger Xavier Arellano Arróliga, whom I met in a cafetín, a block off the Parque Colón in Granada. While a fumigation truck drove slowly past, filling the narrow street with a toxic cloud and sending diners and even sidewalk passers-by diving for cover into the tiny kitchen behind us, Róger remained seated and patiently drew directions to his home on a napkin.

A moment ago I was a stranger at the next table. Now Róger was inviting me to his house and offering to spend the evening helping me find what I was looking for: an old bodega where, 16 years earlier, during the bleak depths of the contra war, while playing a soldier in the Alex Cox film ”Walker,” I’d been shot and killed in slow motion.

William Walker was an american filibuster who, with an American and native rebel force, invaded and captured Granada in 1855. He was briefly president of Nicaragua, but soon lost international support and was driven from the country, burning Granada to the ground before he left. The movie, a surreal evocation of Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua, and his eventual defeat, was supported by the Sandinista government because it echoed the current fight against the contras, backed by the United States.

I walked to meet Róger in the early evening. On one side of the road, people jogged or strolled through the park, or stood at the sea wall and gazed at the waves breaking on the gray beach. A horse-drawn carriage with a family of tourists clip-clopped by, and, at the end of a long wharf, men stood in a line passing crates from a truck down onto a freighter.

I filled my pockets with mints I bought from a little girl in a red dress sitting behind a tray of candy and cigarettes. I waved at the wisecracking women leaning over the disco balcony, turned the corner and passed a man sitting on a wooden stool under a tree. He offered me a fresh coconut, the top chopped open and a pink straw inserted for the milk. I stepped around various spent green husks littering the street, and walked up the shady Calle la Calzada.

I veered toward the side of the street that smelled less of pigs, paused briefly to watch boys practicing baseball. Farther up, I lighted a cigar and waited for a parade of marching girls and drumming boys to make their way past the Iglesia de Guadalupe, where the real William Walker’s retreating troops held out before fleeing the burning city in 1856.

Róger is a handsome, dark-eyed, dark-haired young man, with a degree in industrial engineering, but inclinations to go into business for himself. He was a boy when the film ”Walker” was shot here in 1987, and, like many kids, he enthusiastically followed the filming of the various battle scenes around town.

I was bumming through the country at the time, and recruited out of a Managua bar to spend two weeks as an extra in Walker’s army. I barely appeared in the finished movie.

We set out in Róger’s car; he hadn’t driven a block when he stopped to talk to an old man on a concrete stoop, who gave us the name of another man who actually worked on the film. We drove on, passing the towering blue facade of the Iglesia de San Francisco, connected to the Antiguo Convento de San Fransciso.

The convent’s history mirrors the phoenixlike story of the city. Built in 1529, it was destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt over the centuries by the likes of the pirate Henry Morgan, William Walker, the United States Marines in the 1920’s and the United States Army engineers studying canal possibilities in the 1930’s. It has recently been restored again with the help of the Swiss government.

Inside was a museum with exhibits on the lives of the indigenous Indians, displays of stone carvings and a courtyard with stately palms and stunning views of nearby Volcán Mombacho. But as long as nobody came along and sacked it again, I knew I’d see it all later. Róger and I were on a mission.

He stopped around the corner at the Plazuela de los Leones, where on Friday nights the city often puts on free concerts. The sky was quickly darkening to night, and the trees in the Parque Colón were alive with thousands of birds.

We went into the Casa de los Tres Mundos, a foundation and cultural center that houses an art, theater and music school, historical archive and concert hall, where Róger talked to a man named Dieter, who would direct us to somebody else.

We drove a dark street, then another and finally stopped where a woman sat on her sidewalk rocker in a pool of fluorescent light. A sleeping child lay on her lap. Róger got out and talked to her, then we drove on, around the corner. Suddenly there it was, an old white adobe building with a tile roof that sheltered a porch. The sign read ”Antiguedades El Palenque.”

We got out and knocked on the big wooden doors that I remembered spending a day kicking open for the cameras. A woman answered and let us in. I recognized the thick, whitewashed walls, the earth-colored ceramic tile floor, the dark wooden rafters. I recognized the darkened side room where Ed Harris, playing the deranged Walker, had paused in the heat of battle to sit down at a piano to play a hymn by candlelight.

During the contra war, I saw a phrase stenciled in red on every Granadian sidewalk and corner building: Aquí no se rinde nadie (”Here nobody surrenders”). I think it sums up the character of the city.

Since that dark time, unarmed, crisp-shirted policemen have replaced battle-weary soldiers patrolling the streets with AK-47’s. Schoolboys march with drums instead of guns, and rather than army fatigues, teenage girls wear crisp white blouses and navy skirts and cluster at the playground to watch sweaty boys play basketball.

The war wounded, middle-aged now, still gather their wheelchairs in the park, but some also pass out colorful brochures offering kayak rentals or jungle canopy tours. Shiny taxis and new S.U.V.’s have replaced tanks and troop trucks.

The city still has its ragged edges, its broken neighborhoods and hungry street kids who gather in front of restaurants to point at their mouths. But for the traveler it also has hotels and hostels at every price, some good bars with good music and lots of places to buy ice cream. The streetlights work; the water runs; and instead of shutting their doors against a night charged with madness and dread, Granadians now pull their rockers out on the sidewalk and chat with neighbors.

Granada was founded in 1524 by the Spanish explorer Francisco Hernández de Córdoba on the shores of what the Indians called Cocibolca (Lago Nicaragua), a freshwater lake some 87 miles long, connected by the San Juan River to the Caribbean Sea. On our trip in July 2003, my wife, Rosalie, our three young daughters, Anna, Margi and Mary, and I had rooms at the Hotel El Maltese, on the lake, where you can hear the waves breaking on the beach and keep your eyes fixed on the blue horizon for approaching pirate ships. We also stayed at the dark and stately Hotel Alhambra, where guests sit in rockers on the front porch and observe the activity in the Parque Colón across the street. On our last night we were at the lovely Hospedaje Italiano. As afternoon ends and the shadow of Volcán Mombacho creeps over the city, you can relax on the front stoop, with a bowl of the best ice cream in Nicaragua and watch the streets flood with uniformed schoolkids.

We took excursions to the smoking crater of Volcán Masaya; we glided on cables between the crowns of giant ceiba trees over coffee shrubs on the skirt of Volcán Mombacho. We swam in the clear Laguna de Apoyo, ate good pizza at Tele Pizza, and, on the balcony of La Gran Francia Hotel, Rosalie and I discovered the joy of Flor de Cana Gran Reserva rum. We ate a potato-and-beef burrito in the Hotel Central and a beautiful filete de guapote en salsa de maracuyá in El Zaguán, behind the Granada cathedral.

But the best part of Granada was the unexpected people we met and the places they took us. One morning, my daughters and I walked in the park along the lakefront. A man named Santos rode up on his bicycle and asked if we wanted a boat ride to explore Las Isletas, an archipelago of some 360 islands in Lake Nicaragua, just south of the city. We did, so he told us to follow his son, El Guapo (the handsome one), age 14, who led us along the empty beach past chickens and goats to a lone tree, where he instructed us to sit in the sand and wait while his father’s boat made its way across the choppy bay to pick us up.

On board, we spent about an hour motoring slowly among the tiny islands. We circled one with monkeys that leaned out from the treetops to watch us. We passed white herons on rocks, and men in water to their knees throwing spread nets. We wound past yachts moored by fortress vacation homes, dugout canoes tied in front of stick shacks and tourists paddling yellow kayaks.

At lunchtime we docked at a little outdoor restaurant on an island called Corre Viento. While Santos and El Guapo napped in the boat, my daughters and I sat at one of the brightly painted tables listening to Spanish love songs on a boom box until a running boy tripped on the wire and disconnected the speaker. The sky was overcast, and the lake spread gray to the eastern horizon. We ate rice and beans and chicken, and drank cold soft drinks and beer.

We were the only diners, so the man who served us briefly joined us. He was in his 40’s, I guessed, and all Nicaraguans in their 40’s have a story that takes a turn because of the long civil war. I asked him his, and he told me that he was originally from Managua, but after his time in the army, he came to the islands for peace and serenity and never left. He married the daughter of the people who owned this restaurant, the Doña Justa, and he and his wife now had two sons. He pointed with his chin to the boy in the shorts who had met our boat.

I make jewelry, he said, and from his shirt pocket he pulled a tiny bamboo bracelet that fit around my youngest daughter’s wrist.

She smiled and I offered to pay, but the man waved his hand. I don’t make them for money, he said. It’s something I do for love.

David Allan Cates is a short-story writer and author of a novel, ”Hunger in America” (Simon & Schuster).

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Volunteering in Nicaragua

April 16, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

As in many countries, there are many local and international organizations operating throughout Nicaragua that welcome the assistance and voluntary work that is offered by students, tourists and the concerned public. Voluntary work in Nicaragua can be done on a short and long term basis depending on the volunteer, the organization and the local needs .Most volunteer programs last only a few weeks, with many people sign up for voluntary work during their annual leave or between semesters. The programs not only enrich the lives of the local citizenry by providing much needed services also offers volunteers the rewarding opportunity to visit and explore their host country.

There are numerous youth programs currently operating in Nicaragua with most of the sponsored programs lasting approximately five to eight weeks each session. Youth centers support the most underserved children of Nicaragua and help provide much needed educational programs. They also fulfill nutritional and dietary needs by providing balanced meals and health care assistance.

International volunteer organizations offer a wide choice of countries where their volunteers can serve with expeditions available throughout Central and Latin America.

Some of the volunteer programs offered in Nicaragua by local and international organizations include teaching English as a second language, arts and crafts education, music classes and sports. Often, volunteers can choose the location and subjects that would like to teach. Most of the youth programs and volunteer centers are located in Granada.

In Nicaragua, one of the most popular organizations is called Global Vision International. It has different divisions with volunteers that provide educational, community, and conservation programs for local Nicaraguans. Conservation programs are especially popular amount volunteers because the protection of endangered animals is an important part of local culture. For most Nicaraguans being educated about the importance of the wildlife by foreign volunteers helps sustain the fragile ecosystems in the natural habitats of both flora and fauna.

Other volunteer organizations operating in Nicaragua include Volunteers for Peace which offers short term programs that include projects relating to social services, the elderly, youth and children, farming, education, construction, housing, archaeology, HIV/AIDS and other important projects affecting the Nicaraguan people. Volunteers for Peace supports more than 250 such projects and is especially designed for younger volunteers between the ages of fifteen to seventeen. However, most other volunteer projects have a minimum requirement of eighteen years of age.

Another volunteer organization, Grassroots Youth and Education focuses on the education of the youth. Its staff offers choir, photography, music, science, reading, environmental and health programs. In some programs, foreign volunteers must have a strong command of the Spanish language with a minimum requirement of speaking, reading and writing English as a prerequisite for acceptance.

Voluntary programs and projects, made possible by organizations like Volunteers for Peace and Grassroots Youth and Education, are important to the social, educational and economic progress of Nicaragua and many other countries. So, if you are planning a vacation and want to make a difference in someone’s life please consider a volunteer programs and make a difference in the lives of others in developing countries like Nicaragua..

Source: http://www.nicaragua.com/blog/volunteering-in-nicaragua 

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Casa Sacuanjoche is now renting rooms

April 16, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

Renovated, centrally located colonial home with three rooms for rent. Separate floor (2nd floor)

Thinking in doing a volunteer job in Granada, Nicaragua? Staying with us will make your volunteering experience even more satisfactory.

For more info about our rates, please click here

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Nicaragua: A Wonderful Spot

April 16, 2008 by sacuanjoche.

Central American country is a lot more than coffee and bananas

By Jerry Hall
Daily Record Columnist

Before my recent trip to Nicaragua, much of my knowledge of that country came from lyrics to an old Guy Lombardo song — “Managua, Nicaragua, what a wonderful spot/There’s coffee and bananas and a temperature hot.”

Sure enough, they grow coffee and bananas and it hit 94 degrees while we were in the Suyapa Beach area. It had been 104 the day before and people were thankful for the “cold front” passing through.

However, Nicaragua is a lot more than coffee, bananas and hot weather. Surprisingly, we encountered windy, chilly conditions in the Miraflor cloud forests, where a coat felt good. We also saw active volcanoes, floated around lovely islets in immense Lake Nicaragua, enjoyed a cascading waterfall and stood on golden Pacific beaches with a boisterous surf. We saw squirrels, iguanas, monkeys and butterflies, bright-blossomed trees, delicate orchids and big fields of cabbages, pineapples and beans.

Along the way, we spotted 201 bird species, which set a new record for our particular Elderhostel program, “The Birds of Nicaragua.” The previous record had been 200 species. While we saw some great tropical exotics – three-wattled bellbird, turquoise-browed motmot and blue-throated goldentail hummingbird — the little bird that put us over the top was a purple martin.

Birds from the U.S. over-winter in Central and South America and it’s possible some of the birds we saw on this trip — scissor-tailed flycatchers and painted buntings, for example — might be arriving in Texas during the coming months.

Our group of 14, all members of the Wimberley Birding Society, visited Managua, Jinotega, Esteli, Leon and Granada on a nine-day tour. We traveled by bus around Nicaragua, which covers some 50,000 square miles, almost as large as the state of Oklahoma. We didn’t get over to the Caribbean side. The country has a limited number of good roads and some parks and natural areas can only be reached via rocky, dusty, pot-holed trails.

Tourism infrastructure is rustic in spots – modern toilets are scarce outside cities and dogs and chickens have the run of the place in rural cafes. Unfortunately, the country has a major litter problem and in some areas plastic and paper garbage lines the roads and highways.

On the plus side, the people are friendly and I enjoyed the food, especially a dish called “Old Indian” which featured a combination of native specialties ranging from sausages and fried bananas to sliced beef and melted cheese. Also good: Fish with garlic, grilled steaks, chicken with jalapeno sauce, pickled onions and all sorts of fresh fruit drinks. And we had a lot of rice and beans

Extensive research revealed Victoria was the best local beer and seven-year-old Flor de Cana rum was a fine sipping beverage. Prices were most reasonable and the exchange rate was about 19 cordobas to the dollar. The German immigrant influence is felt in positive ways, witness the excellent beers, the September Polka Festival at Matagalpa and the attractive Bavarian-styled buildings at Selva Negra.

Just as the song promised, Nicaragua produces coffee and bananas. Both were superb. Check out www.organiccoffeebeans.com or call 1- (877) 543-110 to order organic Nicaraguan Jinotega coffee at $7.95 a pound.

On a boat trip among the many small islands in Lake Nicaragua, our guide jumped ashore, climbed a tree and brought back several ripe, delicious mangoes. We skipped the scheduled rum and cigar factory tours, and instead visited a goat cheese cooperative. I purchased some sweet local honey and a big jar of rose of Jamaica-flavored organic marmalade, which I have yet to open.

Masaya National Park offered the chance to look down directly into the smoking crater of an active volcano. Signs advised people with asthma and respiratory problems to take care and luckily the wind blew the vapors away from us. You can also climb up 177 steps and get a panoramic view of volcanoes and the surrounding countryside, marked with ancient and recent lava flows.

Barn swallows, parakeets and black vultures actually live in holes and crevices inside the active volcano crater. Brave birds.

At Chocoyero Nature Reserve, we walked to a crystal-clear, 80-foot tall waterfall and saw and heard hundreds of chittering-chattering Pacific parakeets flying in to roost for the night. Our guides provided chilled bottles of wine and we sipped good Chilean vintages to the sounds of splashing water and squawking green birds. Neat.

If you’d like to visit a country with intense biological diversity, friendly people and the largest expanse of virgin cloud forest in Central America, I recommend a visit to Nicaragua. Most libraries carry international Elderhostel catalogues or visit www.nicaragua.com for general information.

Guy Lombardo was right – it’s a wonderful spot.

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