Granada

6 July

We left Masaya Volcano National Park promptly at 8 am for the one hour drive over to Granada.  Norm made a point to tell us a couple of times that we would be detouring around the narrower streets in Granada as we navigate to the Tourist Park on Lake Nicaragua.  The Tourist Park is a fee park, but today was a free day for everybody to enjoy so it was more crowded than usual.  We didn’t think it was crowded at all, considering it was a Sunday.

Norm made arrangements for us to take a lake tour and horse drawn carriage tour of the city.  The lake tour was to show us a few of the volcanic islands that are now privately owned and the pricey homes.

The boat tour was better than we expected, considering our boat was the poorest looking one of the bunch with NO life jackets and only a 15 hp outboard engine, that our guide had to remove the cover to hand wind the pull cord.  But we made it back just fine.  Roger made the mistake of trying out his Spanish and so Sandra has made us make a pact that if the guide is supposed to speak English we aren’t to speak to the guide in Spanish.  It’s just something we need to remember, because Sandra’s Spanish is rudimentary.  Roger’s is getting a lot better.  When we are driving I frequently verify translations, to help improve his vocabulary. 

We saw an interesting bird nest colony and Roger was able to get a picture of one of the pod building birds.

  

There were several beautiful and expensive homes.  This picture shows a house that is owned by an American and comes complete with pet monkey house.

We had lunch at an “Indio” (local food) restaurant that our guide took us to.  Roger and Sandra had fried plantain with local fried cheese (white cheese that was very salty).  I had fried plantain with fried lake fish fritters.  Everything was good, although I liked my fish better than their cheese.    Roger bought our guide lunch as well.  He seemed to appreciate being included and we talked about cellphone service in Nicaragua.  Movistar has better coverage and is cheaper than Claro, but Claro has better technology and navigation (Internet) speeds.  There are only two companies in Nicaragua, as Tigo doesn’t have service in this country.  I’m sure tomorrow we’ll be in search of Gbits for connectivity.  Sandra has realized that now that she’s compressing pictures she doesn’t need nearly as many Gbits as she had previously bought.

After lunch our guide took us to one last stop on the tour.  There’s an island that has two types of monkeys on it.  The picture of the red monkey is sort of sad.  He suffered an electrical injury to his tail when he was young.  There’s one power pole on the island that connects two other islands.  If I had to guess the island is less than 1 acre.  The other type of monkey is the white face monkey.  There are less than 20 monkeys on the island and our guide wasn’t too clear on explaining how they got there or how they continue to thrive, because to us with such a small population inbreeding seemed like it would be a big problem.

Our two horse (in actuality more like 1.5 horses, since they were very scrawny) drawn carriage ride covered all the tourist sites in Granada.  It appeared to me that the three churches were having a competition on keeping up with each other in outward appearances, because all were freshly painted and looked well maintained.  The locals are also proud of the new Japanese financed hospital that they now have, that replaced the 1925 hospital.  The carriage ride was transportation that could have been handled a lot cheaper in a cab.  It all had to do with business with one of Norm’s amigos.

We stayed at the Granada Tourist Park right on Lake Nicaragua.  There were several cattle that decided to tour the park around 4 pm.  They ambled in front and behind our RV.

And finally, this picture is the body antenna that I had to pose in order to get Sandra's locator to upload to the satellite.  Of course a space weenie has to strike a weenie pose to get the necessary connectivity.  I hope you all are enjoying the tracking posts as well.