Today we were supposed to get an early start again. We were shooting for 5, but slept in again. It´s really easy to not wake up at 4:30 in the morning when you don´t absolutely have to! It stayed fairly cool today, so there was no real need to leave early, but we won´t always be so lucky.
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| Tobaco |
We got going at 6:30 and went just about immediately into a mountain pass leaving Ocotal. It was about 15-20 km worth of ups and downs. Had it not been morning with cool temps and me having lots of energy, I probably would have been off of my bike pushing, but I managed to make it the whole way on the bike! I am getting better and better at the hills! After the mountain pass we had a long stretch of flats and slight downhills with only a few hills. Then we went down a giant hill into a valley. We rode along the bottom of the valley in a pretty flat area and kept expecting the mountains to part and let us out of the valley. No such luck, we had to go up the giantest mountain ever to get out! I was getting exhausted by this point, cause I was hungry. So I pushed the whole way, it was only about 4km of continous up, but that is too long for my legs to handle pedeling. It took me 45 minutes to walk it! From there it was only another hour to Esteli and was mostly flat, but I was tired. The wind was gusting on this last stetch, and the passing semi trucks were only making it worse, we were being blow around quite a bit! Because of the cliff incident a few days ago, I get nervous every time a semi passes me, it didn´t help that we had a miniuscule shoulder the whole way. The scenery today wasn´t particularly nice, lots of dry and dead looking stuff. I guess that´s what happens here in the dry season! One neat thing we saw were lots of fields of tobaco and lots of cigar factories. I had never seen a tobaco plant before and they are actually quite pretty, with big green leaves and pink/whiteish looking flowers.
The 82 km of distance today is an estimate. Google maps says the distance is 88km, but shortly after leaving Ocotal, we saw a kilometerage (we say mileage, does it work for kilometers too??) sign that said 78km, and the kilometer posts would lead me to believe that 78 was correct. I hate to think google maps could be wrong!
We arrived to Esteli around 2. It´s nice to be done so early. We found a super cheap (but way nice) hotel for $6! They have agreed to store our bikes for us for 2 days while we go to Matagalpa. We are going to stay at Selva Negra (a German run eco-lodge and coffee farm) for one night and in Matagalpa the next night. I will have to use a tour operator to visit El Castillo del Cacao (chocolate farm and factory) which will include a tour of Finca Esperanze Verde coffee farm and a trip to Wanube Falls. I am very excited! I might also do a tour to the small village of El Chile, where women still practice traditional weaving methods, it might be neat to see. We will be high up in the mountains and be enjoying lots of lush green landscape and cool mountain air. :)
I did say it was mostly flat the rest of the way down to Panama, but I suppose I left out that fact that the flats don´t start until we get down by Granada. So that means we will only have one more day of difficult cycling. But being in the flats means it will be hot! So we better start getting up at 4 am again! Starting this week temperatures are going to start getting higher than we have yet experienced. :( At least Matagalpa is high enough that we can enjoy a few more days of cool before plunging into the heat.
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