Biking days: Granada, Nicaragua to Liberia, Costa Rica (184 km /114 miles)

Pretty field of young sugar cane just outside Granada

Biking day 1: Granada to Rivas, 68 km (42 miles)
We left at 5 am for Rivas this morning. It was 68km in total. We had been riding for half an hour when Craig realized that he forgot his backpack at the hostel, which is full of his money, passport, etc.  So he had to go back.  I really didn´t want to go back cause it had been a slight incline the whole way and I was sweating and the sweat was irritating my rash on my face (rash is of unknow origen and showed up while I was in Leon).  So I stayed on the side of the highway near a busy intersection and read my book while he went back.  There were lots of people riding by on their bikes on the way to work, and I felt safe enough.  Craig was able to get back quickly since it was downhill into the city.  We continued on as did the slight incline for another hour or so.  The rest of the way was flat farmland!  But we had to battle with the deadly combination of wind and semi trucks again. :(  I´m starting to wonder if the wind is going to be going against us the rest of the way.  I have a mini heart attack every time I hear a semi coming. Despite the wind we made pretty good time.  We rolled into Rivas at 11 and got a cheap hotel along the highway.

Our next destination is Liberia, Costa Rica, but that was close to 200 km from Granada, so we decided to break it up into 3 days, so we could be done pretty early and be out of the heat.  So since we arrived to Rivas we decided to take a day trip to the beach town of San Juan del Sur.  It is only a 45 minute bus ride, and at under $1 it was well worth it.  The beach was deserted and we quickly found out why, the wind was creating a sand storm.  We stayed for a few hours thinking we might even out our lovely tan lines.  The beach was pretty, a horseshoe shaped cove with green hills on either side and clear water of varying shades of blue and turquiose.  It reminded me of a lot of beaches I have been to in Costa Rica.  The water was freezing though!  I have yet to experience this in Central America, maybe it has to do with the time of year.  We layed on the beach, got coated by the sand storm (which was actually a painful pelting), then would jump in the water.  This happened 3 times, then we were ready to go.  Even with the rinsing off in the water we were still coated in sand!  We are now back in Rivas preparing for the next days riding.  The trip to the beach was a nice way to pass the afternoon out of the heat of the highway.

San Juan del Sur

San Juan del Sur

I have sandle, ankle, calf and thigh tan lines!

Sand everywhere!

Updated 03/17/2012
Biking Day 2:  Rivas to La Cruz, Costa Rica, 57 km (35 miles)

We had wind again leaving Rivas, but it wasn´t too horrible.  The ride to the border was fairly easy over low rolling hills, but we were tired from the day before.  It is hard doing multiple days in a row.  We were along Lake Nicaragua most of the way, and rode through lovely farm land with golden hills of hay, we went over tons of rivers running in and out of the lake and also rode through a neat wind mill farm.  I was very excited to see the windmills, there were at least 30 of them and I have never been that close to them, they are huge!  So it took us quite a long time to get through it, each windmill blade is as big as a semi truck!

An annoying thing about the day was we didn´t have a whole lot of shade, but the wind kept us from getting too hot.  And there were tons of little white bugs in the air, they kept getting in my face, behind my sunglasses, and I had tons of dead ones stuck to my sticky sunscreened skin!  It was gross!

That is not moss on the tree, it is tons of cactus that grow on trees! We saw lots of these. :)

Windmills with citrus trees

Crossing the border was pretty easy.  We had to pay $2 each to leave Nicaragua, but nothing to enter Costa Rica.  We got harrassed a bit by the immigration worker on the Costa Rican side, cause technically you´re supposed to show proof of onward transportation out of the country.  The bicycles were not a good enough form of transportation.  I booked my flight home a few days ago, but I didn´t have printed copy.  I took a photo of the computer screen when I booked the ticket, so I would know my flight info.  The guy didn´t seem too happy with the photo, but he let it slide.  We had heard that some people are forced to buy a bus ticket if they can´t prove they have onward transport.  That would have been annoying!

Entering Costa Rica, the scenery changed instantly.  It was undeforested tropical forest!  I don´t know that we have ridden though any land like this that hasn´t been altered.  It was quite refreshing!  Also the forest helped keep the winds from impeding us to much.  We we quickly met by unwanted hills. :(  I had to take a lot of breaks, but we still made it to La Cruz before 11.  We immediately had lunch, cause I was about to drop dead!  Then we found a hotel in town.  We were surprised to find that La Cruz is on a cliff overlooking several beautiful coves of beaches.  Because it is above the ocean, it was incredibly windy!

View from La Cruz

We decided to head down to the beach.  We had the bus driver pick a beach for us.  It was an hour ride, and it was over dirt road and somewhat inland, so we couldn´t see the beaches as we passed the turn offs for them. We passed by a lot of beaches but the driver had us go all the way to the end, probably because he wanted us to pay the full fare!  It ended up being a 4km walk from where we got off the bus.  We probably would have chosen one of the other beaches if we had known it would be such a walk.  We ended up getting a ride part way by a German couple in a rental car.  Once there we found that we were just about the only ones on the beach.  It was a pretty little cove with white sand, turquoise water and it was lined with cactus and frilly green trees!

Our fun at the beach was short lived.  Within minutes of entering the water Craig was stung by a sting ray!  He said it was some of the worst pain he has felt!  It was bleeding quite a lot. :(  We had no bandaids or anything to clean it up with and we had to walk the 4km back, cause the Germans had already left.  I felt really bad, but I am glad it was not me, since I don´t tolerate pain well, and probably would not have been able to do the walk back.  Once back to the bus stop we had an hour to wait for it to come back and then the hour ride back into La Cruz.  It really sucked. :(

Playa El Jobo (pronounced Hobo!!)

Cactus on the beach!? How cool!!

Biking Day 3: La Cruz to Liberia, 59 km (37 miles)

It was sooo hard to wake up.  The alarm went off and 4:30 and we decided to turn it off and get up at 5:30 instead.  At 5:30 it was still hard to get up and we contemplated staying in La Cruz another night, but we managed to get out of bed.  The wind was whipping so loudly outside that is sounded like the roof was going to blow away, so we weren´t real motivated to get going.  It took us awhile, but we were finally on the road by 6:30.  To our surprise the wind wasn´t as awful as we thought it would be.  It was mostly a cross wind that sometimes changed direction to help us and sometimes went against us.  We quickly found out that the semi truck drivers here are much nicer and pass us slowly and give us lots of room, so no scary wind vortex!  That was quite a relief.  No heartattacks for me today. :)  We had slight incline and rolling hills for the first two hours as the road curved through tropical dry forest (which looks like rain forest that hasn´t been watered).  As we came out of the forest we had a nice long gradual downhill and went into an open plain filled with fields of cows and horses.  It was very pretty, the grasses in the fields were different shades of red, yellow and green.  The open area made lots of room for wind though. :(  It was mostly a cross wind but sooo strong we were blow off the road on quite a few occasions. We were leaning so far left just to stay on the road, if the wind had decided to just stop we´d certainly have fallen over!  Most of the rest of the way into Liberia was flatish, but for 30 km or more we dealt with that wind and it wasn´t enjoyable!  About a kilometer outside of Liberia we spotted the golden arches of McDonalds!  It is scary how excited I was too see them,  I pedaled my butt off that last kilometer and upon arriving enjoyed a McFlurry and fries in the air conditioning!  It was like heaven.

We are staying at a really neat hotel called Casa Real.  The decorations are super neat antique things.  The tv stand in our room is an old sewing table!  I put a few pictures below.  We will be here 2 days.  Tomorrow we will hike around Parque Nacional Rincon de La Vieja.  And the next day we will probably visit Playa del Coco.

Sitting area, Casa Real

The toilet paper holder is a meat grinder!

Craig was in pain all day, but he survived :-/

Granada, Nicaragua

We spent a total of 5 days based out of Granada.  Granada is a colonial town in which main attraction is the architecture.  It sits on the shores of Lake Nicaragua (one of the largest lakes in the world) and is surrounded by volcanos.  It´s a lovely place to relax.  But as I have mentioned, Craig and I are not the best as relaxing, we like activity. We had big plans but really accomplished very little. A lot of our time was spent at the hostel (Hospedaje La Libertad) being bored, and of course eating!


We did one tour to Las Isletas, which are a chain of over 350 little islands in Lake NIicaragua.  It is thought that they were created by the lava flow from the eruption of nearby Volcan Mombacho.  Nowadays rich people have houses on the islands.  There are also some subsistence fishermen that live on the islands.  I didn´t have high hopes for the tour, but it was a very nice ride on the boat.  It was interesting seeing all the fancy houses, and we saw lots of pretty trees as well.  We stopped on one of the islands to enjoy a coconut freshly cut from the palm tree.  We got to visit an old Spanish fort and we saw the sun set over Granada.  The tour was only $15, not a bad price.  We also saw lots of mango trees full of fruits and I got to have a few fresh mangos!  The trees we see along the highways have already had the fruit removed, so we never see ripe ones.

To keep me from being so bored, I cooked us quite a few meals in our hostel.  We were able to buy most of our ingredients in the market, which is like a daily farmers market.  It´s quite neat, just about every town has one.  We got eggs, beans, cheese, avocado, and plantains.  One of the days we were walking back with some fresh cheese, 6 eggs and a pepper all in the same bag, and the handle broke.  Of course every egg in there broke as it hit the ground.  We manged to  keep them all contained and I spent a long while separating out the shells when we got back. It was good for a laugh and gave me something to do. :)

One of the days we were in Granada we took a bus to visit Leon, which is another colonial town about 2 hours away.  We had planned to stay two days there and visit the San Jacinto volcanic mud pools.  Since it is the dry season, they were dried out. :(  I was rather disappointed, I had wanted to roll around in the mud!  Leon is nowhere near as impressive as Granada, and we arrived on a Monday, which I apparantly a day when most things are closed!  So we only stayed one day.

There are definitely neat things to see around Granda, but nothing is cheap.  Most of it is on guided tours.  I would have liked to visit the Volcan Mombacho biological reserve and also to have gone to Volcan Masaya at night and watched it erupt.  I will just have to come back one day. :)

Eskimo has the monopoly on ice cream in Nicaragua and it is sooo awful that  even I won´t eat it!  We tried it twice and never had it again

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View up Calle La Calzada, Granada

Lago de Nicaragua

Granada from La Merced church

Me in La Merced bell tower.  Wearing my $1 1980s jordache shorts from the american clothing store.

Central Park, Granada

Guanaste Tree, Las Isletas

Fancy house and boat, Las Isletas

Monkey that were left on one of the islands!  They can´t swim away!

Granada

Leon, Central Park

Leon

Nicaragua has the prettiest money!

Biking Day: Esteli to Granada (170 km / 105 miles)

Day 1: Esteli to Tipitapa (130 km / 80 miles)

We didn´t sleep well since we were so annoyed about the taxi incident from the night before, but we got going at 5 am anyway.  We had a bit of incline the first hour or so then a long down hill that opened into a large agricultural plane.  The wind was whipping like crazy in the bottom of this valley, and of course it was going against us.  It gusted so hard at some points that it felt like we could barely peddle, and at some points I felt like I would be knocked over.  It was coming at us slight from an angle so it easily could have knocked me over.  So instead of enjoying the flat, it felt like pedeling uphill.  The wind combined with the passing semi trucks and non existant shoulder was quite scary, their tail wind was like a vacuum which first pushed us off the road and then sucked us back in.  Luckily we only had to continue 15 km like this before the highway turned and the wind was pushing us.  We had made it past the junction where we had got the taxi from the previous evening and also crossed over the protest.  Vehicles still weren´t being let though, but we didn´t actually see any protestors just a line of tires blocking the road in a few different places, and mass chaos of vehicles waiting behind the lines.  I don´t understand why they didn´t just drive over them and continue on.  We didn´t mind though cause we had the road to ourselve for quite a long time.  The road was newly paved, which made for smooth riding, and the wind decided to change direction and blow at us again, but it wasn´t so bad.  We stayed cool because of it and made good progress.  Around the 70km mark and only 5 hours in we took a 2 hour break for lunch at a truck stop.  We didn´t have high hopes for good food but it was actually amazing!  We got grilled chicken which came out on a sizzling iron plate, with plantain chips, salad and rice. :)  Usually this far in I start to get tired, but I was doing really well, perhaps I am finally building my endurance and becoming fit!  So we kept going and going over gently rolling hills.  We passed through a few small towns, none of which had hotels, so it was a good thing I was feeling so good.  In one of the small towns we saw lots of people on the sides of the road holding iguanas by the tail, several at once.  I presume they were trying to sell them, and this may have been our one chance to eat iguana, but we continued on.  At almost the half way point we went down a long grade out of the mountains, the wind was so strong that we had to do some downhill pedeling!  We had a lovely view of the endless flats ahead and the gigantic Lago de Managua.  The lower we got, I could feel the temperature of the wind changing, it became a hot desert heat!  Good bye cool mountain air, hello 4 am wake up calls.  At the bottom we had planned to stop at a town called Las Maderas cause it was at the halfway point, but again no hotels.  Still feeling great we decided to continue all the way to Tipitapa, 45 km away.  It was mostly flat with some small hills.  There was nothing between the two towns and I was wishing for some sort of refreshment, such as a watermelon.  Then out of nowhere there was a road side watermelon stand!  It was so exciting.  We stopped for 30 minutes and split one of the best watermelons we´ve ever had!  We continued on and the wind pushed us the rest of the way to Tipitapa.  With the wind pushing as, we had a quite different experience with the semi trucks.  I still have a small panic attack when I hear them coming but instead of knocking us all over the road, the tailwind simply gives us a forward boost, it´s actually kind of fun!  We arrived an hour before sunset amazingly still not worn out from the biking!  That is the longest disntace we have gone so far in a day.

Lago de Managua

Day 2: Tipitapa to Granada (40 km / 25 miles)

Only 40 km! I remember when 40 km would have seemed like an insane distance to bike.  It is strange how your perspective can change!  A few years ago, I used to carpool with my ex boyfriend David.  He commuted from San Diego to Orange County every day for work, and I would have him drop me and my bike off in Dana Point and I would ride the 27 miles along the coast to Huntington Beach to visit Shannon and father.  There were a few hills along the way and depending on how windy it was, it would take me between 2 and 3 hours.  I used to do this ride because I wanted to go visit without the environmental impact of using all that gasoline.  I remember I´d arrive about to drop dead, probably more mentally than physically, because at the time I thought this was a long way so I in turn felt tired because I thought I should!  Now it´s nothing.  In fact, I can´t wait to get home to San Diego and ride my bike from Pacific Beach to Oceanside.  It would be about 60 miles, and with my new perspective, it is very doable in a day, as long as I take the train back.

So yesterday was quite an easy day of biking.  With one break to buy water, we made it in under 3 hours.  It was low rolling hills, but it was pretty easy.  We arrived to Granada around 9 and used the rest of the day to explore the town and of course eat lovely foods.  I am on a mission to try all the street foods!  Nicaragua seems to have a far greater variety of street food than any other country so far.  I fought tiredness all day cause I didn´t sleep very well the night before (two nights in a row of bad sleep!).  I made it to 9pm, falling asleep instantly and sleeping soundly all the way to 8 am!  I feel excellent today. :)  We shall do some more exploring around Granada today, either Volcan Mombacho or Las Isletas.

Matagalpa, El Castillo Del Cacao and Selva Negra

We let outselves sleep in from the somewhat tiring biking day from Ocotal, so we didn´t get to Matagalpa until almost 11.  We pretty much squandered the day cause we didn´t plan ahead.  That was ok though, days of rest are nice.  We ate lots of food, did research internet and did some reading.  We quickly found out the tour operators in town were a rip off unless you have a large group.  The larger the group the cheaper the tour, because the transportation costs are split.  It would have been just me for the weaving tour, and at $70 I decided it wasn´t worth it.  They also wanted to charge $30 for the chocolate tour!  In the lonely planet it says the entrance to the chocolate factory is $5, but says nothing else.  And on the website for El Castillo del Cacao under the visiting section, they have only a logo for Matagalpa Tours.  So I wasn´t sure if you could show up or not and if the $5 admission was only gonna get me into a gift shop or something.  I decided to try just showing up cause $5 is a whole lot better than $30. 

It ended up being just fine.  Craig hadn´t planned on going with me, but in the end decided to and was glad he did.  We also had an older Canadian lady tag along with us.  We met her in our hostel in Matagalpa and her Spanish was awful.  I ended up being the translator for the tour.  It was a nice feeling to know my Spanish skills are still good enough that I could do a chocolate tour!

Below is a tour through the factory with pictures.

Yay! I´ve been waiting months to come here!

It all starts with cacao (that´s the chocolate fruit) beans/grains (don´t actually know how they are called in English! grains in Spanish!).  At this particular factory they use locally grown cacao that is produced in the north of the country.  It is one of 3 factories in Nicargua, and the only one that makes dark chocolates! Apparently Nicaragua has the best quality cacao of Central America.  The trees need to be between 900 and 1200 meters of elevation for optimal growing conditions.

Granos de cacao

Once the beautiful organic chocolate grains have been acquired they are put in the machine below and toasted.  I don´t remember the exact temerature but it was somewhere near 100 degrees, and they stay in for 30 minutes.

Toaster

Once the grains are nice and toasty they crumble quite easily and are hand ground on one of these tradtional Mayan grinders.  The purpose of this step it to remove the shell from the grain.  There are only 3 ladies working in the factory and each day they do a different task, one day toasting, one day grinding and another day making chocolate!

Hand grinder

On the left are organic grains and on the right non organic, you can see the color difference!



Once all the chocolate has been crushed, it goes in a machine that blows air.  The heavy cocao goes to the bottom of the machine and the light shells are blow away.  Each batch is put through 3 times.  The shells are then composted.  There can be no more than 10% shell in the ground cacao for a good quality chocolate.  But their machine is so good that only 5% is left!

The machine below makes chocolate paste.  It is a mixture of just the toasted cacao and sugar.  No liquid is needed because the cacao is fatty enough.  So at this point you determine what percent of darkness you will make.  For 50% dark, you use half sugar half cacao, for 60% dark, you´d use 60% cacao and 40% sugar, etc.  The cacao and sugar go in the top (under the lid) and out the bottom comes paste.  Some companies, such as Hershey, buy just paste and do the rest in their own factories, other companies buy the cacao grains and do it all on their own.

This machine melts the chocolate paste and cools it.  This helps with keeping the chocolate from melting too much later, like when it is in your hand for example.

 The liquid chocolate is then taken from the machine and put in molds and frozen for 1 hour.

All the packaging is done by hand.  Each wrapper is individually made and sealed using a roll of poly propylene and a hot iron press thing.

Then the ladies hand place each label and glue them shut with glue sticks!

This is the factory from the outside, it´s really a castle!  How fun! :)

So many chocolates! I of course took a few off their hands!

After the chocolate tour we headed towards Jinotega to a German run farm called Selva Negra.  They grow coffee there and lots of other things.  They also happen to be on a lovely plot of land up in the cloud forest that includes a biological reserve full of hiking trails.  They also run a hotel and restaurant as well as youth hostel.  We decided to just come for the day and do some hikes.  We were charged a $4 entrance fee but that was fine cause they let you apply it to food in their restaurant.  We spent about 3 hours hiking.  It was gorgeous forest with lots of lovely trees, but super muddy.  It felt like walking on mashed potatoes!  After the hike, we enjoyed organic hamburgers in the restaurant.  I had coffee with my meal, even though it´s not something I normally enjoy.  But since I was on a coffee farm I gave it a try, and it wasn´t bad!

Coffee plants. very lovely surroundings

View of Matagalpa from the top of the hike

We were very muddy at the end

Craig in a super cool tree.  We have pics in about 15 similar trees

It was about 5 when we left Selva Negra.  We got a ride in the back of a truck the 1.5 km back out to the highway.  And we were back in Matagalpa by 5:45.  We barely missed the last bus to Esteli.  So we got on a Managua bound bus and planned to get off at the junction with the Pan American Highway and get another bus on to Esteli.  Normally this would have worked, but some kind of agricultural protest was blocking buses coming from Managua.  So people were parked all around the juntion in there cars offering themselves as taxis!  We finally figured out what was going on and grabbed one.  They told us 100 cordoba all the way to Esteli (44km) for both of us and there were 2 others they were taking so this sounded reasonable.  When we got there however, the price jumped to 600!  (23 cordoba = $1 US) I didn´t want to argue with them and risk getting in a fight so we paid them. It sucks be we are lucky, if this is the only bad thing to happen to us all trip, we are very lucky.

We were up early the next morning on our 2 day ride to Granada.  More updates to come.

Ocotal to Esteli (82 km / 50 miles)

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.

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.

Tegucigalpa, Honduras to Ocotal, Nicaragua (155 km/96 miles)

View from the top of the first mountain pass outside Tegucigalpa

Pine forests along the way to Danli

The road I almost fell off of

Billboards are painted on cliffs all over down here, kinda annoys me.

Scenery coming into Nicaragua

Biking Day 1: Tegucigalpa to Danli (105 km)

We have been threatening for awhile now to start our bike days at 4 am, and on this day it actually happened.  We got going at 4:15 knowing we had a tough day of mountains and hills ahead of us.  We had a mountain pass to go over to get out of Tegucigalpa in addition to an hour of riding through the city just to get to the base of the mountain.  It was actually rather cold out, but the uphill riding made a jacket not necessary.  The cool temperature also made it possible for me to make it up and over the mountain pass without having to get off and push once, woohoo!  Our scenery was almost entirely pine forest.  You would never expect to see pines in Central America, but we have seen them in every country so far and they are even the national tree in Honduras.  I never noticed them on previous trips but I wasnt interested in plants before!  The mountain pass was surprisingly not all that difficult, but it was still early and I had lots of energy!  The sun was barely up when we made it to the top and it was freezing!  I had to put on my jacket and dream of leg warmers!  We were rewarded with the longest lovliest downhill we have ever had!  It was awesome.  We had a few more rolling hills then took a long stop at a road side restaurant for breakfast, it was still only 9:30. :)  We were at the halfway point at the restaurant and were told that we would only have one more hill to go over the get to Danli.  That was definitely not true and I began to lose energy quickly.  We had lots of rolling hills and another area of mountain pass.  I began having to get off the bike and push.  The road turned to crap and there wasnt much shoulder for us to ride on.  At one point the road just crumbled away off a cliff, narrowing the road to one lane.  As I was right next to the drop off, a semi came barreling by me giving me very little space between it and the edge of the road.  I freaked out and slammed on my breaks and skidded and fell off my bike.  I really wasnt hurt, just scared.  One of my bags had popped off and was hanging over the edge of the drop off, and my bike was not far from it. Had I kept going, I am pretty sure that that the tail wind of the truck would have knocked me off the road.  It wasnt a huge drop off, but still not somewhere I wanted to be. So the uphills continued and I got more and more tired to the point where I was beginning to feel disabled.  Luckily the cool weather continued, and we even got rained on a little bit.  I am sure if it had been hot, I would have collapsed.  We made it out of the second large mountain pass and decided we would stop for the night in the next town, Jacaleapa, since I was so exhauted. It was like heaven seeing the welcome to Jacaleapa sign, but it was short lived, the town was too small and had not hotels. So we trudged on the final 10 km, over another pretty big hill to Danli.  We made it just before 5 and went to bed at 7!

Biking Day 2: Danli to Ocotal (50km)

We had ambitions of starting early again, but when 5 am rolled around we were nowhere near ready to get out of bed.  It didnt help that the bed caved in towards the middle and we didnt sleep all that well that night.  We slept in til after 8, bringing our sleep total to 13 hours! And we decided to get a real breakfast, so didnt get going until 9am.  It was somewhat hot out, but not to bad cause the wind was blowing.  It was only 50 km to Ocotal, but we knew we had a mountainous area to go over to get to the border station of Las Manos.  Except for the final 4 or so km of continous rather steep uphill to Las Manos, it was not as bad a we thought it would be.  I pushed my bike almost the whole way up the hill, Craig was able to ride the whole thing, I am envious!  It was gorgeous scenery at the higher elevations, coffee fields with banana trees mixed in, large tropical trees of varying colors, and the road sides were lined with flowers, bouganvilleas, hibiscus and even foxtail chenille.  The border crossing was easy.  We had to pay $12 each to enter Nicaragua, which was annoying.  Then the downhill from there was absolutely spectacular!  It was gorgeous, we still had the breeze, (which was warm like the Santa Anas we get in San Diego) beautiful clear skies and a downhill that went almost the whole remaining 20km to Ocotal.  As we came down in elevation we got into dry desert like landscape.

Once in Ocotal, we found a nice family run hotel on the main road, Hotelito San Martin, and relaxed for the night.  The owner of the  hotel was nice enough to let us store our bikes and bags there.  Yesterday took a 3 1/2 hour bus ride over dusty mountain roads to small town of Quilali.  We are here visiting some Peace Corps volunteers who Craig met in Alaska a few years ago.  I was nervous about spending time with people I didnt know since I can be shy, but they are great people and I have had a lot of fun and learned a lot about the Peace Corps.  They are a married couple that are teaching English classes, and also working on building a classroom out of plastic bottles! They are excited to have us, as they have not had any visitors the whole time they´ve been here, since the town is such a pain to get to.  Tonight we get to meet the host family they lived with for their first few months after being placed in this town .  They are making us a traditional Nicaraguan dinner! We got here yesterday afternoon and will leave tomorrow.

The biking continues to Esteli from Ocotal on Tuesday.  In Esteli we will store our bikes and take a bus to the highland town of Matagalpa to visit Selva Negra (eco-lodge) and El Castillo del Cacao, chocolate farm!  We have 760 miles down and 910 miles to go!  And it looks like mostly flat terrain for us the rest of the way on the interamericana!