More than halfway

I've been sitting still at the computer at the hostel we are currently staying at for about thirty minutes now, and I cannot stop sweating. We are in Leon, Nicaragua and out of the mountains for the remainder of our trip. It is considerably warmer in the lowlands. 90 degrees, to be exact, but the online weather report tells me it feels like 99.

We are spending longer amounts of time in each city in Nicaragua, which is causing the days to kind of all blend together. It was easier to keep track of the things we did when we were hopping from place to place and activity to activity.

Now that we have been in Nicaragua for about a week, we have come up with a couple of differences that we have noticed between Honduras and Nicargua:

Honduras

• more mountains
• smaller cities
• less variety in the food
• very little diversity in the population

Nicaragua

• bigger, more up to date/commercialized cities (for example, I have seen two Payless shoe stores, one in Matagalpa and one in Leon)
• more diverse population (when compared to Honduras)
• strange vendors on buses
• attempting, by having trash cans on the sidewalks, to clean up the country. There is still trash/litter all over, but not nearly as bad as it was in Honduras.

Back to the strange vendors on buses in Nicaragua. Now, it is completely normal for people to board the bus with their bucket of goodies whenever the bus stops to let someone one. They walk up and down the bus a couple of times trying to sell their food/drink and get off a few stops later. This occurs in both Honduras and Nicaragua. However, Nicaragua has some more specialized vendors that board the buses. We have had many missionary men preaching for at least ten minutes (one even had a portable dvd player and played a short movie). We've had people selling the following items: face lotion, vitamins, pens, and something else that I'm forgetting at the moment. Now, all of this is comical in itself. BUT, somebody on the bus ALWAYS, without fail, buys one of the items! I'm pretty sure Nick and I are among the very few who do not give the missionary men money. Very, very different response from people here versus in the US.

Okay, back to the trip. We spent about three days in Matagalpa. A lot of the time was spent walking around the city. Monday we went to the chocolate factory, only to find out they weren't making chocolate on Monday (Lonely Planet did NOT inform us of this piece of information). Since the main reason we chose to come to Matagalpa was to go to the chocolate factory, we decided to go on Tuesday. I think we were a little let down by the whole thing. We were hoping to see the entire process of chocolate being made, from seed to bar, kind of like in a factory on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. This "factory" has two employees working a day. One day of the week they crack open the cacao seeds to get at the chocolate seed. The rest of the days the seeds go into machines, mix with sugar and then mix and mix and mix. We did buy a few bars, which were good, but not the best I've ever had.

After the chocolate factory we took a short taxi ride to the town of San Ramon. Lonley Planet had a short write up about this Co-op in San Ramon that lets you tour a coffee plantation, learn to make typical Nicaraguan food, see their farming, etc. We got dropped off at the Co-op headquarters, really had no idea who to talk to or what to do, but ended up getting set up to take a tour of a coffee plantation and then stay with a family who lives on the Co-op's grounds (something like that...). The coffee plantation was much like the chocolate factory, kind of a let down. It is not coffee season, so the only thing we could look at was unripe coffee plants. One of the best parts of the tour was when our guide knocked down some mangos from a tree and they were delicious. We stayed with a family in their "guesthouse" (they are set up with tourists often) and learned how to make corn tortillas. It was a neat experience, living for half a day with a rural Nicaraguan family, although we didn't think it was quite as neat as the $50 the lady totaled up as we were getting ready to pay and leave. Oh well.

Now we are in Leon, which is turning out to be a pretty neat city. There are a lot of beautiful churches and many different types of museums. The restaurants are full of variety, and the hostel we are staying at is full of backpackers (most of our hotels up until now have been pretty empty). Yesterday we took a 45 minute bus ride to the Pacific Ocean and spent the day at the beach. Today we went to an art museum and are about to take a roof top tour of the cathedral. We'll be in Leon until Monday and then Granada for about four days. In Granada we plan to attend a baseball game. It's nice being in the same city for a few days. Besides not needing to pack our bags and catch a bus all the time, it's nice to be able to cook our own meals in the hostel kitchen. I can't believe that in 17 days we will be on a plane heading back to the US.