Well here we are back in the land of the internet.....we arrived in San juan del sur on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua just north of the Costa Rican border broken and hungry.....it is a good few hours since we got here and we have fed ourselves back to life but everywhere is closed after the craziness of semana santa so it was down to the grocery store for crisps and cookies and cheese and a pack of tortillas all washed down with a nice bottle of the fiery Ron which we now love so much....it seems it is the only spirit you can get for a reasonable price and its not beer which is a good thing and you can only have so much of a good thing.................so we have been isolated and away from civilisation on the volcanic island of Ometepe which is on Lake Nicaragua, two volcanoes;one active and sending out big clouds of steam and ash which we kept our distance from and the other which is long extinct which has a lake in the top of the crater which we did hike up to with our friendly guide who has i¨m sure been refered to as laughing boy on acount of his humerous delivery and constant repartie:::at one point we thought he had abandoned us high on the slopes and indeed did seem unhappy to be there:::up in the cloud forest with the roar of the monkeys and the cry of the brightly coloured birdlife::::a smile came to his face on one occasion when we found an Iguana which after he dug it out of a hole ended up in his back pack, he claimed to be a vet but the next time we saw him he was slaughtering a pig so i have my doubts....plenty of relaxing days on the island, we stayed at 3 locations and we were there for a week and a half all together, partly because of the semana santa easter celebrations and the ensuing mayhem which has something to do with religion but by all accounts turns into something of a week of roman drunken orgy proportions, the part that would affect us being that the public transport system is seriously overloaded and all hotels and guesthouses treble their prices and are invarioubly booked up....so in short we decided to stay put on the island....before that in reverse order we were in Granada( amazing colonial town with good monkey related hostel and the other monkey related lakeside house we spent a day at by the other crater lake) We met some wicked folks from England who turned to originate from Notts and there was talk of Slayer and Nuclear Assault and assesing health through observing stools all over a couple of few beers at the bearded monkey hostel, before that of course we were in Leon, our spiritual home and another nice colonial city with loads of fiery history and of course a local volcano which is also still pretty fiery.....back to Ometepe...via a four hor ferry trip from Grenada on a ferry that could possibly sink sometime soon, packed and slow and very old and passing no safety requirements but full of character and definately characters.......they had a full kitchen set up down in second class and brought on all the raw ingredients for everyones dinner so they fired up all these cookers in the confined space which was already sweltering and fried hundreds of chickens right in front of us, families piled on top of other families and carried on like it was a big soap opera down there in the brig. We had to save an American girl who was being hassled by a young¨stud¨who couldnt take no for an answer and got pretty aggro.....it all fizzled out as we disembarked at Ometepe four hours later and he stalked off into the night as we rode off in the back of a pickup truck and the boat steamed on for another 10 hours overnight to the far end of Lake Nicaragua.....for us one night in Altagracia and then on to the little Finca on the side of the extinct volcano looking over at the smoking volcano...5 nights here including our 8 hour hike to the misty crater lake where a howler monkey pissed on our heads from above and then started to throw down stuff at us....at one with nature as we are we continued down and stayed in hammocks for the next 4 days....actully we ventured a little way back up the trail on our own a few days later where a snake fell or jumped, i´m not sure which yet, down from a tree and narrowly missed Siobhan....a theme that in fact continued today where a Mango fell out of a tree and actually hit Siobhan on the head in a bus queue....whats going on????
After five nights here in isolation we left for some human contact and arrived at Chaco Verde down on the edge of the lake on the way to Moyagalpa which is where you catch the ferry back to the mainland.....this place was cool and super cheap as we camped for the first time on the trip, right on the waters edge for 2 bucks a night!!! food was super nice, cooked in the house kitchen but after 5 days rice and beans can only be served in so many different variations.....on the second day here we were sitting reading our respective books in the sun by the waters edge....Siobhan-The picture of Dorian Grey, Me- Jude the Obscure....its all getting very high brow...anyway a guy pulls up on a bike with loaded panniers and bandana and surveys the lakeside scene and heads our way to scope out the chances of camping here too....obviously i´m excited by a guy talking English and riding a bike all loaded up for a big trip...not in fact knowing how big a trip he was actually doing....it turns out after a while of him being a bit cagey that he had left Hamburg 6 and a half years ago on the very same bike and was still going!!!!!

Waiting at the bus stop on the volcano island
Bad tempered geese at 6am