Head for the hills!

We'd heard about a nice river canyon to visit near the town of Somoto back up near the border with Honduras (don't worry, a different bit of Honduras from before but we are going back on ourselves a bit). Apparently there are also some lush pockets of rainforest to see as well. Let's go!

We saddled up and rode out of town, all the way to the bus station! We'd studied a topographical map on the wall of a bar and by cross referencing this with info gleaned from other cyclists blogs learnt that there was a 110km hot, barren plain to cross first. We didn't fancy riding that and certainly weren't going to do it just to keep you lot happy :-)

We installed ourselves on the back seat of the bus and got ready for a jolly old ride

https://vimeo.com/153176244?utm_source=email&utm_medium=vimeo-cliptranscode-201504&utm_campaign=29220

2 and a half hours later we were still going and the enthusiasm had waned a tad.

https://vimeo.com/153176209?utm_source=email&utm_medium=vimeo-cliptranscode-201504&utm_campaign=29220

We did see a smoking volcano though which goes down as a first in my book. That perked us up a bit

3.5 hours after setting off we finally arrived at the dusty junction town of San Isidro. We now had 30km more to go to reach the town of Esteli, our destination for the day.

To claw back some meagre credibility Kate encouraged us to ride although I wasn't really feeling much like it. "C'mon, porky pig fatty" she said in a 'text book' encouragement way. "All you've done for 10 days is sit about waffling to people, put some bloody effort in you lazy buggar". Kate, as I'm sure you'll all realise if you know her didn't say a word of the above, she just looked at me with that look and I had a little talk with myself.

It actually turned out to be a nice ride. 3 hours in total of enough uphills to 'earn' a beer or 2 and enough downhill to remind us that Newton does still love us.

Funny isn't it? If I had anything more interesting and important to say I could have summarised the above in one sentence, sorry!

Oh, the only other thing I can add is that last night at dinner we saw a local bloke tipping salt into his beer. The food here is all very salty and I guess things begin to taste a bit bland without a little dash of sodium chloride. Whilst on the subject, they can't believe that we choose the drink the coffee without sugar....

They also seem to choose some pretty odd things to tie their stages to