Nicaragua

What definitely shouldn't have been a full day of travel quite quickly turned into one!

We woke up early ish but were in no rush to get going on the short trip from Granada to Isla de Ometepe 50km away. Therefore we had some breakfast and played some pool at our hostel. We were glad to see the back of probably the worst pool table we've ever played on especially since, despite almost every game going down to the black, Dan beating me 5 sets to 0 in our 48 hour series.

From our hostel we took a 5 minute walk to find the local bus to Rivas, only to find there weren't any buses at the location. After speaking to a few locals at the market they directed us to the new bus stop where we found our bus. The buses in Central America don't run on any timetable and simply leave when they are completely full. We had to wait about 45 minutes for our bus to fill up before we eventually departed.

However, 10 minutes into the journey, our bus broke down. After 20 minutes on the roadside we realised this particular bus wouldn't be going anywhere soon so we had to get off. We then waited another half an hour for the next bus to Rivas to come along which we all piled on. At this point it was about 12:45pm so in the 2.5 hours since leaving our hostel we'd managed to travel 10 minutes down the road.

We arrived in Rivas and jumped straight into a taxi to San Jorge. This was straight forward enough although our driver was a bit erratic.

We got to the ferry terminal in San Jorge at 2:23pm, which was 3 minutes too late to catch the 2:30pm ferry. The next ferry was scheduled for 3:30pm but oh no this ferry had a mechanical failure so the next ferry we could actually board was at 4pm. We used this time wisely and called our friend Javi.

We boarded the packed ferry and eventually arrived at Omotepe, with one of its two volcanos towering ahead. We then had to take a tuktuk down the road to our hostel.

So, 2 buses, a taxi, a ferry, a tuktuk and 7 hours later we arrived at our hostel! It's a pretty decent hostel with great food and a good selection of drinks. So we had a few soft drinks and played some cards before settling down.

Not exactly a fun day but definitely another memorable one, which sometimes is what it's all about!

God speed Merseytravel.Les mer