Trip to Grenada

Last week (end of April) we decided to leave our beach and camping for a one-night trip to Grenada – once the capital city of Nicaragua, but still definitely a cultural capital of the country. The 80 km trip took us about 5 hours on 3 different means of transport. First we took a taxi collectivo with some people from our camping to San Juan (the camping is not easily accessible , you need to have a Jeep to get here otherwise you can get stuck on one of the roads). On the way we noticed a chicken bus driving to Rivas through the local villages. It was not a good choice as we could have taken a faster bus from San Juan. We travelled with the locals in a bus which we don't know until now why it was working, with two big stinky fish and stinky buckets of god-knows-what- was-there-inside substance. It took us two hours during which I was chatting with an older Nicaraguan man about life in general. After this trip we took another chicken bus-this time a long distance bigger version of the previous one and after two and a half hours we reached Grenada: a colonial town founded in 1524. It is nicely-located at the foot of the Momacho Volcano to which many trips are organised from Grenada. As we are not architecture freaks we just decided to stroll around the colonial streets, take some photos and check the locally-made crafts. We made to it the tower of one of the churches with a nice view of the town and Lago de Nicaragua. Grenada it is a nice town with many tourists but I wouldn't spend there more then one night. There are many things to do around the town like climb the volcano or have a trip to one of the islands on Lago Nicaragua. You can also do a coffee trip. As we will be doing similar things later we decided to concentrate on the town itself only and its night-life. We went there on Thursday night so to be honest not much was happening at the time. There is one street with the gringo- type bars and restaurants and we spent there the whole evening as the lady from the hostel told us that it can be pretty dangerous anywhere else. So we went for an overpriced steak (18 euros for 2 plus a litre of Tona) and really cheap Mojitos. We were quite lucky as they had many happy-hours there so each of us drunk 6 mojitos for 180 cordobas (9 $) for all of them. It was not the best mojito I have ever had in my life and it was not the best night-life either.  It was a nice, quiet evening though. The streets are pretty cosy there and we met a couple of interesting individuals including some artists and also some local drunkards. Next day we decided to visit the local museum and stroll a bit more on the colonial streets and go back to our little Camping Matilda and our beach. After 6 hours trip we were so happy to be back in a laid-back and totally relaxed Matilda. The first thing we did was to jump in the ocean and soak there for an hour as we were  totally exhausted by the heat, noise and crowds in the chicken buses.