After a crazy, sweaty day on 6 different buses and a nutty border crossing, I made it up to Granada, Nicaragua with a smile on my face. The towns I crossed through, the adventure of trying to figure it out, and the people I met along the way made for an invigorating day... That was the scene last January when I took a little detour (from a 2 week Costa Rican vacation)up to Nicaragua and was pretty much the time and place where I said, ¨I need to throw the backpack on and get out there on the road again.¨ A few weeks later I was off to Argentina for the beginning of this journey. Now, almost 10 months later, I made the same northward trip from Costa Rica and went straight to Granada for old times sake. Its amazing how much easier and more comfortable a place is when visiting it for a second time. 
After Granada, I went up to another beautiful (more for its charm than for its colorful buildings) colonial town of Leon where I stayed in a hostel with an interesting mix of ´backpackers´. First there was John, a cool, 72 year old retired engineer from California who was in Nicaragua for a month because his retirement check ¨goes a lot further here¨. There was a couple in their 50's from Nevada, a 60 something German guy named Hans, a 34 year old mother who also happened to be fitness competitor (5th in the world last year) and a 40 year old American cycling from the states down to South America. What made him most interesting was that, among the limited number of things he could carry with him on his bike, he brought a clothes iron. ¨I like to be able to look nice when I get to a new town¨ he remarked when he saw the puzzled look on my face. The 19 year old German kid spending time between high school and college must have wondered if he had taken a wrong turn off the backpacker trail somewhere in middle Nicaragua to end up with this crew. A visit to the Tisey nature reserve outside of Esteli in the north of the country provided an opportunity to meet with Don Alberto, a photogenic old guy that took up carving figures into the local mountainside as a way to give up drinking.
Like many places I´ve been through over the past 9 months, Nicaragua was going through some interesting political times and, in fact, was the fourth country I´ve been in that was holding elections while I was there. By now I've gotten use to several things here in South and Central America...corruption is prevalent, people are passionate and informed about politics and the fact that drinking of any alcohol is against the law in the days leading up to the elections.
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