Bunch of yoyos
Trip Start
Jan 30, 2008
1
27
63
Trip End
Ongoing
Esteli,
Nicaragua
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
We left utila on thursday afternoon after a 45 minute delay as the boat captain finished watching the european cup semifinals before leaving. upon arrival in la ceiba we discovered a bus strike that had shut down the only road out of town. after a 12 kilometre hike in the rain we made it back to out campsite in time to eat and crash.
we headed to lake yoyoba (spelling) and found a little microbrewery ("D n D" - actual brewery in a shipping container) run by an american expat. they had a gourgeous garden, a parking lot we could camp in , and not entirely as much lake access as we had been led to beleive (read it is not actually possible to walk to the lake from there anymore as the road is fenced off) we had a look at a waterfall nearby instead and headed off to find somewhere we could get to the lake from (we didnīt - the lake is pretty marshy and i donīt know that even the lakeside hotels are within 800 meteres of it) still we had a nice view of it for awhile and it was lovely
Walking past the bus strike, La Ceiba
. passing through tegucigalpla we managed to break our turn signal switch in an unfixable way (cheap metal) and had a toggle switch thing put in by a mechanic who did not seem especially inclined to work, then we had a rushed late lunch and managed to get pulled over twice by the police in 5 minutes on the way out of town. the first pair were clearly looking for bribes and managed to get $15 usd from us because we didnīt have red triangles (down from $60) and they wouldnīt give linds her license back until we paid them. the second pair gave up pretty quick as i think they sensed we had just spent 20 minutes not two blocks up the road getting pulled over by their buddies.
we spent the night in a border town called danli (nothing exciting to report there), bought some safety triangles and headed out in the morning for esteli nicaragua. the border crossing took about 40 minutes and we were swarmed with young guides trying to get us to pay them to assist with the only slightly complex procedure. we managed to get everything done and headed out only to be interrupted a short distance later by a local protest that shut down the highway (for an hor or so) - turned out to be about 45 minutes.
Weīre now in beautiful (so iīm told) sunny (torrential rain) nicaragura and simonīs back hurts. actually itīs not all bad and lindsey is looking forward to an epic journey to a small village in the mountains tomorrow morning. i expect iīll go along if iīm up to it.
Comments
Nice post!
There are bus strikes in Ottawa, so I featured your blog on TravelPod News today:
http://blog.travelpod.com
Louise Brown
TravelPod Community Manager