Our drive through Granada came complete with an explanation from our guide regarding the historical significance of the city as well as descriptions of its architectural styles and you can see and hear some of that for yourself in the following short bit of video (temporarily removed) shot from the bus.

We would have a chance to look a little closer at some of the buildings but first order of business was lunch.

Lunch In The Garden Cafe

Lunch was taken in The Garden Café, a local business doing lots of good work in the community especially with regards to education for young girls, offering lots of decent benefits to its employees, and acting in a sustainable way for the environment. On top of all that it was an absolutely lovely location to have a sit down and enjoy some food and drink. The courtyard style of the restaurant was one that was shared by a lot of the houses in Granada.

There were a few choices for our group booking at the restaurant and both my wife and I went for the fish option. I loved this; the sauce and coating on the fish were just lovely. My wife, however, found it unappealing to her tastebuds; it was the fact that the fish was cold. Again, I loved it, this was absolutely fine to me, a real melt-in-the-mouth meal. Our lunches came with cheese, though, and I find cheese just nasty with one of those difficult-to-imagine historic inventions –

Geoff, you see where that cow’s milk fell into that pot and was left in the sun and became riddled with infection and hardened? Dare you to eat it!

– while my wife could probably live on the stuff. As a result she didn’t do too badly out of the food as we ended up swapping items on our plates.

Our lunch came with a soft drink but we could throw a few dollars in and get a local beer if we wanted. And we wanted. In fact, the restaurant also does craft ales which we’d not realised at the time, but we can’t complain; the beer was cold, refreshing, and from Nicaragua; all things that were important for us in our ongoing quest to mask borderline alcoholism as experiencing what the world’s brewers have toiled to produce.

After eating, having a quick look at the shop attached to the restaurant, then using the toilets before the long drive back to San Juan del Sur, we were directed to head one block to the west to take a look at the Central Park of Granada where we would be meeting our bus.

Granada, History And Architecture

Granada is famous for its colonial architecture but, as our guide had explained on the bus ride, while the style of the buildings may be heavily colonial they were built more recently, late nineteenth and early twentieth century for the main part. The reason for this lies in the history of Granada and it’s quite a fascinating one.

There were two aspects of history that combined to make Granada the way it is: firstly, there was the geographical location; secondly, there was the American nasty piece of work, William Walker.

Léon had been Nicaragua’s capital since colonial times as it had been one of the first cities founded but its location on the Pacific coast was less useful than that of the city of Granada which sat on the shore of Lake Nicaragua and thus had a good trade route through to the Atlantic through the San Juan River. The two cities became rivals for trade and influence with liberal administrations in Nicaragua preferring Léon and using it as the capital only for conservative administrations to favour Granada and use it instead. Eventually, a compromise was reached between the two cities and Managua became the nation’s capital but not before there was a civil war in 1854.

William Walker was, basically, a racist piece of crap. A well-educated racist piece of crap unlike most modern day racist pieces of crap but still. On numerous occasions he had led mercenaries and sought to establish independent states over which he could rule in California and Mexico, and he had a lot of support in the southern states of the US due to his pro-slavery stance. He had already been tried in America for violating the Neutrality Act of 1794 (which made it illegal for an American to wage war in a country at which the United States was at peace) during his Mexican land-snatch but had been acquitted due to his popularity among other racists and Manifest Destiny believers.

In 1855 Walker arrived in Nicaragua at the request of the government of Léon to assist in their civil war with Granada. To get around the Neutrality Act he was invited to bring “colonists” who were then granted the right to bear arms in defence of the city. In October of that year his mercenaries defeated the defence at Granada and effectively put Walker in charge of Nicaragua through his position as commander of the army. Investors in the region were concerned that Walker’s ambitions to turn the entire region into a slave state under his control might impact on their business and this fear seemed founded when assets of the American magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt‘s company – which did a lot of trade through the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua – were seized. This turned out to be because subordinates of Vanderbilt had encouraged Walker to do this so that they could profit but this wasn’t known at the time and Vanderbilt sent agents to Costa Rica to start exploring retaliatory measures with its government. Walker launched a preemptive attack on Costa Rica when he realised that country was mobilising forces but was defeated and pushed back. This loss encouraged other neighbouring countries to step up and put a stop to Walker’s apparent ambitions and so Honduran and Salvadoran fighters engaged from the north while Costa Rica approached from the south, closing off supply routes through the rivers as well as discouraging material support from America for Walker through Vanderbilt’s business influences. Walker was defeated at the end of 1856 with Granada surrounded by forces from Costa Rica, Honduras, Salvador, and Guatemala. During his retreat from the city and prior to surrender he ordered his troops to burn and flatten Granada which they did over the course of two weeks.

Granada’s location was still important despite it being levelled so the city and its buildings was gradually rebuilt and in most places in the original style, whether that was neoclassical, baroque, or more commonly, colonial.

In light of his importance in Granada’s history and because there’s also a very small connection to my home city and I never pass up a chance to mention that on this site, Walker’s end is also worth a quick mention here. Following his defeat in Nicaragua, Walker surrendered to the American Navy and returned home to America where his initial popularity waned after he started blaming the navy for his defeat. British colonists in Roátan in the Caribbean requested Walker’s help in 1860 in establishing an independent, English-speaking government as they feared that Honduras would assert control over their land and Walker jumped at the chance to start again. The British government, however, had enough economic and strategic interests in the region that they didn’t want Walker threatening to destabilise it all so they sent Commander Nowell Salmon to capture him. This was done but rather than hand Walker over to America he was instead delivered to Honduras and given to their authorities; there he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by firing squad. And the connection to my home city? Commander Nowell Salmon was eventually made Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth and died in the city in 1912.

History lesson over, let’s get back to the business of concluding our cruise excursion in Nicaragua.

On our right side as we approached the Central Park we passed the Calzada Art Centre in Plazoleta de los Leones, buildings around a square with a couple of monuments dedicated to events in the city’s history.

A large square to the east of the park was Plaza de la Independiencia and the Plaza de la Catedral joined it forming one, large, open space. As the latter square’s name suggests (unless you are absolutely hopeless at guessing foreign words), the most prominent structure here was the neoclassical church, Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral, although beautiful buildings were all around. A church has stood in this spot since 1525.

The park area was a reasonably popular spot for locals and tourists to cool off under the shade of the trees and there were numerous market stalls out offering plenty if you wanted to look. Of course, just standing still for a few seconds with a camera in your hand was enough to bring the street vendors to you and it would be fair to say that they may not have been the most persistent of sales people we’ve ever encountered when we’ve travelled abroad but they were certainly in the reckoning for a runners-up medal. Which they would probably have then offered back to us at a steadily decreasing bargain price while following us to our vehicle. Still, it’s their livelihood, it’s their culture, it’s just something you have to accept when you visit any tourist-heavy area in a poorer part of the world, and if we’d had Nicaraguan money on us we would gladly have spent it here but it was the only currency we couldn’t pick up ahead of the cruise so we didn’t.

Leaving Nicaragua From San Juan Del Sur

All that remained for this day in Nicaragua now was to jump aboard our mini-bus and make our way back to San Juan del Sur where we hoped our cruise ship would still be waiting. Hoped. If you’ve read the first part of this full day’s excursion (yeah, I’m well aware you haven’t) then you’ll already know that our day trip had started late and the notices indicating last time aboard the ship were a lot earlier than we would have been expected back even if we’d left on time. In fact, as we left Granada it was almost the Last Aboard time already and we had at least 90 minutes of driving ahead of us. It would be fair to say that even with our guide’s assurances that the ship would wait there was just a glimmer of worry in the faces of us and our fellow passengers. Not a lot we could do about it, though, so we enjoyed the bumpy ride as much as we could and I grabbed some more shaky video footage (temporarily removed) from the window as we made our way back to the port along the road that tracked Lake Nicaragua and its volcanoes.

At San Juan del Sur we were relieved to see other buses debarking cruise ship passengers at the port and a couple of buses pulling in behind us too so we weren’t the last people back. Most importantly, we could still see Star Princess out at sea. A Princess Cruises representative was standing at the pier and encouraging everyone to ignore the shops and hurry along to the tender boat which we duly did. As we waited to begin our short trip across the water back to the ship we overheard a radio message to the tender boat pilot stating that there was a medical emergency evacuation due to take a passenger off the ship and ashore imminently so we knew there would be a further delay before departure anyway.

I hadn’t been able to get up top on the tender boat but I was lucky enough to be seated by the open section at the midpoint which would normally allow egress from the boat once docked. This meant I could snap some photos of the rocky headland to the south of San Juan del Sur as we made our way to the ship.

Back aboard after a long but fantastic day in Nicaragua I headed out to the balcony while my wife showered and changed. More tender boats came and went which made a mockery of the Last Aboard time until I wondered whether that time had been set to ensure that those who’d made their own arrangements or just been ashore in San Juan del Sur were not going to cause unnecessary delays when the organised tour buses got back a little later. No way to know for sure.

I had time to shower and change too and we still hadn’t left the Nicaraguan port although there was an announcement that the ship would be turning to make it easier for the last tender boat to get back and be raised into position. This gave us a different view of San Juan del Sur although the fading light as dusk fell didn’t help the camera too much.

There was no disputing that the sunset as we waited to leave was another classically gorgeous and instantly relaxing one.

It was while we were admiring the setting sun on the Pacific horizon that we became aware that a number of bridge officers had their binoculars trained back towards the land. It took us a while to realise that they weren’t looking at the port but rather up into the hills surrounding the city where we could – now that we knew what to look for and now that it was dark enough to spot – see orange flames. Our first thought, because of all the volcanoes in the region, was that we were seeing a distant eruption or magma flow and this seemed to be the case as we zoomed in on the photos I was taking and saw what seemed to be a ring of fire with occasional streams of it. However, as much as we’d love this to be true there simply aren’t any volcanoes in that area so it seems far more likely now that this was a wildfire in the hills. One day we’ll see a proper eruption. Hopefully, from a sensible distance.

With Star Princess finally setting off, I grabbed one more post-sunset photo in the waters off Nicaragua before the evening aboard the ship could commence.

Food And Drink Aboard Star Princess

We’d had a relatively late and relatively large lunch for us thanks to the cruise excursion to Mombacho and Granada so we opted for a late dinner once again (we probably would have anyway) and snatched up a couple of pre-dinner drinks in Vines and Crooners.

Dinner was as good as ever.

And the evening finished with a bit of people-watching (I’m sure there must have been some) and dancing (I’m sure there must have been some) and drinking (that we definitely did) in Skywalkers before the exertions of the day convinced us it was time for bed.

We had another couple of sea days ahead of us before the final new country for us on this South and Central American cruise, Mexico, all of which will be covered in the next few travel diary entries.

San Juan del Sur

We may have been ready in plenty of time and the ship may have been ready in plenty of time but the Nicaraguan authorities had different ideas and after a long wait in the theatre we were finally called to our tender boat over half an hour after our excursion was due to have started. Indeed, by the time we had completed the ride to land and our bus had set off for its tour we were close to an hour behind schedule. This was particularly worrying as, allowing for that delay, our expected time back at port based on the excursion’s duration would be well after the time indicated on the Last Time Aboard signs in position as we disembarked the ship and as we arrived on land. This was mentioned amongst our group with some people wondering if the tour would be cut short but, ultimately, we just had to trust that the operators knew what they were doing and, as this was an excursion arranged by Princess Cruises, we knew they wouldn’t leave us behind.

It’s a shame that we were acutely aware of the time because it would have been nice to just take a few minutes to look around the port area at San Juan del Sur. There was a large, covered space selling typical souvenirs, and dancers, musicians, and children dressed in local costumes were all there to welcome our ship. I can’t say whether there was much else beyond what we saw between the jetty and the bus but the impression was of an attractive bit of coastline, a very friendly place, very happy people, and it’s possible that there are enough things to do in the town if you don’t choose an excursion from the ship.

Drive To Mombacho

It wasn’t the most comfortable of bus rides and it wasn’t a short one. We headed roughly northeast from the coast on the road towards La Virgen on the shore of Lake Nicaragua then turned northwest and followed the main road tracking along the lake and affording us with occasional glimpses of Ometepe, the island in its centre formed from two volcanoes. They were easier to see on the right side of the bus and we were sitting on the left so my views and this short video clip (temporarily removed) are of the Nicaraguan landscape we passed instead. It’s almost cruel of me to have even mentioned it.

The road leading up the volcano was situated at a place called Comarca El Guanacaste and it was here, about one and a half hours after leaving San Juan del Sur, that we got out of our air-conditioned bus and onto a 4-wheel drive truck. Not air-conditioned; not comfy seats; exposed to the elements. The vehicle is mounted up a set of stairs at the back and people filled from the back forwards so that they could a) get off first, b) see more of the ascent, and c) cause as much trouble as possible for those climbing aboard last who needed to squeeze through the narrow aisle to get to the still-unclaimed rickety chairs affixed to the flatbed of the truck near the front. If you’re unlucky enough to get the front row, aisle seats then your view will consist mainly of a tarpaulin cover. Luckily, we were in the second row and I was able to lean out and snap some shots going up the mountain.

The ascent was a slow one and, as you can tell from the short video clip below (temporarily removed), not without a soupçon of noise. The views were pretty impressive, though.

Santa Ana

About two-thirds of the way up Camino al Volcán Mombacho is Santa Ana, a handy rest stop with a café, shop, and toilets. Our vehicle halted here for fifteen minutes to allow people to use the facilities and because there is a one-way system in effect managed over radio to prevent vehicles running into each other. The women’s toilet immediately caused a queue to form because poor toilet design is a worldwide phenomenon but as I was the last of the men to use the room allocated to us I then helped stand guard in shifts with another male passenger to let the women use the cubicles in our restroom. It’s worth noting that at this point we’d been off the ship for around two and half hours and the vehicle would not stop here on the way coming down although there was another toilet at the information centre at the top of the volcano.

Santa Ana was a very pretty little area and probably a very welcome resting point for those people choosing to walk to the top of the volcano ahead of the hike around it. There was an abundance of colourful flowers and I won’t antagonise florists by even considering hazarding a guess at what they were.

Mombacho Volcano Hike

A slightly shorter drive from Santa Ana took us to the information centre and café at the end of the road atop the volcano. We didn’t use the café but we were told that they only accepted local currency at the time of our visit. The very first thing we were shown was a trail guide indicating the paths that could be taken: the Crater Trail and the Puma Trail. The former trail is around 1.5 kilometres long and considered moderately difficult and the latter one is strenuous and approximately 4 kilometres in length; that, along with the time taken to get get to and from the port plus the inherent unfitness of cruise passengers in general (guilty as charged) meant we’d be hiking the Crater Trail for this excursion with an expectation that this would take around one and half hours.

If you’re thinking of taking a hike around Mombacho on your own then you are only allowed to self-guide the easier Crater Trail; you need to pay for a guide if you want to try the other, tougher path. Regardless, upon leaving the information centre you have to take the Crater Trail initially to skirt around the edge of the nearest crater and you can either go clockwise or anticlockwise. There were too many of us to be guided in one pack so one half went on an anticlockwise circuit of the crater with the guide who’d accompanied us on the bus while the other half headed clockwise with a guide who worked for a local company who specialised in looking after the volcano and its tourist operations. We were in the latter group.

Mombacho Volcano is 1344 metres high. With that being the highest point, of course, the initial part of the hike was mostly downhill which was absolutely fine all the while you could forget that this would come at the cost of some future uphill parts to battle.

We would periodically stop so that our guide could explain some of the flora we were encountering: grass that looked like bamboo but which was very flexible – he bent one over to touch the ground to demonstrate – to cope with the occasionally strong winds at altitude; giant leaves that collected water; explanations about the types of orchid that grew on Mombacho; warnings not to touch a rather innocuous-looking bark away from the marked path which we were told caused an acid-like burning sensation if it came in contact with your skin.

The top of Mombacho is a cloud forest, a type of forest that accounts for around one percent of the world’s woodland. As the name implies, cloud forests thrive on their altitude which intersects with the formation of cloud layers. Moisture from clouds and fog condenses on leaves, collects, and drips onto the forest floor leading to wooded areas with higher-than-average amounts of moss and high acidity in the soil which in turn creates often very unique ecosystems. That soil lower down the slopes can provide some interesting growing conditions and Mombacho has coffee plantations situated there. Be aware that the clouds, of course, could be present if you visit which could make any hike a colder and considerably damper one, lacking some of the fantastic views you might otherwise get, although, as you can see from the photos, we had fabulous weather for our hike which was in March, 2019.

At certain points around the hiking trail there were signs in Spanish describing some aspect of the trail; its flora or fauna, for instance. One of these signs was at the entrance to a narrow canyon that had initially been formed by rainwater erosion but which had been widened by inhabitants in the area in order to assist in getting fresh water, something no longer necessary once modern plumbing made an appearance in this part of the world. The canyon was an interesting little side-journey off the main hiking route and gave a partial view towards the interior of the crater that we were circling.

Our hike continued after we’d all returned from the canyon and, while there were short periods where we were climbing, the path we were taking continued to descend overall. We had a few more stops where flora was pointed out and we also got to smell some unroasted coffee beans as we trekked ever clockwise towards what would be the lowest point of the hiking trail.

It was at the low point of the Crater Trail that we caught up with the other half of our hiking excursion group. This was close to the volcano’s fumaroles and it was about two thirds of the way around the crater’s rim from where we started, moving in the direction we’d taken. There were two points of interest at this meeting point of the groups so we took it in turns with our half of the tour looking at the fumaroles first while the other group headed to the viewing platform looking out to the Granada Islets, then vice versa.

Fumaroles are holes near volcanic craters where gases vent. It was certainly possible to smell the sulfur from the fumarole but it was only just about possible to see one and taking a photo proved impossible as it required leaning out and looking down a crag in the mountainside. More interesting was a fumarole that wasn’t venting but into which we could put an arm – if you’ve ever seen Peter Duncan’s test of manhood in the movie Flash Gordon then, yes, almost exactly like that – and feel the sudden, almost heavy heat from deep underground encasing it. It was a strange and fabulous experience.

The viewpoint was the farthest distance from our starting point and allowed us to see directly ahead of us towards the freshwater Lake Nicaragua, the city of Granada (where we would be heading after our volcano hike), and the archipelago of 365 islets formed during an eruption of Mombacho in the distant past. Some of the islets are inhabited and our tour guide in the bus had mentioned that he had older family members who lived there and who remembered in their youth when the freshwater sharks that the lake is famous for were so large in volume all you could see were fins moving between the lumps of land. This contrasted to modern times when local Nicaraguans, many of whom cannot swim and so keep away from the sea, still nevertheless come to the lake to paddle or learn to swim, fear of shark attacks being low due to the rarity of even seeing one of the creatures.

Turning leftwards and towards the northeast it was even possible to see the smoking crater from another one of Nicaragua’s volcanoes, Masaya.

All that remained to do was to complete the circuit of the Crater Trail and get back to the information centre at the top of Mombacho. Now, maths comes into play here. We’d effectively covered twice the distance of the other group to reach this point but we’d both dropped the same altitude. This meant, of course, that on our part of the hike we had descended at half the rate of them but, conversely, it meant that the remaining part of the trail to hike – you know, the upwards bit of it – would be twice as steep for us as it would be for them. In the first of the photos below you should be able to make out the pylon atop the volcano on the right side; that’s the information centre that we needed to get back to.

This was the only excruciating part of the hike around Mombacho. We are not a fit couple and probably shouldn’t be picking the excursions with warning signs on them when we’re booking cruises but we’re also contrary gits so whenever we even think the words “probably shouldn’t” regarding an activity then there’s a part of our brains that will already be drawing up plans to do just that thing. For a fit person this part of the hike is quite likely a nice workout. For a regular hiker this may well be just a warm-up exercise. To be fair, if it was just the pair of us taking it at our own pace then we’d probably have had no trouble either but our pace turned out to be a lot slower than everyone else’s and, not wanting to slow everyone down, we matched what the rest of our hiking group was doing. And almost died. An exaggeration for me but perhaps not so much for my wife who has trouble regulating her body temperature in normal circumstances and whose face was the colour of a ripe tomato with third-degree burns as viewed under a red spotlight. She was physically unable to speak and experience has taught me not to attempt communication in these situations for my own safety and to simply do what I can to cool her down during the brief halts we had.

Because we’d made painfully, painfully good time returning to the summit of the volcano we had time to wait before the other half of our group caught up with us on their more gentle ascent. This, at least, gave us both the chance to reach a more normal temperature and skin colour before we headed back down in the back of the four-wheel drive once more.

Despite the high exertion towards the end of the hiking trail this was a fantastic trip to do during our stop in Nicaragua and we don’t regret it one bit. Highly recommended if you like to hike or just want to say you’ve walked around a volcanic crater or you’ve got a soft spot for forests. Should you be thinking of taking a hike around Mombacho Volcano, my advice, you won’t be surprised to learn, is to do so in an anti-clockwise direction from the information centre.

Descending Mombacho

With our excursion group whole again and everyone who’d needed to use the toilets having done so (we’d pretty much just sweated out all the water we’d carried with us) it was time to head back down the mountain. We passed back through Santa Ana without stopping and passed several pairs of hikers walking up, about to start their own trek around the trails.

It was interesting to see the vegetation change as our altitude dropped, something I’d not noticed on the way up. The verdant colours of the cloud forest level soon gave way to a more heat-scorched environment, although one reasonably well-occupied.

We finally made it out onto the main road where we were let out of our truck and gave silent prayers of thanks to the God of Air-Conditioned Vehicles once more. The next stop on our day’s excursion out from San Juan del Sur would be to the city of Granada for a look around at its historic centre and a spot of lunch, and that will be covered in the next post in this cruise diary travel portfolio.