Nicaragua

San Juan Del Sur (Nicaragua)

Thu, Dec 14th, 2017

Another early morning and this port was a tender port – so we took a very bumpy, windy, splashy ride across the bay to the dock, where we met our tourguide for the day’s tour.

At the dock were aggressive sales folks – trying to sell us local goods.  Once onboard the (thankfully) air-conditioned bus we headed to the nearby city of Granada.  Our tourguide was Gustov – and he was fun and informative.  He was a local – and explained many things about the local people, customs and politics.  He explained to us ahead of time that the street vendors would be trying to sell us goods – and he was right – they were very aggressive which was not really fun.

We passed a small fender-bender between a tourbus and a local car – our bus driver was related to the involved bus driver – so we stopped briefly to make sure he was okay.  Our guide explained that they would need to wait there for the local police to take a report and it could be a couple of hours – yikes!

Gustov guided us around the city pointing out landmarks and interesting features.  At one point he was attempting to show us a church but we were asked to leave.  Our guide was embarrassed and explained to us that tourism was fairly new in Nicaragua, and they were still learning how to be good at it – he apologized for the problem – and we went to a local hotel where they had arranged a nice lunch for us.  The meal consisted of local rice, beans, salad, tortillas and meats – it was great.

Then it was time to move on to the next part of the tour – we boarded the bus and headed to a little marina where we boarded small boats and were taken on a tour around the “360” islands on Lake Granada – many of the islands are family owned and a few are small private resorts.  We saw a spider-monkey that our guide explained to us was previously a pet that got out – and had figured out that the local fishermen would share their food with him – so he was quite content to live on his private island and have people bring him food.

Back to port – and more vendors trying to sell us bird-whistles, potter and cashews – and back aboard our tender for a much smoother ride back to the ship.

We were treated to a beautiful sunset – and that night we won a trivia game about TV show theme songs.

Tomorrow is a day at sea, and then on to Huatulco (Mexico).