One thing I've noticed here is that we go on a lot more outings and guided tours than we did in Europe which is cool and which is also how we ended up on a boat in Lake Nicaragua this morning.
Fun fact about Lake Nicaragua: it has sharks. No I'm not joking -- I googled it. Apparently the shark population has gone way down but that doesn't mean they aren't there... So that definitely added an element of danger to an otherwise take morning.
The first stop of the "three hour tour" (no one besides me seemed to worry about the obvious Gilligan's Isle parallels as we entered a shark-filled lake) was an old fort. It was pretty small and the view was just pretty. The coolest part about it was that we saw mango trees for the first time! I don't know what I expected a mango to grow on -- it's far more convenient to imagine that they grow skinned and cut up the way you buy them on the street here -- but they grow in tall trees. But I totally lied about the coolest part being seeing the mango trees because as soon as we told our guide that we liked mangoes, he told us to hold on, disappeared and came back with what most closely resembled the basket/pole combo we use to get leaves from the bottom of the pool EXCEPT instead of scooping up nasty ick from the swamp in our backyard, he used this contraption to pick mangoes for us! Yeah, we peeled a mango and ate it minutes after it had been picked. If you need to make it sound even cooler, just remember that we were on an island *potentially* surrounded by sharks. The highlight of all of this was when Whitney showed her blonde highlights by exclaiming "Freshly caught mangoes!" Yeah, Whit, the fruit really put up a fight...
Our next stop was Monkey Island. There is a tiny island in the middle of the shark-filled lakes that has been repurposed into a mini-monkey sanctuary. The monkeys are used to people coming around to the point where one of them decided to take a ride on another tour boat. If it had come into our boat, I probably would have gone overboard from the shock. One guy did have a few bananas in his bag that he shared with the monkeys and we got some sweet monkey pics.
After that, we visited a little restaurant out in the middle of the lake. This was a let down to say the least because the food was garbage. The prices were clearly far too high but Whitney and I were hungry so we split a plate of nachos and even that was a disappointment. To call what we ate nachos is an insult to nachos everywhere! I'd call it a garbage plate but that actually exists and apparently it is delicious so absolute nastiness will have to suffice.
We sat in the sun for a bit and then returned to shore. There were absolutely zero shark encounters.
Because we're the coolest, we had another tour planned for the afternoon. We took a brief intermission from activities where Whitney napped and I read but we're ready at 4:30 when we were told that the shuttle would be coming for us. Except the shuttle didn't come. The shuttle was 30 minutes late and we were not happy (prepare yourselves for a two-star review, Buena Adventures!).
Our tour was a trip to Masaya, another active volcano that is apparently known as a Hell-Mouth. We were excited to go hear because we'd heard that you could look into the crater and see the lava flowing. I was also a bit excited because I knew that the bus would take us all the way there and that I wouldn't have to hike in the dark. I also brought my book to read on the ride!
Because you're at the top of an active volcano with actual flowing lava, there are some restrictions at Masaya about the number of people who can go there. You basically get 15-20 minutes there TOPS (and for some reason, our bus got face masks as a safety precaution but nobody else had them).
I can barely begin to describe what we saw besides the obvious "lava." Imagine watching National Geographics but not on TV, in front of your actual face. The lava was not actual near my face. It was down at the bottom of the crater, but we could see it and lots of brightly coloured smoke. It was hard to take pictures to do it justice -- impossible, actually -- but we did our best and came up with several punny potential instagram captions (mainly about being hot and lava-ing stuff).
And this is what brings me to my rant... I hate people. Whitney and I got some incredible views but we didn't get "The View". The View would be the prime time real estate for viewing actual molten lava. We were too late to the party... There was a higher outlook but it was so crammed with people that we would have had an easier time swimming in the lava pool than we would have getting to this spot. Take your picture AND LEAVE. Let me repeat this, take your picture and leave. Let other people in! Don't take a picture, edit it, decide you don't like it and take the next one. Take half a dozen and edit them later (by the way, man on the bus who spent most of the ride home "expertly editing" the 3000 pictures he'd taken on his IPAD(!), just adding a red filter to every picture you took isn't truly editing... even Instagram encourages you to do more than that). I don't want to complain because it was a cool experience but I'm going to... Why can't people wrap their heads around the concept that they aren't the only ones at a tourist attraction and that they're acting selfishly? Why do people with iPads think they're real photographers? Why am I on the same bus with people who fulfill both of those requirements?
IPad man, for the record, eventually finished with his photos and started reading on his IPAD with the screen at full brightness. He was reading the Bible and was highlighting every other sentence (and occasionally entire pages) because of course he was.
We got back late and ended up going to the (please don't judge us) Japanese restaurant by our hostel. It wasn't our first choice but walking around an unfamiliar city late at night wasn't a great choice either.
To sum it up, I lava puns but not people.
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