Blog 10 - Blind Massages & Kayaking "Records"

To get to Granada from 

El Transito we had to get up at 5.30am (yawn) and travel on a couple of chicken buses.  I have become surprisingly used to this form of transport.  Sitting between two hot and sweaty people on what is clearly a seat designed for one, while the driver either chats on his mobile phone or swerves to avoid giant potholes has become the norm, and I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about getting on a regular bus, even more so a train ever again.

When we stepped off the bus, we found to our dismay that it was RAINING!  As we hadn’t experienced such an event in numerous weeks, we kind of took leave of our senses and walked into the first café we could find for breakfast.  It was not great.  After that, we went and checked into our hostel: The Bearded Monkey.  This hostel is rated number one in Granada in the Lonely Planet guidebook….we are not sure why.  It wasn’t bad but certainly nothing to write home (or an entry in a guidebook) about.  Also, a couple of people who were staying in one of the dorm rooms had money stolen from their locker which isn’t great.

Granada is fine, it’s nothing too amazing though.  There are lots of nice cafes and old buildings, but we’d kind of seen all that in Leon so it was all much of a muchness for me.  On the first day my back was pretty sore so I decided to go across the road to the “Seeing Hands Blind Massage” place.  Here I got massaged by a blind person, and it was definitely the best massage I’ve ever had.  It was also very thorough……very, very thorough.  Over the next couple of days we generally mooched about, checking out the town.  On the Saturday, Nick spent the night in a treehouse a few miles away from the hostel.  This trip definitely wasn’t for me as you were guaranteed to be sleeping next to all sorts of scary creatures and the chances of me getting a good night’s sleep were pretty slim.  Instead, I went out drinking with some other people who were staying at the hostel: much more suited to my tastes :-) 

On the Sunday we said goodbye to Granada and travelled to Lake Apoyo.  I was mega hungover and so when the bus dropped us off, we walked into the first place we saw which turned out to be LOVELY!  It was called the Laguna Beach Club and it was a kind of cross between a hostel and a hotel.  Swimming in the lake was amazing.  The water was so clear that you could see incredibly far down; not to the bottom though as the lake is 300 metres deep!

We stayed here for two nights, and on the night before we left Nick decided he wanted to kayak across the lake and back which is a 7 mile round trip.  Someone (me) suggested that they should leave at 3pm so that they would be back by 5.30pm so not to be kayaking in the darkness.  Someone else (him) left at 3.30pm and got caught in a storm when he was halfway back across the lake.  When it hard been dark for half an hour and there had been no sign of him, the barman got in a kayak and went to search for him.  As it turned out, he was fine.  The current had carried him across the lake away from the hotel, so he was kayaking along the shore back to us when the barman found him.  Nick would like me to add here that he is the “first man ever” to kayak solo across Lake Apoyo, purely because he can’t find any other mention of anyone else having done it on Google.

If you look closely at this picture, you will see Nick setting off on his trip.  In the next instalment: Ometepe Island :-)