I headed out Friday morning, and met up with two friends in Granada. From there, we rode a pick-up truck up the volcano to the ecological station. On the way, we passed through the plantation where our coffee is grown! As we gained altitude, the air became cool and crisp - a nice change from the hot and humid air which I'm normally in nowadays. :-) The ecological station is located at 1150 meters, and contains a 10 bed hostel/dorm. My two friends and I were the only overnight guests that night, so we had the whole room to ourselves!
Our guide for the trip, Samir, explained a little bit about the area to us and then explained our hiking options. There were three options: an easy 1 hour walk, a really difficult 4 hour walk, or a 2.5 hour mixture of the two. We went for the mixture, which was a good choice - I'm not sure I could have done the 4 hour one, and even the 2.5 hour "moderate" one had some pretty steep climbs! It was more than worth it, however, for the amazing views. For the first part of the hike, we were walking around one of the four craters of the volcano, and mostly could just see into that crater. As we continued, however, we got to a point where we could see out over a huge portion of Nicaragua. The picture below shows part of the view from my favorite look-out point. On the left, you can see Laguna de Apoyo, a crater lake which is awesome to visit and swim in. The town in the middle-ish of the picture is Granada, and the lake to the right is Lake Nicaragua.
The view was amazing in all directions, and we were lucky to have a clear view! By the time we reached some of the higher points, we were completely in the clouds (which I suppose is an expected feature of being in a cloud forest) and couldn't see anything.
One of the perks to spending the night up at the ecological station is doing a guided night hike to find a particular type of salamander and frog, which are endemic to the area and don't live elsewhere. We were lucky enough to find both pretty quickly. The salamander was pretty darn cute, but hard to photograph. The frog was harder to find, since the green color blended into the leaves we were searching in. His big orange eyes gave him away, however!
Another perk of spending the night was hanging out with the guides who were working that night. Samir and one other guide saw us playing cards and decided to teach us some popular card games here in Nicaragua, which were a lot of fun.
When we woke up in the morning, the clouds were even thicker than the night before - when we opened the door to go outside, clouds came inside...literally. It was pretty damp, but we all enjoyed the nice cool weather for the night! We headed down the volcano and did a canopy tour, which consisted of 11 zip lines and 3 hanging bridges - it was a lot of fun and a good adrenaline rush. :-)
All in all, it was a really enjoyable weekend trip and I'm glad that I was able to see a bit more of Nicaragua in a place off the tourist path! I'm trying to take advantage of all the beautiful places in this country in the next four months before I head home, so hopefully I'll have some more blogs about cool places in the coming months!
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