Having had a few days to spare in Granada I was able to get
out of town and explore some nearby lesser sites on the city’s outskirts . One
of those is an old railroad depot from the days long ago when there was actually
some passenger train service in Nicaragua. The few old trains there are the
buildings are quite atmospheric, although now it serves as a community center
with a small admission fee for tourists who want to look at trains. Somewhat
more interesting is Granada’s cemetery. In Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central
America bodies are entombed above ground rather than being buried allowing for
some very elaborate memorials to the dead. Among those in Granada’s cemetery
are the tombs of six of Nicaragua’s nineteenth century presidents who were from
the city, several with the name Chamorro, one of the city’s most prominent
business and political families through the current era. It was Violeta
Chamorro who was a main opposition figure to the Sandinistas in the 1980s who to
everyone’s surprise managed to defeat Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua’s 1990
presidential election.

The second group tour of my Central American trip began in
Granada on February 27^th, this one focusing on cycling and being
from Granada to Panama City with Explore, the British travel company that I’ve
done several trips with in recent years . I have now dune several
hiking-oriented group trips, but this will be my first one centered on cycling.
I quite like having some structured activity while I am traveling to make the
experience healthier and more varied, as well as mixing something a little more
social with the solo independent travel of which I do so much. I have to admit,
though, that I have been wondering whether committing myself to some long days
of riding a bike in a very hot tropical region of the world is really such a
good idea.

After meeting up with the group on Saturday evening, we had
a short practice ride around Granada and along Lake Nicaragua to get used to
the bikes. Our scheduled afternoon activity was a trip by bus to Masaya
Volcano, a relatively low but active crater near the city of Masaya northwest
of Granada. However, as I had heard from tour operators earlier in the week, it
turns out that Masaya Volcano National Park was closed at the time for safety
reasons because of continuous small eruptions . We’d be going to Mombacho
Volcano as a substitute as part of the tour. Gee, I wish I had known that
earlier in the week before I booked a day trip there. So I got to do the Jeep
drive up Mombacho and the two mile walk around the crater again, this time in
significantly clearer conditions than I had earlier in the week. But that’s the
nature of travel. Things are always changing so you have to be flexible and
adaptable.

Our trip began in earnest on Monday morning with a bus ride
to Catarina, the town near the highest point on the rim of Laguna Apoyo, a
beautiful deep lake in the crater of a volcano a few miles west of Granada. Apoyo
is still considered to be “active” under the lake that filled the crater but
has not seen an eruption in recorded history. A day on its shores is probably
the day trip I should have done from Granada had I any way to know ahead that
Mombacho would have to be substituted for Masaya on the tour.

Anyway, the first significant day of biking on the tour
began at the overlook/mirador over Laguna Apoyo in Catarina . The ride was
mostly downhill on a mix of decent paved roads and some fairly rough unpaved
ones, a route that took us from Catarina through several of the so-called
Pueblos Blancos in the upland region west of Granada and onwards to a point on
the Pan-American Highway where we met our minibus again. Nicaragua’s Pueblos
Blancos (or white towns) were supposedly named after the white churches around
which they were centered, but now that many of those churches have been painted
other colors there’s not much that’s white about the towns. It’s really nothing
like the Pueblos Blancos in southern Spain that are villages that are truly
white in appearance. From the point where we met the minibus it was a short
drive of about an hour to Rivas and on to nearby San Jorge on Lake Nicaragua,
the port town for the lake ferries to Ometepe Island.