The Black Forest

After a quick few days in Esteli I skipped town and headed to the cloud forests outside Matagalpa, Nicaragua.  The only real access to the few existing trails in the area are from the finca at Selva Negra.  Nestled in the forested mountain slopes of the same name, the finca has both a working coffee plantation and a hotel/restaurant on it's grounds.  And what a hotel!  More of a resort really.  If anyone feels like getting married, or maybe a nice family reunion some time (hint), this'd be the place to do it.  Just beautiful.  Next time we do a reunion, this is my suggestion.  I figure if we all have to fly anyway, why not Nicaragua?  Plus the rooms are cheaper...

The surrounding hillsides are accessible through a web of well maintained trails.  Not a huge number of trails, but definitely enough for several good days of hiking.  I really don't mind hiking the same trails repeatedly though, so it would be easy to spend a week in the area.  Supposedly they have quetzals and mountain lions in the area.  I had to settle for howler monkeys and toucans.  Oh and agoutis.  Oh and tree frogs.  Freaking tree frogs!  Awesome.  I had to go out in the middle of the night with a flashlight to find them, but a couple of hours of checking all the bromeliads I could reach and I found a few.  Kinda plain, tiny, brown ones.  But hey, they were still tree frogs living in bromeliads!  It's just a matter of time before I find a red-eyed tree frog, or poison dart frog.  To that end, I went a bought a mirror when I got to Grenada which I'll tie to the end of branch so I can see into bromeliads up above my head.  That should increase my chances a bit.

Oh and if Governor Richardson is reading this, the owner, Eddy Kuhl, asked me to say hi for him.  Apparently he wrote a book which, in part, mentions your grandfather here in Matagalpa.

El Salvador

Photos

Twelve days is too short a time to try and take in a country, but even that required an inner struggle against the half of me that desperately wants to get to South America sometime in this lifetime.  I know it isn't fair, but I just have to say it.  I liked Guatemala better.  Granted it had 7 weeks to grow on me, and Xela had really started to feel a little like home, but I just liked it better.

El Salvador doesn't have the smoking volcanoes or gorgeous lakes, or the Mayan ruins like Guatemala.  Mostly though, I just miss the friends I had made there.  Because, while they may not be smoking, El Salvador does have to truly massive, volcanoes outside San Salvador and San Miguel (and others that I didn't see).  It does have at least one nice lake at Suchitoto where I spent three days relaxing and enjoying the view.  It has some excellent beaches, though the half of me that wants to go south south south, got the better of me and I only visited one.  But that one treated me very well.  Treated me to one of the most amazing lightning storms I can remember seeing.  And finally, El Salvador has several striking museums about the recent civil war.

El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador and the Museo de la Revolucion Salvadoreno in Perquin were each filled with old black and white photos of guerillas, activist, and others from the war, along with descriptions of each.  The Museo de la Revolucion, in particular, was quite moving.  Mostly because Marcos, the man watching on duty while I was there, took the time to talk to me, in spanish, about many of the photos on display.  He had been a fighter for the FMLM thoughout the war and knew many of the faces in the photos personally.  Men and women that had died in the war.  Speaking to someone who knew them, knew there names, and was friends some of them, gave the faces in the photos life in a much more emotional way.

Oh and papusas.  El Salvador has papusas and I really, really like papusas.