Category Archives: Nicaragua

My bike was to share the hold with a lot of other cargo, but, at least, it had the army’s watch­ful eye on it. The 2-storey ferry was packed to the rafters. Those of us get­ting on in Alt­a­gra­cia were shunted upstairs onto the open deck because the Nicaraguan army were being bil­leted down­stairs. We were safe from […]

The island of Ome­tepe, lying either 4 hours by ferry from Granada or an hour from San Jorge, is one full of leg­ends. How­ever, as I laboured up the 200m hill out of Granada & around the Mom­ba­cho Vol­cano, I nei­ther cared nor thought I’d made the right deci­sion to cycle the 70km to San […]

The road out of Man­agua took me towards the other end of feud­ing road — ‘Con­ser­v­a­tive’ Granada. Founded, just like León, in 1524, it still has the feel of being dia­met­ri­cally opposed to its for­mer foe. Just as León is a gritty, work­ing city; Granada is a clean, intel­lec­tual city. The 45km ride from Man­agua to […]

Two episodes occu­pied me dur­ing the first part of the 100km ride between León & Man­agua, the country’s cap­i­tal, almost by default. As a neu­tral loca­tion between ‘Lib­eral’ León & ‘Con­ser­v­a­tive’ Granada, it was still a vil­lage when it was cho­sen as the new cap­i­tal in 1857 – a suc­cess­ful move which finally put a […]

Nicaragua’s ‘fab four’ is not Juan, Jorge, Pablo y Ringo, although these ‘four lads who shook the world’ still have some­thing of a fol­low­ing judg­ing by the num­ber of times I heard Bea­t­les’ songs waft­ing across the air I cycled through the coun­try. They are Augusto, Rubén, Car­los & Daniel – all national heroes prominently […]

Route Map View Cycling Nicaragua in a larger map Key By bike By plane By ferry By train By bus Nicaragua gets mixed reviews from the cycling blogs I have read. In spite of the Hon­duran lady’s state­ment, just before I crossed from her coun­try, that Nicaragua’s the safest coun­try in these parts, sev­eral cyclists […]