San Juan Del Sur

Just a short post to keep you all updated. We made it back to the beach, this time we are in Nicaragua's south eastern most corner in San Juan Del Sur, a horse shoe shaped bay surrounded by surfing beaches on all sides. Pollo took a surf lesson today and was up and standing on his first attempt. It must be all those hours practising balancing on the unicycle. The water was beautiful, the sand was hot, the beach was clean and aside from a few other surfers completely empty. He is going to rent a board again tomorrow, i will further perfect my tan and the highlights in my now very short and unruly hair. You though it looked crazy before!

yesterday we visited another beach just north of here. Pollo found a nice shade tree and read for a while, and i collected a beautiful pallet of shells, purples and pinks and tiger colours. We both sat in the tidal pools for a while which here almost like hot tubs in the sun. I was amazing that the tiny florescent fishes could survive in that heat. They nibbled on our legs "cleaning" us which was very cute and felt like a spa treatment.

Later we had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and discovered the only animals that seem to be more attracted to peanut butter than pollo and my dad are hermit crabs! Yes they came flocking from miles around like a mass migration to get at the stick we had used to spread the liquid gold on our bread with. We watched as more and more and more came, and even some other tourists stopped to record the moment on their video cameras. Very interesting, and we have no idea how they knew from so far away where the stuff was. At one point we turned around to find them trying to get inside the bag where the jar was kept!

What else, hum..... not to much going on here really. Just lazy days at the beach for now. Thursday we head back to Costa Rica with ALL of our stuff which is now quite allot, to wait the arrival of Chicolini the great!

Mombacho Volcano

More pictures

Granada Update

hey everybody! Its been a few days since our last update, I wont go into all the details of every museum and church we have visited in the last week, but here are some of the highlights.

I left off some place around my birthday and Leon. We celebrated Pollos birthday in Leon, ice cream for breakfast and a day at the beach. He swam in the Pacific for the first time, the waves were perfect and we rolled around for a while. Later on we found a tiki hut selling beers, and we sat and laughed and read together. It was a really nice afternoon. The bus ride home was a fun one, through a huge thunder and lighting storm. It cooled off a little bit, and we enjoyed watching all the locals running to get on board in the pouring rain, it was almost like a party inside. We had a nice dinner that night, and watched a few episodes of CSI on the Green machine. Next birthday on the list is Chicolinis!

A funny story of late. Fast forward, we move to Granada and are looking for a place to stay. As usual we check the book and it gives a few names of places they recommend. One is close to the bus station and sounds nice so we go, down the crowded market street with all our stuff. There is an elderly couple running the place who were nice, and room looked, upon a brief inspection passable. It wasn't until later that night as we climbed onto the bed that we realized the horrors the night would bring. What had appeared to be a normal bed was actually a 18th century torture devise salvaged from the depths of Sing Sing. The sheets were probably clean....5 or 10 years ago, but the endless sensation that something was crawling on us in the night kept us both awake, that and the fact that the spring had long since surpassed the stuffing in a softness rating. We woke up sometime around 3am in a state of silliness for the frustaion of trying to keep the thread bare sheet between our sweat soaked bodies and the bed.

Needless to say we moved hotels the next morning and found a much nicer place, with a pool and you wont believe this next part, AIR CONDITIONING! As we left the Happiness hotel, we peered into the other rooms, which all seemed nice, neat, tidy, how we got so lucky with our room im not really sure.

Fast forward again a few days later we are walking past the same hovel we stayed in the first night and what do we see? Our bed! The unmistakable stained mattress and box spring with its wooden feet pointing up to the sky like a dead dog were laying on the back of a wooden horse cart in the street. Its seems the entire hotel was in the process of getting new beds and our nights stay was one of the last before the bed from hell was moved to its next location, probably some place just up the block. Pollo remarked he hoped the horse didn't catch the bugs that we did in route, which was a good point because the poor thing didn't look like he could stand to loose much blood. Any way we snapped a picture to remember the night by, and I must post it here for you all to see. To be forever remembered as the WORST BED IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!

Since then we spent a very nice time at Laguna de Apoyo, http://www.craters-edge.com/ where we swam in the crystal clear waters, and took kayaks out around the lake. Pollo would have beaten me in our race as he has been training his biceps caring all our stuff around for the past month,sadly however he lost points for falling over board and i took the lead. It was very fun to watch him try and climb back onto his over turned kayak in the middle of the lake.

We are now back in Granada, sitting poolside and having a day of relaxation. yesterday we had a hot and dusty outting to the nearby town of Masaya and tomorrow we will be attempting to climb the volcano Mombacho. After that we will head down the coast to the beach for a few days and back into Costa Rica.

Hope you guys are all happy and healthy. Miss you all.

So thats what all the dust is....

Leon- This town was built to be hot. The Ceilings are all about 20 feet high, and the old colonial Spanish buildings do a reasonably good job of keeping their contents cool during the day. Outside its hot. It starts off warm and beautiful, and slowly builds to completely unbearable, then some time late afternoon the sky opens up and cold rains sends all the street vendors and cats running- the dust settles, and it becomes a cool and clear evening with in an hour.

Its been a very relaxing and fun couple of days. We found our way into Leon on a long and hot bus ride, inside a retired American school bus with not quite enough room for POllos knees, but hey, at least we had seats unlike most of the passengers. Once we arrived we found our way (the long way) to a nice hostel, with a big open court yard and a cute kitten. Pollo was sold. they have their own kitchen and two non working blenders, so we unknowingly went out and bought lots of fruits for juices and smoothies. Got home- discovered they were just for show, so we decided we would make our first investment in our future kitchen and buy a blender! Off we wen over hill and dale in search of a liquado, which we did find, in every shop, and eventually for a reasonable price. Home again, we now have an endless supply of fresh fruit juices, and my most favorite of all, Pitaya- a bright purple cactus fruit is in season! yum!

Saturday we were out for a walk and happened to stumble upon a HUGE dance competition where hundreds of pre-teen girls were thrusting their hips and shaking thier shoulders to the beat of the same silly pop tune, over and over and over again. What a hoot! So we grabbed a street side hamburger (1% meat, 99% mayo-katsup-mustard-pickles-bread) and sat on a fountain for a while, where we watched them warming up and getting ready for their 5 minutes of fame. Mothers and fathers were primping, polishing, and coaching their kids, and siblings were jumping in for some dancing too. Very cute. The street kids were all there playing too, and one little girl decided the Brown, murky, trash filled fountain looked like a good place for a swim. She jumped in and pulled herself around on the bottom in the 10 or so inches of water, round and round throwing the trash from the water to the grass outside. Hey- someone has to take responsibility for the litter problem around here right? All the onlookers cringed.

Soon after the sky blackened with some kind of dust and rain started to pummel the streets. We all took cover, but the dust was really blinding. We did take a picture or two as the sky turned from a light blue to a brownish gray. Pollution we wondered? We later discovered it was due to a near by volcano that had erupted the day prior, and the ash had blown in.
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/49339/story.htm

Sunday was movie day. Pollo and I rounded up 3 street kids, and tried to get a few more, but their mothers wouldn't let them leave their begging posts. The three boys we did get however were thirlled, and we all had a blast! They all had their choice of snack from the snack bar, they picked orange soda, and we all waited, we were first into the theater. ¨Kung Fu Panda¨ was such a great movie and we had a blast, the kids loved the folding seats, the soft cushions, the big ¨beautiful room¨ as they called it. By the end they were all freezing cold, they didn't have any shoes on and wernt used to the air conditioner. Any way we had a really good time, enjoyed the movie and the company.

So today was my birthday today, Pollo snuck out this morning early and got me a big beautiful cake this morning. We had it for breakfast and left for a day trip out to see some boiling mud pits. They were interesting, about how they sound, boiling mud- it was fun- a group of local kids guided us around made sure we didn't fall in. The bus was standing room only on the way back, and we had worked up a real hunger. We stopped at a ¨¨Comador¨ and had a delicious lunch, and then crashed back into bed after a cold shower to avoid the midday heat.

So that's the update on this side of the world. Hope you are all doing well out there, send us a note!

A few pictures from leon, Nicaragua.

ry relaxing

Nicaragua!

HELLO EVERYONE!
We made it back to the world of technology and we now sitting in a sweltering hot Internet cafe in the city of Rivas, in NICARAGUA! When
i say back to the world of technology, thats a joke, this place is
from the middle ages as pollo would say, so the photos from the past
few days are now on this link, which seems to upload faster then to
the blog at this moment. Check them out at

http://picasaweb.google.com/juodaspaulius/VaizdaiIsCentrinesAmerikos

Last week we did in fact see the Dr. as I am sure you all could tell from the Ultrasound pictures. He was very funny and likable, and more importantly the baby is doing great! He is upwards of 5lbs now and big for his age. The ultrasound showed he has lots of hair, and all his fingers and toes- a good start to life I suppose :) We didn't find out the gender yet, even though the Dr really wanted to tell us- we will save some surprise! So everything for the birth is set up, the hospital, Dr, house rental, and we are now on the road again until the 1st of Aug when we have to be back in San Jose.

SOOOOOO, we hopped on a bus to the Nicaraguan border, got there just in time in the middle of a huge rain storm and in the dark. When we arrived at the border it was a little sketchy, but a lovely man who was on our bus guided us through, I guess he was doing his mitzva for the day! So he got us the forms, and on the lines, and to the places we needed to get to, and soon we were on our way in a taxi at the LOCAL price, very nice indeed. He even told us the name of a nice cheap place to stay in Rivas, our next stop and transitory bus town. with the best Pizza on the mainland.

After our night in Rivas we headed out to Ometepe Island, on a lovely little ferry boat. The island is made up of two Volcano's that are still active, in the middle of a huge fresh water lake. The early morning view was spectacular, and the cool breeze felt nice. Getting off the ferry we grabbed our first Nicaraguan tacos, two fried tortillas with some chicken inside and salad ontop. They cost us 26 cordobas for the meal, or about $1.25 USD, not to bad for the price, although they did leave us feeling a little hungry.

Everyone on the island was so friendly, always smiling and saying hello as they passed us in the streets. Its all dirt roads, and the main transport is retired USA school buses, painted and covered in stickers. Much of the roads aren't actually roads at all, but rocky paths that most people would even try to drive their truck on, but these buses seem to make it just fine, even if we never went above 10 miles per hour. In any case its slow going out there, and we stayed our first nights in a midway point called Chico-largo. It was right on the lake side, our room was feet from the short. With a cool breeze, monkeys over head, fresh fruit juice, and a amazing all you can eat buffet at night (including pesto pasta, whole lake fish, salads, chicken, beans, rice, tortellini, plantains, and fresh lemonade) I didn't think things could get much better! But wait, there more! Pollo (the in-house genius) brought with him, all the way from Lithuania, two inflatable rafts! So we blew them up and floated away in the cool waters of the lake. We took turns being tug boat and pulling each other back upwind of our hotel, and shared our shore with white horses, local kids swimming, and several women doing their laundry. Heavenly!

We took a day trip up to a nearby attraction, the eye of water, which is a volcanic spring, and famous fountain of youth, at least localy. The water was clear as any I've ever seen and COLD which was just what i wanted after such hot days here. POllo translated WELCOME into Lithuanian so that they could put it on their gate with all the other languages who had visited, he is always a novelty here, as it seems no other Lithuanians have ever visited Nicaragua, or at least not as long as anyone can remember!

The next day we headed out further, to the more remote island, for the base camp of Pollos volcanic trek. As we were walking along the way we met a nice guy who recommended to us a place to stay http://www.ometepezopilote.com/ which turned out to be just the thing we were looking for. An all organic, earthy crunchy, hippy place, we arrived to find several Spanish and Italian's bead working, while listening to songs of the revolution under a thatched roof. The toilets are composting, the water safe to drink, and the entire places looks a little bit like a fairy garden, with winding paths and tropical flowers as far as you can see. Staying in our cottage were a couple of Irish guys, and pollo the they arranged for a guide for the next day to do the trek. Meal while i ordered pizza for the evening, to be cooked in a huge earthen wood stove under the stars. We sat round a table laughing and chatting with the others staying there, and watched an amazing fire spinning show, done to classical, Spanish, and techno music. BRAVO!

Pollo left early the next day for his trek, with his hiking crocks on. As the group marched off into the distance i went back to bed, and lay watching the flycatchers and hummingbirds outside my window. I got up, did some yoga, and took a long walk to the nearby town, 2 hours away, but worth the ice cream and the python sighting along the way. I even met a nice man with a pig on his bike, he stopped to talk with me for a while, but eventually had to go, as the pig was getting hot and angry.

When i got home pollo and his crew had made it down, all safe and sound, he was covered in red clay and seemingly not at all tired, only a few thousands meters later :) They took a dip in the top, in the crater pool, sounds like a great time, one girl with high tek German hiking boots fell and cut her leg, needed stitches that night, but pollos crocks proved just the right shoe- easy to clean at the end of the day too! Pollo made me a nice dinner, of organic pasta sauce and pasta, and we lay together in the hammock reading for a while, and went to bed early- but only after an exploratory pond search. We could hear what seemed to be a small army of star wars fighter jets in the lotus plants, but it turned out to be just a group of tiny yellow frogs all filled with air like little balloon's singing to the moon light.

We woke up this morning and took a walk to a nearby farm (1 hour away) where we had a great breakfast of fruit salad, beans, and sour cream, and then made our way back to the port, the ferry, the bus, the taxi, and now Rivas. We are back in the same hotel, and will leave early for the Northern city of Leon.

So that's the update of our recent movements. Everyone is still feeling great, pollo says chicolini is getting bigger, i have seen a mirror in over a week. Its been hot hot hot, four showers a day, or one per bus ride seems to do the trick. We saw a motor cycle show today and thought of all our motor cycle riders at home. Things here always remind us of our friends and family. Wish we could share them with you all. Much love, until next time- Chicolini and Company

pictures!

CHICO!