One more motmot photo…
Couldn’t resist – these birds (Blue-Crowned Motmots) are so beautiful!
Look who brought a friend to visit me this morning at La Mariposa Spanish School and EcoHotel. This branch is just outside my bedroom window.

Couldn’t resist – these birds (Blue-Crowned Motmots) are so beautiful!
Look who brought a friend to visit me this morning at La Mariposa Spanish School and EcoHotel. This branch is just outside my bedroom window.

One of the key things I wanted to do while in Estelí was visit Don Alberto Gutiérrez, a bit of a recluse who has spent the last 40 years carving all sorts of designs into the stones on his farm in the Tisey-Estanzuela Nature Reserve just outside of town. Once again, I arranged a day trip through Treehuggers, and…
La Mariposa supports lots of things within the community of La Concepcion and has added a concert by local artists to the program. This is a local family and some of their friends performing Mexican and traditional Nicaraguan music for us. My favourite was Nicaragua Mia – love the line “soy puro pinolero” And…
The Bartola Refugio is located right where the Río Bartola meets the Río San Juan and the Costa Rican border and is right on the boundary of the Indio-Maíz Reserve. They have lots of hiking trails and a couple of canoes for guests to use, so I headed out onto the river both mornings I was there…
Just as we thought that our run of great weather had come to an end, the wind dropped and we were actually able to disembark for our first excursion of the day at West Point Island in the Falkland Islands. When we arrived at the entrance to this point during the night, the winds were…
Still got a few blog posts coming from my time at La Mariposa Spanish School and EcoHotel 🙂 I mentioned previously that one of the wonderful things about the school is the sense of community it fosters amongst its students. For example, there were two families studying at the school over Easter, so the kids…
Another thing I love to do while travelling is try the local dishes of the country I’m visiting. Nicaragua has quite a few of these (and I’ve tried almost all of them) but the specialty of Matagalpa in the northern highlands is the Güirila. There are several places to buy Güirilas, including some restaurants, but most people simply…