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.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love jewelry and have taken to buying jewelry as my souvenir from each country I visit. Even better if I can meet the actual artisan and work with them to make it myself. So in addition to the cooking workshop I did with NicAsí, I also signed up for the NicAsí…
Every Thursday night, the Centro Cultural Antiguo Mercado de Masaya (ie the artesania market) hosts a cultural show of dancing and singing called La Verbena. Here you can see traditional Nicaraguan dances as well as some Nicaraguan singers, and it is attended by both locals and tourists alike. Once per month a trip to La Verbena is…
I mentioned in my post about surviving a chicken bus trip that Nicaraguan bus drivers have a soft spot for either latin romantica or 80’s power ballads. To give you an indication of what I’m talking about, here’s the actual playlist for the 2 hour bus trip from Rivas to Managua (yes, I sat…
After catching many glimpses over the past weeks, I finally had a wonderful view of a Guardabarranco, the national bird of Nicaragua, this morning. It was just outside my bedroom window at La Mariposa Spanish School and EcoHotel and I managed to get a fairly good picture of it (see below on the right). Many…
Although I couldn’t get all the way down the Río San Juan, I wanted to go as far as possible. So from El Castillo I headed down to the Refugio Bartola (about 8 km further on) where there is a rustic hotel, plenty of hiking trails and the Río Bartola to explore. It is right on the boundary…
One of the really quirky things about Nicaraguan towns is the direction you are often given to find things you are looking for, like a restaurant you’ve heard about and want to eat at. Although most of the larger towns have proper street names like 1 Avenida NE (1st avenue north-east) and 3 Calle SW (1st street SW) of a…