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.

Central America is well renowned for its “chicken buses”, essentially old, worn-out school buses from the US that get a second lease on life transporting the good folk of Central America and their produce (including animals, hence the name) from one place to another. They are all dilapidated (though brightly coloured) without any creature…
One of the many fabulous things about the Finca Esperanza Verde is the opportunity to spot a wide variety of wildlife. For example, if you want to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with hummingbirds – this is a wonderful spot! But hummingbirds (colibri) are not the only birds here – not by a long…
For many tourists, volcano boarding down the active volcano Cerro Negro is the biggest drawcard of León in north-west Nicaragua. Think snowboarding, but then replace the snowboard with a slightly larger and more rudimentary slab of timber, replace the snow-capped mountain with the black cinder-cone of one of Central America’s newest volcanoes, and replace the cool briskness of…
One of the new activities offered by the Finca Esperanza Verde since I was there last time was the opportunity to do a jewelry making workshop with Las Mujeres del Plomo – a women’s collective in the nearby community of El Plomo. Those of you who know me know that I love jewelry, and my…
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…
The Finca Esperanza Verde is actually a working organic coffee farm and this time around I arrived right at the end of the flowering season. Each of those little green nodules that are left once the flower has finished will turn into a coffee bean. The last time I was here, I did the coffee processing…