Happy Valentine's Day!

Hi everyone,
Happy Valentine's Day! Hope everyone had a good holiday and lots of chocolate. Graham and I made a massive pancake, egg and bacon breakfast, which we are still trying to digest. When we do, we will eventually roll ourselves to the movie theater to see "Valentine's Day", despite the terrible reviews we've read. We just saw "Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief" when we were in Leon for my birthday and thought it was alright...fun, but pretty cheesy. Oh well, we're not going to keep our expectations too high for this one. We added some of the photos that we've taken around Leon to snapfish, so click here to check them out. They depict our walk from the hostel to central park in front of the cathedral and give you a little taste of Leon. We will add more to this album, but it's a start. Oh and hopefully Salem will appreciate the ones at the end of the kids riding their wave boards...they are all over Leon. Enjoy your Valentine's Day!

Our vacation to the north

Hi everyone. We hope you are all making it through the harsh winter wherever you are. We hear that it is snowing a lot in the east and dusting in the Midwest. West coasters, I am sure you are all surviving just fine. Down here it is steadily getting hotter, much to our bewilderment. Though we have gradually acclimatized to the oppressive heat, the warmest months are yet to arrive. From what we have been told, April is a month of just trying to survive. This wet season we had little rain, which means that in a couple weeks the water will be turned off in the afternoons for several hours. We are hoping to spend a substantial amount of time during the next couple months up in the mountains. So to prepare, we took a mini-vacation last week to Matagalpa and Jinotega, both towns in the mountains.

Matagalpa has about 100,000 people in it, while Jinotega has only 50,000 people. They are both beautiful places cradled in the mountains. In Matagalpa we took a tour of a chocolate factory called El Castillo chocolate, because the Dutch guy who started it built a little castle to house the "factory." The operation is pretty small, but the chocolate produced is delicious. I was a little worried that Britsy was going to quit Green Pathways and work at the castle after smelling the sweet aromas of the cracked cocoa seeds. Fortunately my winning smile and witty charm seduced her back to Leon. We have a couple pictures of me demonstrating the seed crushing technique. Though I may not have shown much promise on the basketball court (we did win a game my senior year), I was fairly confident that my natural ability at seed breaking was going to win me a substantial job offer from the Castle. The worker next to me was giddy with surprise at my organic talent. Though she may have been 5-6 times more efficient than me, I believe my courage and care spoke for itself. If you ask Britsy she will tell you the woman was laughing at me not with me, but I am pretty sure I know when someone is laughing with me, people have been doing it all my life. Regardless, after buying probably five too many chocolate bars, one of which was 75% cocoa, we headed further into the mountains to Jinotega.

On the cusp of the cloud forest, Jinotega is the coffee mecca of Nicaragua. Here we took a coffee farm tour, watching them pick the fruits, clean them, dry them, and bag them. The farm we visited was not a tourist hotspot, so we got a lovely tour by the daughter of the farm owners. She said she was sixteen, but I am pretty sure she was 11. They were exceptionally kind and served delicious coffee.

Going a little further north, to a small town called San Rafael del Norte, we took a zipline tour in the cloud forest. Up here it was very cool and beautiful. Flying through mist enshrouded valleys was the highlight of our trip (except maybe devouring bar after bar of decadent chocolate). At one point Britsy went down one line first, and when she reached the platform and unhooked from the line, the guide told her to stand back because, "he is coming and he is out of control." When I heard this I took it as a compliment that I was pushing the envelope like only a hero would. Britsy assured me it was not meant as a compliment. Apparently it was meant that I am big and reckless. Could have fooled me. Anywho, the family run operation charged only ten dollars for something we would have paid much more. The mountains of Nicaragua are not part of the gringo trail, thus receive very few tourists. This is a shame as we have enjoyed this area the most...helped by the fact that it is so cool. But I suppose we should be grateful to get to enjoy such a gorgeous place all to ourselves...and all the people who actually live there. We have uploaded our photos from our four days there so click here and enjoy.

We hope you are all doing well and if anyone is cold remember that down here it is the "land of eternal spring" (technically that is Guatemala, but lets not get caught up in semantics), so feel free to visit.

Majestic Mountains Tour

Hi everyone,
So I (Britsy) went on my first, official tour with GP - a 3 day, 2 night tour to the mountains in the north. It was myself, Gemma and three Canadians...one of whom was the 2007 Canadian women's 100 mile run champion. Yeah, my two and half to maybe three miles on a good day treadmill jogs looked pretty pathetic compared to her. Anyways, it was a lot of fun to be on a tour and to get out of the heat of Leon. I was freezing both nights and wearing pants during the day, which was awesome. I added my photos to our snapfish account, so click here to check them out. It is really beautiful up there and oh yeah, wonderfully cold.
So for a breakdown of the trip. We left Leon and headed to Somoto Canyon close to Esteli. It is this beautiful, granite canyon that was only "discovered" (aka when white people stumbled into it) in 2003. We boated down part of it and then tubed a section. The guys jumped off these huge rocks at one point, so I told Graham when he leads it, if he doesn't jump off, then he's a huge sissy. So we'll see. Although to be fair I didn't jump either...mmmm, I blame the collarbone, which is pretty much 100% now thankfully.
After the canyon, we drove through Esteli to a place called Miraflor, it is a protected natural reserve, but also a working community that supports over 4,000 people. All the people have formed cooperatives and make a living through eco-tourism or sustainable agriculture. We camped on the property of the head of the largest coffee cooperative (the staple crop in Miraflor) the first night and enjoyed a HUGE tipica dinner, followed by a campfire. No one else was really eating the marshmallows we had brought, so I pounded way more than my fair share.
The night was freezing, windy, rainy and incredibly enjoyable. We woke up to a thick fog enveloping our tents. We had another huge meal with the family there, which included spaghetti noodles (no sauce), gallo pinto (mixed and fried rice and beans), a kind of crazy veggie concoction (including ground soy meat, zucchini, squash, soy beans), platanos (plantains cut thickly and then fried), whole wheat tortillas and rice pudding. It was insanely big and that was just a good, normal breakfast for them. Then we took a three hour coffee tour with Don Adolfo (the head of the cooperative and father in the family) through his coffee fields, coffee husk fermentation station, the massive de-pulper, washing stations etc. It was cool to see each step in the process.
We then drove further up into the cloud forest, where we took a sweet nature hike instead of eating lunch. We saw Golden Orioles, Parakeets as well as a slew of blooming orchids. The trees were covered in Spanish moss and we saw a 250 year old strangler fig. Basically it starts as a vine in the canopy and then eventually strangles the host tree, killing it and leaving a huge hollow space inside. We came back and I was asleep by 8 pm. In the morning, after an early morning tortilla making lesson, we visited the massive cigar factory in Esteli. It was really interesting, but the smell of the place was almost unbearable. They basically ferment the tobacco leaves and ammonia naturally comes out and it is overpowering. The Canadians took some samples home, so they were happy. We quickly visited a waterfall nearby, grabbed some lunch and headed home. All in all, it went really well and I look forward to doing it again - mainly for the cold. Hopefully Graham and I will be able to lead it together soon as well. Anyways, hope all is well and things are picking up at GP!