Esteli – lazy days waiting for time to pass.

It has been an interesting few days despite the fact that I’ve been rather lazy. I did manage to get up and go for a bike ride yesterday, to hire a cycle from Café Luz is a whole 25 cordobas – about sixty pence. It’s something that my budget would stretch to, I must admit. There weren’t any really clearly laid out routes to try out – there’s a waterfall about an hours walk away from here and I don’t know too much about the geography of the area that the river runs through before it reaches the sheer drop where the waterfall is, but apparently every community that the water runs through must be dumping into it as the water’s filthy. It’s a shame that the water can’t be cleaned up and the site become a more widely renound attraction.

In terms of the local scenery, the area is quite pretty and there is a national park not too far away called Miraflor – it would make quite an adventure to try to get some maps put together for this place of what the equivilant to a UK bridalway would be for the purposes of creating cycling maps. More maps of relatively well recognised tracks to go down on one of the mountain bikes may make a small but signicant contribution to the tourist infrastructure here. I felt pretty much safe on the roads here cycling yesterday, the traffic was fine and I think the chances of being attacked by a puma when out cycling are relativley small – though it will probabaly happen to someone soon.

I’ve just watched the Euro 2008 final and I’m relatively glad that Spain won. They didn’t really do anything wrong in the tournament and the Germans looked a little jaded and lacking real creativity in the majority of the game. There were a couple of Germans here in the bar and they didn’t say how well they played, they just left rather quietly. One of them gave me the shot of the waterfall which is above. Tomorrow to Leon and to the beach from there to try to get some sun before heading home. SOme very duff shots of Esteli are online at Esteli shots should you want to take a look.

I met a German guy called Michael and he's being doing a similar route through central america his shots are now on my site if you click the link for Michael's shots. Some of the shots of national parks in the US and Canada are not bad at all. There is also a pretty good episode of The Goodies called invasion of the moon creatures part 1, part 2 and part 3.