Flavia & Gregory go LA

Our border crossing at Peñas Blancas went very smoothly and fairly quickly. Only glitch is that we hopped on a bus at the last minute and it turned out that it was a long distance bus to Managua where they wanted to charge us 200 cordobas ($11) for going only 20 km up ahead!!! We paid but started making a lot of fuss and demanding a receipt, but of course they did not want to give us one, because they were not supposed to pick us up and they were ripping us off. I kept arguing loudly till they got embarassed and asked us if we wanted to get off, and so we did. We then got the next local bus for 20 cordobas...

San Juan del Sur is a nice little village on the Pacific sea, very touristy. It seems that it is changing pretty quickly and getting really commercial. For us, it is retains a certain flaire - it looks fairly Caribbean/colonial. People sit on their rocking chairs outside and the houses are nice and colourful. The beach itself is not really for bathing, it is large and built up and hosts lots of boats of various types. As we got here, we thought we would stay just one night, but then today we got up at 4:30 to go and see the turtles and got back quite tired. The hotel we are staying at El Puerto is very comfortable and so...there was no question really about hanging around a bit longer.

Our turtle expedition was great. We are in the middle of a arribada, which is the Spanish for mass egg-laying. Literally thousands of olive ridley turtles (smaller type than the leatherback, they only reach 75 cm) come to shore about 6 or 8 times per season, between July and December, to lay the eggs. They come in thousands and then inbetween the arribadas you only see one or two per night. And we got here in the middle of one!! Last night there were over 1,000, we were told, there was hardly any space to walk!!! We however decided to book the morning tour because that meant that we could take pictures and also we would stop at another beach for swimming. We went with Hotel Casa Oro and that is the way to do it, if anybody currently in Nicaragua is thinking of taking a tour. There are other places offering transport to the beach, but at Casa Oro they are actively involved in turtle conservation and so this is the best place where to take your money. Plus they are a really nice caring family.
Anyways! When we got to the beach at 6 am there were about 30-50 turtles coming and going. Far from the thousand in the night but still quite a lot more than we have ever seen!!! We spent a couple of hours there and then we drove to Coco beach for a swim, which was quite good fun with the big waves. Gregory managed to lose his second pair of swimming goggles and so now he is in trouble, because they don´t sell them around here. So far he has managed to lose 2 pairs of goggles and two swimming costumes, not bad hey?!

Here are the precious pics:

This baby turtle was being kept at the rangers house and it is not a olive ridley. The next olive ridley hatchlings are due this month but not quite ready yet

Coco Beach