Sorry for the long gaps, turns out travel is getting busy – even when you’re not doing anything particularly exciting. Still, my friend Jon and I have still managed to get a few interesting things on the books in Nicaragua. Like a few days ago, we managed to climb a fairly small hill beside the little town of Matagalpa.

Just a little hill o.O

As you can see, the view from the top wasn’t too bad either. Thankfully Matagalpa was a bit further up into the mountains than most places in Nicaragua, so the temperatures weren’t tooooo bad – I’m talking high 20s rather than 30s! (celcius that is).

That was the marker at the top of the hill – also pretty cool. Anyway, after spending 30 minutes up there cooling off and recovering, we took the more jungle path down. And it sure got pretty rough compared to the road we followed up. I was definitely starting to wonder whether we were even heading the right way halfway down – right about the time we had to clamber down half a dozen boulders.

Jon didn’t handle it nearly as well as me

One other thing I forgot to mention. The water in the whole town had been turned off the night before for ‘maintenance’. So we hadn’t had a shower in a day, and there was no prospect of having another one until the next day. So you might say we were getting a little bit smelly… Fortunately my kiwi senses were tingling (or for those scientists among you, my Fluvial Geomorphologist skills told me), and I guessed there was a stream further down in the valley. It was extremely dry though, so I wasn’t too sure there’d actually be any water in it… But there was! Only I tiny bit, but just enough to have a little bath