El Castillo

We decide to stay a little longer at the lake, respectively at the River Rio San Juan. Again we take the local ferry from San Carlos to El Castillo. How the name already says, this was the former place of a very important castle.

Through history El Castillo had a lots of ups and downs and several massive attacks of pirates. Nowadays the people are very poor here. It's like to live on an island but it's no island: There are no roads to get here, only boats reach El Castillo - from the Caribbean Sea or from the Lago of Nicaragua. So the products they have here are well restricted. On our first night we also had a longer power blackout.

Street food during the power breakdown.

La Fortaleza - the former castle.
We take a tour with a great tourguide through the castle...

The really funny and lovely tourguide who put us inside the dungeon!

At the same time we take a cacao tour - it's chocolate time ;-)
From the fruit to chocolate they explain us everything.

And we also get the chance to make ourselves useful and of course to degust!!!

The second biggest national park of Nicaragua Indio-maiz just starts here.  So we take a hike through secondary and primary rainforest to watch animals and learn about medicinal plants. We meet Paula again, the Spanish girl which is travelling a day behind us, and group up with a girl from the Netherlands. In total we walk for 4 hours through the forest and have a one hour boat ride. We don't take a swim in the river because of the winter, how they call it (well, the rainy season) - the water is not clear enough for us. Too many Caymans are tingling around and even if they tell us no accidents will happen, we trust in our natural instinct. We just watch the river :-)

Nicaragua - Solentiname

In the end, we don't take the boat to cross the border from Costa Rica to Nicaragua, but we walk. Well, arriving in Tablillas - a new border crossing - we get the stamp to get out of Costa Rica and walk some steps to get a new stamp to get into Nicaragua. Then we hop on a bus to San Carlos.

The border crossing...

Just got the stamp! This is the backdoor of the office...

There we are in Nicaragua, waiting for the bus...

These lovely birds received us in San Carlos - love 'em!!!

There we get to know the true promise of a boat ride: 1 1/2 hours to the Archipel Solentiname to the island San Fernando. This Archipel is a forgotten paradise of Nicaragua. Forgotten means we are the only tourists of the whole Archipel! Friendly locals receive us warmly. There's just one "restaurant" where "big mamma" cooks and you have to pre-order the meals.

Our Hostel with a nice Tarantula to recive us ;-¦

Our daily typical local breakfast...

The next day we take a tour with the local Don Silvio around the San Fernando island. We see lots of birds, turtles and frogs. Don Silvio is a very kind oldish man and it's really fun to discuss life with him. We talk about the plans of the Nicaragua canal, the Civil War and life on the islands.

We get to know Paula, a tourist from Spain who just arrived at San Fernando. The next day we decide to go together on a tour to visit the other islands of the Archipel. Again with Don Silvio :) 

See for yourself what we experience...

The local simple and precious church...

The church from the inside...

Locals work a lot in traditional handcraft: craving balsa...

and primitivist painting. This is the master pionieer of the primitivist painting of Solentiname Rodolfo Arellano.