Day 3: Comidas and Cones!

Nice leisurely start this morning, woke up early again and caught up on my blog, before heading down to breakfast around 8am.   Today’s dance card was nicely full, with a cooking class in the morning, followed by an trip to see the Masaya volcano – with the potential to see the glow of molten lava!  Very exciting!!

Spice Girl

About quarter to ten, we headed out to our cooking class.  Unlike our other tours, which are run by Tierra Tours, the cooking class is offered by a hotel, the Hotel Con Corazon – translates to “with a heart”.  The mission of the hotel is an impressively philanthropic one – as well as seeking to provide their guests with an enjoyable holiday experience, they also invest 100% of their profits back into local educational initiatives.  Their mission is to help local children finish school.  Here’s their website: http://www.hotelconcorazon.com/foundation/foundation/

So, as well as getting an authentic culinary experience, it felt good to know that our $$s were going to a worthy cause.  First up on our cooking class, a trip to the local market. 

I love markets.  Especially ones in foreign countries. And especially when you are accompanied by a local so you don't get hassled too much.  The fish market in Tokyo that I visited earlier this year (sorry for not writing that blog up, btw – maybe I’ll get to it over the Christmas holidays…) was an absolute feast for all the senses.  The sights, smells, sounds and tastes (from one of the little sushi bars that the locals queue for an hour to get into) were rich, immersive and utterly overwhelming.  Most of the time, I didn't even know which phylum what I was looking at belonged to (animal, vegetable or mineral?).  Apparently, its not the done thing to take pictures, though.  As I was trying to take a picture of a particularly impressive stall selling fish, the owner came over and starting pointing at my camera and sounding cross.  Not quite sure what the problem was – unless they were Aboriginal fish, its not as if I was going to be stealing their soles by taking their picture, but whatever.  I’d rather not have a pissy fishy old Japanese guy waving his finger in my face, so that was the end of that.

Your guess is as good as mine.

No such concerns at the Nicaraguan market – however, this time, it was simply too busy and packed to get the camera out, stand around and take pictures!  We were in a very local part of town and were the only tourists in sight (again, I LOVE that experience – but when I’m with a guide – it would be utterly intimidating on your own!).  The market was as you’d probably expect – jam-packed full of stalls housed under a patchwork of tarps and tin roofs selling fruit, vegetables, spices, cheap clothing, big bags of plaintain-derived snacks and many other unidentifiable comestibles.  Our guide led us into the maze of stalls for a few minutes, then stopped at one stall selling a variety of spices, seeds and the like, told us a bit about them, then led us back out again.  I thought we were actually going to be buying the ingredients for our class but, apparently not! It was a shame we didn't spend longer in the market, but I guess we had a schedule to keep, so we got a taxi and headed over to where our class was. 

The hustling bustling market scene

Our classroom turned out to be the kitchen of this little old lady – I couldn't quite make out if she was the grandmother of our guide or not, but there we were, right in her front room, surrounded by kids, cats and other relatives!  You couldn't get any more authentic than this!  The dish that we were to be making was called “ Indio Viejo”, a very popular dish made from shredded beef, rice, mashed up day-old tortillas, onions, peppers, tomatoes and some red stuff that acted as a dye.  All natural, nothing artificial and – though it didn't look the best visually when it was done – actually quite tasty!  Our tasks in helping our instructor were not terribly challenging – I had to stir some rice as it fried off, to stop it sticking and burning.  Lisa was put to work shredding the beef, and then I was put to work again mashing the tortillas.   There were also plantains on the stove boiling away and, after about an hour or so of the various components cooking away, our host brought all the different parts together, assembled the dish and it was ready.  To go with it, we were also given a local iced drink made from corn powder and a cocoa flavoring – it looked very unappetizing and tasted a bit weird but it was good to try it, even if it does look like its pretty much guaranteed to give you the squits later.

Lisa hard at work

Chef de jour

So that was our cooking lesson.  All in all, it took a couple of hours so we waddled back to our hotel, very full and a bit sleepy, around 1pm and sat round the pool for a few hours, digesting and relaxing ahead of our Masaya volcano tour.  About half an hour before we were destined to be picked up by the tour guide, the heavens opened – thus prompting my now (in)famous Facebook post.  Sorry, again, about that Loopy!  We weren’t sure if this would mean the tour would be off or not – according to the guy at the reception desk, sometimes they close the volcano park when it rains heavily, but our tour bus arrived bang on time so we figured the tour was still running and we gladly hopped on the bus. 

This time, there were another 6 or so people, so we made our introductions.  The tours are priced such that, the more people you are, the cheaper the tour gets so this one was $18, rather than the original $25!  We drove for about 45mins to get to the Masaya volcano – not difficult to see our final destination!  The tour itself had several components to it – billed as the “nighttime” tour, we’d fit visit the volcano and its crater, then have a short hike around another volcanic crater, before heading into the ground itself and into a big cave, full of bats!!  After our batcave exploration, we’d then return to the crater and see if, in the gloom of the night, we could see a tell-tale glow of lava, all the way down in the bottom.

Masaya volcano crater

I can now check “Driving up to the edge of an active volcano” off my bucket list.  Its actually the only volcano in the Western Hemisphere were you can drive up to the rim.  It was a very cool experience.

Here’s some information about our local, friendly volcano, courtesy of Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaya_Volcano:

Inside the crater

Masaya is a caldera located in the department of Masaya, 20 km south of Managua, Nicaragua. It is Nicaragua's first and largest National Park, and one of 78 protected areas of Nicaragua. The complex volcano is composed of a nested set of calderas and craters, the largest of which is Las Sierras shield volcano and caldera. Within this caldera lies a sub-vent, which is Masaya Volcano sensu stricto. The vent is a shield type composing of basaltic lavas and tephras and includes a summit crater. This hosts Masaya caldera, formed 2500 years ago by an 8-km³ basaltic ignimbrite eruption. Inside this caldera a new basaltic complex has grown from eruptions mainly on a semi-circular set of vents that include the Masaya and Nindiri cones. The latter host the pit craters of Masaya, Santiago, Nindiri and San Pedro. Observations in the walls of the pit craters indicate that there have been several episodes of cone and pit crater formation.

Masaya continually emits large amounts of sulfur dioxide gas (from the active Santiago crater) and volcanologists study this (amongst other signs) to better understand the behavior of the volcano and also evaluate the impact of acid rain and the potential for health problems.

The floor of Masaya caldera is mainly covered by poorly vegetated lava, indicating resurfacing within the past 1000 or so years, but only two lava flows have erupted since the sixteenth century. The first, in 1670, was an overflow from the Nindiri crater, which at that time hosted a 1-km-wide lava lake. The other, in 1772, issued from a fissure on the flank of the Masaya cone. Since 1772, lava has appeared at the surface only in the Santiago pit crater (presently active and persistently degassing) and possibly within Nindiri crater in 1852. A lake occupies the far eastern end of the caldera.

Although the recent activity of Masaya has largely been dominated by continuous degassing from an occasionally lava-filled pit crater, a number of discrete explosive events have occurred in the last 50 years.[1] One such event occurred on November 22, 1999, which was recognised from satellite data. A hot spot appeared on satellite imagery, and there was a possible explosion. On April 23, 2001 the crater exploded and formed a new vent in the bottom of the crater. The explosion sent rocks with diameters up to 60 cm which travelled up to 500 m from the crater. Vehicles in the visitors area were damaged and one person was injured. On October 4, 2003 an eruption cloud was reported at Masaya. The plume rose to a height of ~4.6 km. In 2008, the mountain erupted spewing ash and steam.

If you want to see some lava pics, this website has got some pretty good ones: http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/masaya.html

After gazing down into the caldera for a while, we got back into the van and drove for a couple mins away from the caldera, up the hillside.  We then hopped out of the van and proceeded to hike for about 20mins up a steep hillside, until we reached the very top and then had a brilliant view down into Masaya crater as well as its dormant neighbor, Nindiri.  This one was not constantly spewing gas but, as our guide explained, is actually more dangerous due to its cone shape – basically, if this one blows then that would be A Bad Thing.  Fortunately, its been a while since its last major eruption – and it managed to hold on for another half an hour while we were there, so we made it back down without incident and headed Off to The Bat Cave! 

Another short drive, and we parked up and were handed torches plus bright orange helmets that made us all look like matches.  As I found out, they weren’t just for their sartorial elegance – I’m a bit taller than your average Nicaraguan, so managed to clip my head on the ceiling of the cave several times.   We hiked for about 10mins until we reached the entrance of the first cave.  The guide was very careful to tell us not to touch anything, or grab onto anything for support as we headed down into the caves as there were tarantulas, snakes and other possible nasties ready and waiting to take a quick chomp at unwary tourist fingers.  Marvellous.

It wasn't long before we saw our first bat.   Now, I quite like bats – but poor Lisa doesn't really like flappy bird-type things, so she was less impressed than I with our cave neighbors!  Our guide said that they were vampire bats – but I don't know if he was being serious or not, or whether he was trying to get a rise out of us.  Hmm…I thought to myself.  Aren’t vampire bats the natural host of the Ebola virus?  Just how far away are we from Liberia right now?

Anyway, the cave was impressive, about 20ft wide and over 50ft tall in most places, stretching onwards for at least half a mile.  I think there are additional passages that we could have taken, but we stopped when the main chamber started to narrow, about a half hour or so into the cave.  Here, there were plenty of bats clinging to the roof of the cave, flitting about as we shone our torch beams on to them.  There were also some damn ugly bugs – god knows what they were, but they were seriously pant-crappingly scary mothers.  Unfortunately, cos it's a cave and dark and all, I didn't really get any good pictures of being inside the cave and the bats.  I also didn't get any good footage from when we were led back out of the big cave and then sat down in front of the entrance of a smaller one – with then hundreds of bats streaming out of the entrance once our guide turned on his torch!  Poor Lisa had been sat right at the front, so she got the full flappy experience – it was brilliant, hundreds of bats piling out of the cave, swooping for bugs, the sound of their wings like little leathery hummingbirds and the draft from their wings fanning your face.  My attempt to film it didn't work terribly well – it was just too dark – until I then realized I’d been inadvertently filming my t-shirt, not the opening of the bat cave.  I still had the camera turned the opposite way around from when Lisa and I were doing Scary Torch Selfies in the cave.  Doh!!  Ah well – 45,000 bats was better experienced in person than through a tiny camera lens anyway.  Fortunately, its amazing what you cant find on the internet, so here's a brilliant picture taken from a fellow explorer: http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g551472-d646709-i57510661-Masaya_Volcano_National_Park-Masaya_Masaya_Department.html

After that, it was time to head back to the bus, hand back in our torches and hats and drive back into town.  Another great day with some unique experiences to treasure!

Hello Kitty

Making the dodgy drink

Squidging the tortillas

ta-da!  the fruits of our labors!

Mombacho volcano - uncharacteristically clear from cloud

No parking right here….but 10ft over there, you should be fine.

the ultimate selfie

Cross placed by a Spanish priest to stop the demons
 rising up out of the pit of hell.  

You can see the outline of the rim of the caldera, which
 drops down 2 miles - but alas, no glow of lava today

View from the ridge

To the Bat Cave, Robin!

Down there, there's 45,000 bats just
waiting to come and say hello!

*shudder*

Hellooooooooo……..

*double shudder*

Here's the view from the top of the ridge, looking out across both calderas...