Revolution! - And The Name of This Place is a Doozy - And How Do You Catch a Sheep?

 

You say you want a revolution?

There was a large statue of a revolutionary in Managua, and this place has a long history of revolution and counter-revolution.   Remember the Sandinistas?  And the Contras?  Nicaragua is a living example of how to try to govern a poor country that has no resources, but they have finally reached a place of stability. 

Giant colorful flowers on the shore of Lake  Managua.

 

 

So we have now reached Honduras

After 10,121 miles, we are smack in the middle of Central America.  The middle of the center, if in name only, because our trip is about 75% done.  

We started at the southern tip of South America on January 1st, and are traveling all the way home to Oregon.  The goal is to do this on the ground, almost all of it driving.  

We are calling this trip Santo Fuego, based on the first letters of the outline below:

South

America

North

To 

Oregon

And the the Fuego part comes from our starting point - Tierra del Fuego, the end of the world. 

Oh, and the name of the place where we are staying is Tegucigalpa, it's the capital of Honduras.  It's pronounced Tay-Goo-See-GAL-pah.

Spending time in the Campo - Baah, Baah, black sheep ...

The last week was spent at the farm of our son TK and his wife Jenny, in Nicaragua (the Spanish for farm is campo).  TK and Jenny have joined us in our travels as we make our way north, and will return to their home next week. 

We did have one last amusing adventure before we left the farm.  TK has a couple of sheep that he needed to take to a distant neighbor to look after while they're gone.  We had to get them into the back of a pickup truck to transport. 

Sheep are more agile than you might think.  They were not interested in going into the truck.  We were able to overcome the male by brute force and wrestle him in the truck.  But the female was not having it.  

Neither TK or I are experienced sheep wranglers. We chased her around, tried to lasso her (with pathetic results), used incentives (food), a dog was involved (only made things worse), and generally were inept at catching a sheep.  We probably spent at least half an hour  

So we took the male over to the neighbor's - he's a local guy - and asked him to come back and help us get the other sheep.  He invited his friend, and they both brought special ropes for the purpose.  They've obviously done this a thousand times, because they had the sheep down and hog tied in about a minute. 

 

Granada and Managua, Nicaragua

We eventually made our way to Granada, the colonial city of Nicaragua.  It's a beautiful city, with colorful buildings and lots to see and do.  After some time in the remote campo, we got rooms at a wonderful hotel there with air conditioning and Internet.  

We had a nice breakfast the next morning and walked around the town, getting some nice pictures and enjoying the atmosphere.

Then we drove to Managua, about two hours away.  It's a big city, and the capital of Nicaragua.  There is not so much to see there, but we did make our way down to the lakeside and have a nice walk along the shore.  

We turned in our rental card and went to sleep.  We had to get up early to catch a bus to Honduras. That turned out to be quite an ordeal, the bus ride.  We left at 5:00 am and didn't arrive until 5:00 pm, twelve hours on a bus.  It seemed like everything took forever, including a three hour border crossing.  It wasn't supposed to take that long, but they were working on the road for what seemed like the entire distance. 

We even passed a big fire in the hills on the way. 

 

 

Another Point of View

The picture below shows the pier on the shoreline at dark in Managua.

 

 

And this picture shows some of the lovely flowers that grow everywhere in Central America.  This was at our hotel.