Granada Leon

Fresh from the scenic Ometepe, I decided to hit up the two colonial cities of Granada and Leon. Granada was nice, but didnt really do much there. One day I visited a nearby market town of Masaya - which had plenty of cool stuff, but unfortunately I didnt want to buy it and lug it around for the rest of my trip. Mainly though, I met some cool people from Austria and Australia who are roadtripping around Florida around the same time that I am there - so we shall hopefully meet up. A guy got some neat pictures of us in Granada on a pro camera, but will need to wait till after we meet up to upload them.


Leon
Leon was the next city I went to, primarly for one reason, to surf an active volcano - Cerro Negro. You climb up a volcano for about an hour, see amazing views and then slide down on a plank of wood. Heres a video of some people who did it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiSOCGGR0B0. You can reach speeds of 80kmph while doing it and ripping off skin while doing it seems to be the norm.

So anyway, I did the walk and got to the top, saw some amazing sights and it was time to go down. The only problem was that the sand was wet and there was dense fog all around the summit, which meant that you were essentially going to board down into complete darkness. I was actually quite nervous about going down. But, on the way down it was actually really hard to pick up speed - the board kept bogging down in the sand and veering to either direction. Anyway, with a wholeheartedly disappointing experience of volcano boarding in my pocket I decided to do the only thing I could do - sign up to do it again the next day.

The next day things were completely different, the weather was hot and the sand was dry - which meant I could go at X-TREEM speeds. The climb was completely different as well, the smell of sulphur (for those of you who dont know, it smells like rotten eggs - or Tarans feet)  was a lot stronger, on every side you could see lush green hills with black mountains in the distance. Towards the end you walk along a ridge, with the crater on one side and the edge on the other - felt like a scene out of Lord of the Rings. There were severe winds as well, at times I actually got pushed a couple of steps to either side. I find it difficult to try to describe the feeling of going off the edge, but I will try my best. You kick yourself off the volcano and your lift your feet off the air. To begin with, you go slow, but you pick up speed very fast. Dont ever think about steering, because you are preoccupied with trying to stay on the board. You can brake by putting your feet onto the floor, but often it just means you do some flips over the edge. So, you are hurtling down this thing, bumping along the volcanic sand and after about half way the decline changes completely - it becomes a whole lot more steep. You feel it straight away because you pick up a hell of lot of speed. This keeps going on till the end, where it curves out and you slow down to a halt.

I spent the rest of the day just walking around and chatting to random people. I bought a hot dog off some kids - they had a pack of cards, so I thought I might as well bust out my David Blaine-esque magic tricks. Upon being astounded and having their minds sufficiently boggled, the kids decided to give me another hot dog for free. Awesome.

That takes us up to about 2 nights ago. Ill upload a post soon with just pictures of the various places Ive been!