Making Tamales

As I have mentioned before tamales are the typical Christmas food in Costa Rica. At this time of the year you can buy it everywhere. Every family either buys mountains of it or prepares mountains of it at home. Today we made some at home.

First we prepared the banana leafs.

Then we prepared all the ingredients: The dough out of mashed potatoes and corn flour and spices, cooked carrots and beans, olives, cooked eggs, cooked chicken breast, prunes, paprika and of course rice.

Then we put everything on two crossed over leafs...

...and wrapped everything in like a little present.

Eventually we cooked them in water...

...and then ate the first ones! Really, really tasty!

Yuca

Yuca is a root and a type of vegetable they use in Costa Rica for example to make a pastel de yuca. On the outside it is brown, but on the inside nearly white. Raw it is very hard, therefore you can only eat it cooked.

To make the pastel de yuca they make something similar to smashed potatoes out of yuca. Then they put different layers of the puree and minced meet and on top a bit of cheese. The yuca is one of my favorite vegetables here.

San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua

For the last two nights of our week in Nicaragua we decided to go to the beach and relax a bit. We left the island and went to the beach in San Juan del Sur on the Pacific ocean in the south of Nicaragua very close to the border with Costa Rica.

This was the view from the veranda of our hostel:

This lady jogged along the beach every morning with  seven dogs plus a parrot on her shoulder!

The next day we went to another beach nearby to watch some surfers :-)

This guy climbed the palm tree right in front of our veranda to pic some coconuts.

We were travelling in a group of six Germans and one Mexican. The Mexican already had cooked something really tasty for us before, so we decided to cook something German for him on our last night in Nicaragua... Kässpätzle! It's a special type of pasta made by hand that you eat with a lot of cheese and roasted onions.

The next day early in the morning we headed of to San José in Costa Rica again. All in all I really enjoyed this week in Nicaragua. It is a very beautiful country and the people are incredibly helpful and friendly!

Isla Ometepe in Nicaragua

From Granada we took a ferry four hours over the Lake of Nicaragua to reach the little island called Isla Ometepe. This island only consisted of two volcanoes, one active and they other one with a big lagoon in the crater.

When we got to the island it was already dark, so we took a taxi to the Finca Magdalena. In our guidebook it was described as an idyllic coffee farm at the foot of the volcano Maderas that we wanted to climb the next day. Also the guidebook said that it was very cheap and popular with volunteers.
Only thing it didn't mention were the millions of rats that shared the house with us... We could hear them all night long and they even bit there way into two of our backpacks to find the chocolate advent calenders. Before the rats could do more harm we had to eat all the chocolates in the middle of the night =)
By day light the farm looked really nice!

The next morning we headed of early to climb the volcano Madera. This was a real adventure! The path was only 5 km each way but more than 1 km of difference in altitude. There was no real path and we climbed more than we walked. The first half it was very hot and we were sweating like crazy. Then it got cooler but also wetter and muddier.

Now we understood why it wasn't allowed to walk this track without a guide.
But the forest in the fog looked absolutely stunning!

We were already exhausted when we reached the lagoon and saw... nothing! It was so cloudy we did hardly see anything of the lagoon. We tried not to think of the 5 km down hill that were still to come...

This was before I unintentionally laid myself down in the mud completely...

Bats:

After 8 hours of walking and slipping through the mud we all were absolutely exhausted,  injured and looked like pigs. The only thing that made worth all this effort was the stunningly beautiful nature we walked through. This was definitively a trip that we all will never forget.

Granada in Nicaragua

Our next destination was the city of Granada in north-west of the Lago de Nicaragua, the biggest lake in Central America. Like León it's and old colonial city. On the way there we took a minibus - one of those for 14 persons... we were 18 persons plus luggage and the driver tried to convince two more persons to "hop" on the bus.

Four years ago I participated with a group of scouts in the "72-Stunden-Aktion" (=72-hour-project). It's a yearly project in the whole of Germany where each participating group gets a social task to fulfill in exactly 72 hours. In my group we had the task to promote a social project in Nicaragua named "La Esperanza Granada". They build and run schools in the poorer villages around Granada. We collected money and school materials for them, held an information desk in the city center and even built them a homepage in different languages in these 72 hours. Of course now I seized the chance to visit the project. Sadly I got there before they opened that day... but anyway I was there and now I can be sure that this great project is still running and helping the children in the area.

 

 We climbed the tower of this old church and enjoyed the view over the whole city from there.

León in Nicaragua

Now the semester is completely over and I have finally time to travel a bit :-)
We (a group of seven exchange students) decided to spent a week in Nicaragua. We had to leave Costa Rica anyway to renew our visa and everyone was telling us how beautiful Nicaragua was. The bus dropped us  right at the border and we crossed it on foot. Already at the border it was obvious that Costa Rica is more developed. While the emigration process was very organized and fast, the immigration was a lot more chaotic and needed a lot more of time. Luckily the German passport was a gift. We traveled with a Mexican and he had to make an extra copy of his passport and was asked a lot more questions than the rest of us.

Behind the border we caught on of the "chicken buses". It was full up to the roof and beyond with people and luggage. At every bus stop heaps of people entered the bus to sell food, drinks, medicines, jolery or what ever you wish for. I just loved it! This was loud, smelly and seem to take ages, but it was a lot more like what I had imagened all of Latinamerica would be like.

Our first destination was the city León. It's and old colonial city with very colorful houses and a lot a beatiful, old arquitecture. Life is a lot more basic here, however the people seem very happy, open and friendly.

The next day in the afternoon we started a sunset tour to the volcano Momotombo. On the way up we had a fantastic view on the landscape of the region. We could see until El Salvador. When we reached the crater it was already dark.We walked right up to the edge of the crater where the toxic gasas came out in big clouds.Luckily the wind didn't change direction. 150 m underneath us we saw the liquid lava floating. It was incredible! I never thought that you could watch something like that. Nonetheless I was glad when we were back at the car with our torches.

Sopa Negra

Sopa Negra (= black soup) is a very simple soup. You just use the black water that is left over after cooking black beans. Then you add some vegetables and an egg which then cooks in the soup. And in your plate you add the cooked rice. Here they put rice into every soup. The taste is good! I tried it ;-) ... but I must admit it doesn´t look very appetizing.

Manzanillo

Manzanillo is a very small village on the Caribbean sea very close to the border with Panama in the south of Costa Rica. There are nice beaches, a coral reef and a Wildlife Reserve. 

I travelled to Manzanillo with a biology student. Because of that we saw a lot of very amazing animals...

This one has a very good camouflage and it didn't move at all so that we nearly stepped over it.

The smallest frog I have ever seen: