Nicaragua trip, day four

A few more random pictures. This morning we went out to find breakfast. Here's the side of the Cathedral:

Here are Gabriel and I, hungry...

The bakery we had been going to was closed, so we ended up at the Garden Cafe again. The food was great, and a guy from Antwerp took our picture after Nadia took one of him and his wife:

Then we walked back across the square...

... to our hotel. I thought it was funny that the apparently old facade actually dates only from about 2004. For fifty years before that, the hotel had a pretty ugly, somewhat modernist front, all monochrome and blocky. Before the fifties, the facade was colonial-looking, but not nearly as ornately so as the current one.

In the hotel room, we packed, then paused...

And then went down to our taxi. The taxi we took this time was in pretty bad shape, and seemed to be  boiling off the water in its radiator at a dangerous rate. THe driver had to stop every fifteen mnutes or so to water the thing. At one of the stops, I took a picture of this bus, which was one of the less brightly painted buses we saw in Nicaragua. Why didn't I take a shot of a bright one?! Oh well.

The landscape was beautiful again. A lot of the ranches had windmills to pump water out of the ground for the cows to drink. (I wondered if any of them were, like the one at our place in Canada, made in Beatrice, Nebraska). You can see one in the background here:

THere were a fair number of bikes on the highway, as well as horse-drawn carts. At one point we passed a horse cart that was pulling two bikes with it: one guy, unfortunately not visible in the picture, was sitting in the cart with his bike and another was holding onto the side and letting the horse pull him. If this were the Tour de France, he'd be disqualified... 

 

We passed by the big white windmills again. There were dozens of them!

At the border, we waited while numerous forms and receipts were filled out and officially stamped. 

Then we walked the muddy road of the crossing itself:

I was carrying a big backpack, and I had a moment of wishing I had hired one of these guys to carry it:

Then on the drive back to Nosara, along the coast for a change, we passed a little place that had a house made from a shipping container. You can see it in the background here:

And then we were back, and we jumped in our own swimming pool and tried to appreciate it.