Hot Sun and beaches!!!

Mark and I first visited Nicaragua back in 2015 and loved it, so we were very excited to return while on our current Central American travels. The city of Leon was better then we remembered it, and much hotter. It hovered at thirty four degrees celsius everyday, so we had to plan accordingly. Get up and see things, take pictures and be back indoors by eleven, then back out around four for anything else we wanted to see or do. With this type of heat, we knew there should most definitely be a beach involved. So after a few days in the city, we packed our bags and caught the bus out to Las Peñitas. Being only a half hour bus ride from León, this was not only our shortest bus ride, but the less crowded - so already the day was off to a good start!

We had booked a hostel before we left so that we could get maximum beach time in, we had also brought a couple bags of groceries, because the town doesn’t really have much for restaurant options. Unfortunately, we hadn’t realized that our hostel didn’t include a kitchen, most of the hostels don’t even have wifi. Luckily though ours did have a decent connection, so at least we could get some work done in the middle of the day when it was too hot to play in the waves. The first jaunt to the beach the surf was pretty rough, but we went in anyway. Both of us got tossed around pretty heavily, often taking our legs out entirely and dragging our bodies through the sand. Thankfully, later in the day we met an Irish-Kiwi couple who told us that we should try swimming on the other side of the rocks, which was really just another ten minutes down the beach, so we decided we would check it out the next morning. This side of the beach was amazing, the waves were a lot more gentle and we could still body surf on them without pain. We decided to stay five more nights.

The ‘town’ around our hostel was quite small, there were about five little family-run makeshift restaurants within a ten minute walk; the rest of the town was about 35-40 minutes away by foot. We searched out the cheapest and tastiest food we could and also the cheapest beer we could. The hostel we stayed at happened to have a bar as well, however their beer was very overpriced. So to wind down the evenings we usually sat down at a tiny little restaurant down the road where the drinks were considerably cheaper - and helped out the locals. As we walked back to the hostel one day, we ran into one of the guys that was on our shuttle from the horrible border trip you can read in our previous post, we ended up hanging out with him and his new friends. Unfortunately they only ended up only staying for a couple nights, but we had some good laughs anyway!