Day 4 - Masaya Volcano Visit -Sunday Funday

Day four in Nicaragua continued. 

Day four was a favorite because it was Sunday Funday! We had our boat ride in the morning and then we ate lunch at a delicious local restaurant. Afterwards returned to our hotel where we just explored a little more than we had been able to prior. Around our hotel there are tons of very interesting plants and cactuses as the owner is a big enthusiast. Here’s one of the really cool flowers on a cactus by the pool. It looks like a tiger flower.

In the evening we traveled to Masaya to see the active volcano in the area. located in Masaya, Nicaragua, 20 km south of the capital Managua. It is Nicaragua's first and largest national park, and one of 78 protected areas of Nicaragua. It is an active volcano that began erupting in 2015 and continues to present!!

In March 2020 Nik Wallenda actually walked across the volcano on a tightrope… below is his picture. They call this volcano the mouth of hell.

There’s a museum that has all kind of interesting back information on the volcano. It is an open air museum as you can see by the bats on the ceiling above the exhibit. These are bats below just hanging out in the museum… Lol!

I bought a small picture by this painter in the town and was told his painting was in the museum. This is his painting of the volcano and the surrounding town.

Beautiful view of all the preserve nature area around the volcano.

This is a huge termites nest in a tree on the way up the volcano.

Another beautiful view…

A big look into the volcano…

another angle of the volcano… You can see the red lava below and around the outside of the red is the freshly hardened black lava

Another view… Depending on which way that smoke that you see is going sometimes they evacuate the volcano. There are many men up there with meters that read the amount of sulfur. Many days people are told to leave or not even allowed up depending on the way the wind is blowing and the amount of sulfur coming out of the volcano.

Another view of the volcano…

This is the view of the city from the volcano… Absolutely beautiful! God is amazing!

This whole trip has really given me a new appreciation for how blessed I am. I am so blessed to have the conveniences that I have and to have been born where I was born. I will have a whole post to write about my feelings on this trip when I get home safe to the US. 

Day One Nicaragua Part 1

Hi everyone! Just wanted to give you a big update on day one… Get ready for a lot of pics!

Day one on June 9 consisted of a lot of travel! We flew from Pittsburgh to Miami and then from Miami to Liberia Costa Rica.  Here’s a picture of me and my seat mate… Isn’t mom cute?

If you haven’t flown lately they now pipe in sanitized air to the plane. You can see the fog before the plane takes off and after the plane lands. It’s really hard to see in this picture but you can see if you look closely at the ceiling and top of the windows.

After we landed in Liberia Costa Rica we got on a bus that was taking us from Costa Rica to the Nicaraguan border in Peña Blanca‘s. This is a little bit of the view out of the window on the way to the Nicaraguan border.




Everything is so lush and green!

Once we got to the border we had to actually get off of the bus and physically walk across the border with our luggage. This meant checking out of Costa Rica and checking into Nicaragua. It was an interesting process but we finally made it through as you can see in the picture below.

This is a group I went with… Me, my mother, two other students named Jeremy and Shawne and my professor Dennis.  Our professor is one that actually organized the trip. He works with a group called Straight Street Nicaragua to coordinate all the different towns that we would be visiting with our medical supplies. They are based out of Tennessee.

After we finished crossing all the borders and we were in Nicaragua, we got on another bus and we were then driven to Granada Nicaragua where we will be staying for a week.

The bus trip was a little over an hour to get to our hotel and we stopped to get a picture of this amazing active volcano on the way. Nicaragua actually has seven volcanoes that are currently active and others that are not currently active.

We also passed a lot of really beautiful windmills on the way as you can see in the picture above.

Next post coming soon!!!