Feliz Navidad y Año Nuevo

It´s been a while! The holidays swallowed me up, in the best possible way. Let’s see if I can give a brief summary of all the fabulous/super cool things I´ve been up to while on vacation.

Vamos a empezar en diciembre de 2010. So, in early December Braden and I decided to kick it in Chinandega and begin our winter holidays. We traveled all the way to northern Chinandega, almost to the border of Honduras, to a small beach town named Jiquilio. It was beautiful. Warm water, cool breezes, baby sea turtles. It couldn´t have been better. We rented a small hut with a palmfrawn roof. And, we spent our few days lounging in hammocks, swimming, walking on the beach or chatting up other backpackers. In the evenings we ate from a vegetarian menu provided by Rancho Tranquilo, our hostel. Turned out that around lunch every day we would vote for what we wanted to eat for dinner. The most voted upon meal was then prepared for everyone that evening. Super communal feel.

And, one evening while we were there we were lucky enough to help release baby sea turtles! Baby sea turtles, did you get that? Baby sea turtles! It was amazing. Turtle eggs are a delicacy here in Nicaragua. Because of this the population is now close to extinction. So a hand full of conservation efforts, big and small, have begun to sprout up all along the western coast of Nicaragua. Most of the time I´m assuming you can´t touch the turtles if you don´t work there. But, in this case the people who owned the hostel had just started their sea turtle conservation work and welcomed the help. Take a look.

After our trip to Jiquilio we both flew our separate ways back the States for the holidays. Side note I saved all of my vacation days from the entire year of 2010 for this vacation. I flew straight to Houston, Texas, my new home! Lucky for me a flight from Managua to Houston is just around 2.5 hours. Not bad at all.

Being home for the holidays was amazing. Good food, turkey and stuffing, the Nutcracker, Christmas lights. I´m basically a junky for Christmas. Oh, and hot showers, obviously!
Those of you that I saw during my vacation, it was great to catch up. I loved seeing you and can´t imagine another year and half without you.

Guess you´ll just have to come visit me!

So anyway, I´m back in Nicaragua. Back to my little Nica house, back the permanent dust on my floors and best of all, back to the cold cold showers of Nicaragua.