After the earthquake the city remains without a real center. It has a severe crime problem and I've heard plenty of stories about people being robbed or losing their money to a pickpocket.

Instead I went straight to Leon, one and a half hours west of the capital. It was one of the first cities founded by the conquistadors, still a lot of beautiful buildings and churches remain. It's a university city, and an intellectual and political center of the country.

A foreigner here, as in most of Nicaragua, attracts a lot of attention. I was sitting reading on a bench at the plaza one morning, and during one hour I had three different groups of schoolchildren dressed in their uniform coming up to me, wanting to chat. One time a whole bus filled with schoolkids passed by, waving and shouting to me.

Sometimes it becomes quite annoying, when you can't walk ten minutes on the street in peace, without someone whistling or yelling 'Ey, gringo!' to you. Well, foreign girls are the ones really attracting attention. It's a common thing for the men here to shout 'piropos' or 'compliments' to the girls, although they can be very rude at times, even perverted.

April 12 - Plastic Pollution
One day I went up to 'El Fortin' together with some other people I have got to know here. We rented horses from a farmer outside the city, to climb up the hill a couple of kilometers away. It is extremely dusty and dry this time a year. The fort belonged to the former dictator Somoza, and served as a jail for political prisoners until the revolution in 1979. They say that anyone sent here wouldn't come out alive again. The sandinistas stormed it during the revolution, and the walls are marked with bullet holes everywhere testifying of that. It was a strange feeling standing in the same cells where so much torture and death took place during the Somoza regime.

On the way back we passed the city dump which is also located a bit outside Leon. There were people using rakes trying to find glass, tins and even food there. Some of it they can sell to earn money to survive. On the hill live the poorer part of the population with virtually nothing in houses made of corrugated iron. Along the main trail there are smaller paths they use instead of going to the latrines, which their houses lack.

One major problem in this country is definitely the amount of trash, especially all the plastic bags you see thrown everywhere. The reason is that they have to send back all the glass bottles to recycle them. The stores and street vendors will lose money for every bottle that is not returned. That's why they put the drink in a plastic bag with a straw for you if you want to bring it. The problem then becoming all the plastic bags that people spread around them.

The buses are relatively clean inside, mostly because it's custom to throw all the garbage out the windows. Many times I've seen how parents teach their kids how to get rid of the garbage that way. It's sad to notice that so many Nicaraguans (and other Central Americans too) are not concerned whatsoever with how this affects the ecology, and more - makes the environment look really filthy sometimes. Some cities try to take care of the trash, and Leon is one of those cities with a clean city center.

April 28 - Tegus
Matagalpa, in the north of Nicaragua, is what a guidebook would call 'a quiet, pleasant mountain town beside a river'. Even if the river itself is almost dried out this time of year, and what's left of it is filled with trash, the 'quiet, pleasant' part of it is true.

The town has a nice climate because of the altitude. It's even possible to wear jeans during the day without suffering to much from the heat. It has two plazas which are linked to each other by a main road. I only stayed one night at a small hotel near one of the two plazas, so I didn't have time to explore the town very much.

The north is mountainous but this time of year, extremely dry. When I arrived at the border of Honduras, my eyes, hair and the rest of my body was covered with microscopic dust from the road, since the windows had been wide open all the way. I passed through customs quickly, mostly because I was the only one there at the moment.

The feeling of being in a new country is always exciting, even more so when I didn't know very much about Honduras. It seems to be almost as poor as Nicaragua, but with some differences. I was surprised to see the good roads - in Nicaragua only 10% of the entire road system is paved. It was also interesting to see all the pine trees growing on the mountains, it actually reminded me a bit of Sweden (Except from the banana plantations and the farmers using donkeys of course...).

Along the road I saw a large amount of small concrete houses scattered over a huge field. In some places the road was torn apart, and the bus had to cross a graveled section for a while. I guess those are all signs of the strong hurricane that destroyed much of the country in October 1998.

I managed to go all the way from Matagalpa to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, in one day. All together it took me twelve hours with four different buses and a taxi. Although it's good to be here, it's not something I would recommend anyone to do.