I hate updating this sometimes

So much has happened and there´s so much to share, but part of me doesn´t even care to update anymore, especially since I´ll be back in the States in less than 2 weeks. But a lot can happen in 2 weeks, so I´ll keep trucking...

Thursday: Met Judith for a drink around 9. How do I keep meeting such nice people? She´s living with a friend who´s making a documentary on the pesticides used by local farmers. Apparently, the chemicals are causing kidney failure in a scary percentile of them (one area has 78 widows out of 400 families), so Judith´s friend Steve is making a documentary on the problem and has started an organization to provide information and counseling to the families. Oh, and he rents a totally sick house here in León. In his words, "I have palm trees. That never gets old."

Friday: Got up at 9 to go volcano boarding. Volcano boarding? Yes. You climb a volcano and then sled down. The volcano is called Cerro Negro and it´s the youngest in Central America. Sounds great. Too bad the rain came and the trip had to be called off. The good part, though, is that I was in a truck with some really cool people (2 Australian girls, a German guy, a Canadian guy and a few Israelis) who I ended up hanging out with during the afternoon. We all went our separate ways after lunch, but at 3:30 we met back in the hostel because we´d heard a rumor that President Ortega was coming to speak in the city center to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. The actual anniversary was today, but I guess they like to start the party early. We got to the center a little before 4, and then we waited. And waited. And waited. We heard rumors that he wasn´t even coming, or that Hugo Chavez was coming, or that he´d be here tomorrow. But finally, amidst overpoweringly loud music, fireworks, sirens and waving flags, we got to hear the president of Nicaragua speak. I was more interested in Che Guevara´s wife and daughter, who were honored guests at the rally, than in what Ortega himself had to say. But to sum up his speech for you... "Down with capitalism. Fight the imperialist pigs. Shun the yankee bastards. Free yourselves from the constraints of foreign NGOs and foreign dollars. Equality! Freedom! Long live the revolution! To victory, now and forever!" You get the picture.

Friday night (which has bled into Saturday with no definite beginning or end): 2nd volcano hike of the day to Volcán Telica. I went with an organization called QuetzalTrekkers, which is run entirely by volunteers and gives all their profits to an organization called Las Tías to help street kids. Apparently the locals are iffy as to how much good Las Tías really does, but I couldn´t pass up the chance to hike an active volcano in the moonlight. We ate a snack at the QT office around 10:30, then hopped in vans which drove us to the park, and by 11 p.m. it was just us, our packs, our flashlights and the countryside. Our group was about 15 large, including a guy from California, 2 Spanish girls, 2 Dutch girls and their dad, a Swiss woman and her 14 year old son, 2 more girls from California, another Dutch guy, me and our 4 guides. One of the guides was entirely preoccupied with flirting with one of the gorgeous Spaniards the entire time, but the other 3 were so cool. My favorite was the German who has been travelling for 19 months now, and can mark how long he´s been travelling by how long his mohawk and his single thin braid are. Oh, and German is absolutely my next language to tackle. I´m sick of not understanding half the people I hear in hostels.

So we hiked from 11 p.m. to about 4 a.m. First we were on a dirt road, then we started crossing fences and walking through corn fields, then we suddenly plunged into the pitch black forest for the last 2 hours or so. This was, of course, when my flashlight decided to burn out. The guide near me was way too busy with his Spanish lady, so I ended up falling down a lot. But then, so did everyone else. We took a couple of breaks, my favorite of which was under a huge mango tree. We saw it again in daylight but I think it was almost cooler at night, the way the branches spread out and made everything so shadowy. We finally made it to the crater rim and stumbled our way over tons of volcanic rock until we got to the edge. The guides told us to lay on our stomachs and peer over the edge down into the volcano. No lava, but I did get a face full of sulfur smoke. The wind and the rain finally became too much for us, so we went down into a valley where it was slightly less cold and huddled on the ground like the pansies we were until superfly Germanguy started a fire, at which point we Americans introduced the Europeans to the joys of roasting marshmallows. Yes, we roasted marshamallows at 6 in the morning on the side of a volcano. We tried to explain how awesome it is to set your mallow completely on fire, but the perfectionist Dutch girls had to show us up and perfectly brown theirs, leading me to point out that "Maybe Europeans really are better at everything?" The other Dutch guy saved us from our American embarrassment by bringing up that one country that has set the standard for perfecting what others have started. And I quote, "At least no one here is Japanese. Then we´d all look bad." 10 times funnier when you haven´t slept in 24 hours and the speaker is foreign.

After breakfast (coffee, bread and peanut butter!) most of us headed back up to the crater rim to see if we could see anything more. The clouds had started to clear away and we suddenly had an amazing view of our volcano, other volcanoes, farms and hills on all sides. I took so many pictures and I´m sure they all suck next to the real thing. At some point, we started a game called "throw rocks at other rocks and try to make those rocks fall into the volcano." Everyone, from the 50 year old Dutch man to the 14 year old Swiss boy, participated. The competition got pretty fierce.

We hiked back down and got to our lunch spot in a nearby town, passing through an area with bubbling mud springs (think Old Faithful toned down and way dirtier). Finally, at 2 p.m. today, we got back to León. My original plan was to press on north to Matagalpa today, but I decided nothing sounded worse than sitting on an old school bus for 4 hours, so I checked into the same hostel as before and will go to Matagalpa early tomorrow morning. I´d gotten to know a few other travellers in the hostel and they are all here for one more night as well, so it was nice to have a sort of homecoming.

Mom and Dad: It´s probably a little late in the game for this, but do I have travel insurance?