JANUARY, 2005
January 26 - 29, 2005
All the tour books describe Granada as the arts or cultural center of Nicaragua, but none of us were terribly impressed. While it does have some cool architecture, a few nice hotels, and a pretty nice riverfront walk, it is gererally dirty, dusty, and everything seems to close at 10pm. In all fairness though, it seems that the riverfront area is in the early stages of development into a tourist attraction including hotels, restaurants, bars, shopping etc, which the city could definitely use. Of course, even though there is nothing there yet but a few older bars and restaurants, they charge 50 cents a person to enter the area, which we found entertaining. Also, for the first time in Nicaragua, we found the food fairly mediocre, with the exception of the well known rotisserie chicken joint in town which is excellent.
At any rate, we found a pretty cool hotel/hostel, called The Oasis which was friendly enough, clean enough, had free internet and phone service to the US (which we hadn't seen before and haven't seen since) and even had a nice pool in the center courtyard. Overall we had a good time checking out the markets, going on soem good runs along the river front, and making a day trip to Masaya, but it is probably not a destination we ever need to hit again.
