Tag: Volcano boarding

Today I got up and walked to “mañana mañana” for breakfast. I was feeling a bit tired but I downed some delicious coffee and went to do the cathedral tour. It only costs $3 and you walk up these little tiny steps that take you up to the rooftop. The view of the city up there is amazing. The whole cathedral is all perfectly painted white. I don’t know how they keep it so white, they must repaint it every couple of months.

I then headed back to the hostel where I lazed around until 2pm when I went on the volcano boarding tour(the reason a lot of people come to Leon). It cost $35, a pretty steep price for Nicaragua, but in the end I felt like it was worth doing. The tour was through Via Via, I think there is another option in town, but a Dutch guy I met got wrecked doing it with them.

I wasn’t expecting too much but was pleasantly surprised. The hike up has amazing views of the landscape. You can scrape away some of the black earth and feel the heat still coming up through the ground from the volcano.

You can also see tons of bugs crawling in the black rock. Our guide explained that was the process of a new volcano turning into a mountain. The bugs get some minerals out of the ground, die there, leave some fertilizer and slowly but surely new plants and trees will start to grow there.

The hike is about an hour and had some remarkably gusty wind almost the whole time. I was sure someone would get blown off the mountain as the board for volcano boarding is its own airfoil and each person was carrying their own, but no one did.

We then rode down and you only get about a minute of riding. But, it was pretty great. Just dust and stone flying everywhere and you go down so fast with an amazing view the whole time. The goggles were all in awful condition however.

I then headed back and ate with one of the guys from the tour. A nice English guy. We found some amazing street food. The pork was sooo good.