filling in the blanks

i have left out quite a bit:

there was the 2 day volcano trek near leon, nicaragua. there was sleeping outside near the volcano on the one night a year that the locals decide to have a big christian revival party wherein they praise jesus until midnight (complete with generator and sound system which they hauled in on foot), then get insanely drunk and run about wildly, burning everything they can find. i wish it had stopped there. by 2am they were throwing burning logs about which land next to you and your sleeping bag (we had no tents). so after getting no sleep and narrowly avoiding injury, we trekked out at 4am and finished the day at the bubbling mud pits. before the party got out of hand however, the volcano was very cool. a huge smoking crater with lava flows visible at night.

then there was another volcano the next day, which i sledded down at high speed. that was a first. occasionally nutty people actually stand and do the equivalent of snowboarding down. falling in the snow is one thing. and i don´t even really like doing that. so i passed on the opportunity to fall into sharp lava rock. a lot of rock hit me in the face, regardless.

then there were my treks around matagalpa, before i fell in the sewers. tourists barely go there so i surprised a lot of friendly (and occasionally unfriendly) locals.

nicas (as nicaraguans are called) are a refreshing change from hondurans. very friendly. hondurans were stand-offish. this despite the fact that reagan (and others americans before him) caused a great deal of grief down here. i have had a few interesting conversations with nicas about the revolution and US involvement.

there more of course, but i´ve got to go.