La Biósfera de Jinotega

Seven hours of buses and hitching after leaving León (including one of the ubiquitous 'conversations' drunk locals always seem to want with foreigners) I arrived at La Biósfera. The MO of this place is probably reasonably familiar to people who've done WWOOFing before, though it's my first experience with it, so maybe not. La Biósfera is owned by the amazingly friendly Suzanne (US), who lives here with her semi-permanent nephew, Oz, and his girlfriend Manu. Aside from those 3, there's a rolling roster of volunteers, and the occasional visit from tourists for a day or 2. Everyone that's been through while we've been here has been awesome, providing endless good times (or buenas ondas, good vibes, would be more common in Spanish ^^), with endless conversation from around the world.

The first evening I spent there we were treated to a view of a supercell over towards Estelí somewhere, which looked pretty spectacular as it built during the day, then was the first of many hours-long lightning storms I saw over those mountains:

Most days at La Biósfera involved breakfast, working til lunchtime, then doing not much for the afternoons. I spent most of my spare time reading (needa start keeping track of the books I've read on this trip, already gonna be hard to list them all...), but we also went down to town every now and then to get internet times and sugary treats. The work we did was pretty diverse, but I forgot to take before-photos of 90% of it then didn't bother with the after-photos, but here's a few of the work:

In my first week we spent a couple of days relocating half the furniture in the 'Bunker' to remove the stucco and dirt covering that half of the walls and leave the underlying sandbags bare:

Kicking the wall.

Throwing bits of wall at the wall.

Hammering the wall with all appropriate safety gear.

Cleaning up the bits of wall.

Clearing the top of the wall sans ladder.

Clean wall! (ish..)

Later that week we thought we'd have a temazcal, so spent a decent chunk of a day preparing that. Unfortunately, it rained rather a lot while we were trying to do the fire, so the temazcal got flooded and the wood turned to smoke.

Temazcal covered and ready!

Temazcal damp and sad. Probably taken post-smokestorm.

Some of the dirt from the wall above was then mixed with water and horseshit to make mud to cover the outside of one of the walls, which, after a few days, had cracked to high hell. So Callum and I were assigned to fill in the worst cracks with more tasty mud:

The only other work photos I have are from clearing a batch of blackberries, which'll hopefully be able to be turned into copious wine in the future :D

Before + Oz

After!

We also saw a pretty flower. Pretty sure it got chopped.

I also passed rather large amounts of time watching the antics of La Biòsfera's dog, Cacao. This guy made me remember why dogs are cool, such good value. Dunno what happened to the rest of my photos of him, but this is prob my fave anyway

Majestic as fuck. (credit where it's due to the lovely Manuella)

Cacao was also bred with a friend's dog down the road at the cost of one puppy, which I picked up with Suzanne on the motorbike (pretty fun sitting on the back of a bike with a shivering puppy, though a little tricky holding on):

Immediately after his grand adventure up the hill (Cal broke his thumb stagediving at a metal gig in Managua. Apparently Nicas don't know to catch stagedivers, heh)

Puppy <3 cuddlez.

At first Cacao was aloof and seemed mad jelly at the attention the so-far-unnamed puppy was getting, but after a few days they started to play (fight):

Cal gifted the puppy a 'scarf' as a parting gift. Puppy was unhappy with this arrangement.

There wasn't too many clear nights in Jinotega, the majority of the time it was sunny for the morning then by the time evening rolled around the clouds had come in. We got a couple nice nights though, including the night after the full moon, so we got out the telescope!

It's fucking hard to line up your camera with a telescope, but persistence makes it worth it :D

A few nights later when the moon was absent there was a multitude of stars:

I can't really remember too many times in my life when I've sat and appreciated a sunset, so I'm certain I watched more sunsets in 6 weeks at La Biòsfera than in the rest of my life. Some of them were pretty sweet:

North/Central America clouds!

Up towards the mountains a bit, but still on Biòsfera land, there's a pretty cool waterfall with a cave full of bats. All the water we used, and the water for a few other properties in the area, comes from the river, and was deliciously fresh. The first time I visited it I took a wrong turn and ended up at another waterfall:

Spider got herself a meal.

After finding my way and wandering past the cabin in the woods, I found the waterfall with its cave, and went a'lookin for some bats:

Bats!

A couple weeks later we went up to clean out the pila (the little reservoir the water pipe's connected to. It'd be raining a bit the day before so the flow on the waterfall was much heavier. So we planned on going up around the back to the bigger waterfall above before the flow died down, but got caught up macheteing some stuff, when the sky totally opened up. Straight after that, we headed to the upper waterfall after some root-climbing and mud-scrambling:

We also had to fix a joint that split under the crazy pressure. 

Every now and then we played a GURPS (pencil and paper RPG, kinda like D&D) campaign set in La Biòsfera post-Apocalypse. The highlight was probably the bloodbath we made at one of those radio towers, with the intention being that for the final session there'd be another and we'd probably go down in a blaze of glory. Sadly we never really had time to do it :(

One of the last weekends I was in Jinotega, we tried to organise a camping trip to what was described as an epic waterfall you walk behind to a cave you can camp in. In classic Central American fashion, we took too long to organise ourselves, but ended up making it there a few days later. This place (El Salto de Santa Emilia - the jump of Saint Emilia, I believe there's a local tale of a girl who threw herself off the waterfall in grief or some such) was fucking awesome. The cave was probably big enough to sleep a hundred if you wanted, and there's no mosquitos, so I forewent the hard ground in the tent and claimed the only hammock in the place. Good company and fire with veges, sausages, s'mores and rum: what more do ya need?

Inspired by 2 more nights of sweet hammock-sleeping, I discovered there was somewhere I could've slung my hammock the whole time. Dunno why I didn't do so earlier:

I suppose that's more or less a summary of what went down. I had a pretty fucking awesome time, but now the wanderlust is strong, so it's time to scoot south!