Oh how lucky we are! Cerro Mogoton, Nicaragua

Tuesday February 16. For our send-off Jeny prepared a traditional breakfast of scrambled eggs, beans, cheese and tortillas. We stopped on our way out of town to get our transmission fluid replaced: it was low, so we need to watch it.

The border crossing at Las Manos took the usual two hours. On the Nicaraguan side they wanted to be paid in US dollars but all we had was Honduran Leimpiras, so every time there was another fee we had to change more money.  Fortunately the money changer guy was sitting in a chair nearby with a big wad of bills, and a better exchange rate than the lady on the Honduran side. Interestingly, the Nicaraguans required no paper copies: they had Lenovo computers and scanner for digital copies of our documents. We also had to get the car fumigated.

The roads in Nicaragua are great! The best in Central America! And decent signage too! The truckers are not as gracious about sharing the road, however. We arrived in Ocotal, Nicaragua about 4pm: enough time to drive every street in town looking for the central park and the tourist office. Which we eventually found only by asking directions: the fourth person we asked—the owner of a bookstore--knew where it was. The tourism lady gave us maps, advised us to hire a guide for Mogoton and called one for us, and arranged for us to park for the night at the Red Cross headquarters. No services, but it was a pleasant, secure and convenient place.

The guide lady didn’t show, so we left a note and walked up to the high-end hotel for a beer and more leads on getting to Mogoton. The desk clerk made some calls for us but turned up nothing. We resolved to just go, and see how far we get. Back at the van we were settling in for the night when the guide lady, Marilen, showed up--in her pajamas no less. Without a 4WD vehicle she couldn’t help us herself, but she gave us lots of good information and drew us a map.

Wednesday February 17. Oh how lucky we are! Today we had the most beautiful hike ever, and it

was all serendipity! We followed the directions provided by Marilen to the settlement of Achuapa and turned north on a dirt road signed Mogoton. We shortly came to two log trucks and two guys in a jeep and stopped to ask about the road ahead, which our advisors all said would require four-wheel drive. The guys were going to their finca at the end of the road and offered to give us a ride, and back again at the end of the day. They also arranged for one of the nearby householders to watch our car for the day. We hustled to pull our gear together and hop in the back of their well-used truck: a small, 4WD diesel utility Toyota truck unlike anything in the US. What a gorgeous ride! The road climbed through a pine-forested canyon, following a cascading, crystal clear stream littered with boulders. A high-clearance vehicle might handle the first ~10k of the road as long as the water at the fords is low, but the last ~5k was too steep and sandy for a two-wheel drive vehicle. Our hosts turned out to be the Jimenez brothers of Las Brisas finca—just the place Marilen advised us to head for. But for one motorcycle, theirs was the only vehicle on the road that day, so if we had not been at the right place at the right time and stopped to ask, we would have had nothing more than a long walk up the road that

The stream bed

day, or perhaps a misadventure with the car.

But as it turned out we had a fabulous hike to the top of Cerro Mogoton and back. All our sources said we had to have a guide to avoid land mines left over from the civil war and to not get lost in the mountains. But Nerry Alfredo said all the land mines were cleared ten years ago and as of two months ago the trail had good signage, so we were good to go without a guide. In addition to some signage, the trail was marked with numbered posts every tenth of a kilometer. The trail itself can be done as loop; we were advised to do it counter-clockwise, in the direction of the numbers. But we took a wrong turn just after post 16 and went straight up through a new coffee field instead of down to the river where the trail followed the stream bed. We hit the main trail at the top of the ridge near post 66 and followed the loop clockwise.

The trail was newly constructed with log steps on the steep slopes and a rope rail on precipitous stretches. There was a two-story mirador on the ridge and a new refugio at the top. Cerro Mogoton is

View from Cerro Mogoton Mirador

not very prominent, it is just the high point in a long, forested ridge, so the trail along the ridge had lots of up and down. It is all cloud forest at that elevation, with lots of giant tree ferns, mosses, epiphytes and bromeliads. The trail was quite muddy, and in places the mud was quite Deep. After the refugio at the top—post 41—the trail descended steeply, then followed the stream bed down the canyon. There is a little bit of light scrambling through the boulders. It was endlessly gorgeous! And we saw lots of butterflies. We washed in the stream before the trail turned away to join the finca road at post 16.

Back at the finca, we watched the harvesters cleaning and sorting the coffee beans by hand and chatted with our hosts. Their father ran a logging business, and bought this finca in the late 1990s. It

Culling coffee beans by hand

had long been abandoned due to the land mines left from the guerilla war in the ‘80s. The mountainous region is pristine forest designated as a national conservation area. Some international organizations assisted with mine clearance. The Jimenez siblings—three brothers and a sister who is their administrator—have agricultural degrees and operate the finca with selective logging of the pine and production of shade-grown, top quality coffee, all in accordance with the conservation rules for the region. Though the land is private, tourists are granted full access to the trail systems, and the Jimenez family welcomes tourists. They are considering adding some modest tourist facilities to their finca.

We walked down the road enjoying the scenery in the late afternoon light until our hosts caught up with us and took us to our van. We rendezvoused again later in town for a little sightseeing, beer drinking and conversation.