The other Granada

According to the World Bank, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in Latin America (after Haiti). The average annual earning are in the region of $1,700 per head of population.  Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinistas and scourge of the neo-cons in the Reagan administration, is the current elected president and has out survived those in the US administration who ran the shameful and illegal Arms to Iran for Cash policy, in order to fund the Contras.
We arrived here on Monday evening after a day spent travelling from Los Angeles to Managua via Houston. After a 45 minute taxi ride at 11pm, along empty roads, we arrived here in Granada, the oldest colonial city in the western hemisphere. Like the roads, it too was empty at midnight.
Our hotel is just off the main square, which houses a cathedral on one side and a sizeable park in the middle. Various hawkers have stores along one side selling T shirts and woven clothes and on another side, scrawny horses are tethered to wooden carts waiting for tourists to pay the necessary dollars for a ride.
Granada has been well restored with money from various foreign governments/agencies. The buildings are predominantly single storied and most are painted in vibrant colours : purple, orange, green, blue, pink. Like Peru it seems, the poorer the people, the more colourful the surrounds (in Peru it was the clothes rather than buildings). The compact city is sandwiched between Lake Nicaragua home to freshwater bull sharks who have made their way up river from the Carribean, and a volcano called Mombacho (which is extinct).
It is very hot here but the heat is dry. The sun shines strongly all day and the small pool in our hotel is a relief. Last evening, when the temperature had dropped to 80 degrees, we went to an open air gym where entry is provided for free by the hotel. Tess did a 90 minute yoga class while I sweated to saturation on a cross training before joining the locals in the weights room, where the equipment was a bit rusty and clunky, but the users seemingly friendly.
It is great to be back in Latin America and to be brushing up on our pidgin Spanish. This afternoon we are off to a mercado followed by a trip to the Masaya volcano, about 25kms away, which is still very active, having last exploded in 2012. We hope to get a view of some lava pools.