Hello Pacific Ocean, we almost saw you a month ago in Guatemala on the 2250m high Indian Nose but you hid behind the clouds. However now we have travelled from Leon to Las Peñitas, a very beautiful but surprisingly deserted beach town with long sandy beaches, some cool chilled out hostels, surfer dudes aplenty and amazing sunsets.

We arranged to stay in the hostal run by our Volcano surfing guides, with a taxi and beer also thrown in for the deal. So in Leon we jumped in a taxi and had a very happy friendly driver very keen to show us all the sights and loving chatting to Emily with her Spanish speaking ability. So we arrived at the hostel and it turned out to be some rich family holiday home, very nice indeed with a garden directly onto the beach.

The beach itself is very long, very under developed and almost completely deserted. Really odd being so close to the large city of Leon, but Nicaraguans dont seem that bothered about such places.

The sea was ferocious, big waves and very strong currents. Rather scary as it would not take much to pull you in with no way out. Just standing knee deep is hard to keep you balance when the current tries to pull you into Davey Jones Locker.

This part of the world is famous for its strong currents and riptides so we just paddled away but no swimming for us!

The first night we endeavoured to find the famous turtles that lay their eggs on the nearby island (see next post) however the second day we just became beach bums, swinging in the hammocks reading our kindles, drinking beer and eating nice food (Emily eating healthy ceviche, Dave a massive double hamburger,, yum yum)

Then we watched the sun drop down below the horizon on its way to south east asia, I dont think you can ever tire of watching the sunset over an ocean as mighty as the Pacific.

So that was all very pretty and pleasant, but a hour later all hell broke loose. First the heavy rain then the thunder and lightning.

We are getting very used to tropical electrical storms now but this one was the most aggressive and frightning one we have witnessed. The thunder was so strong the doors and windows rattled, the roof in our room leaked onto plug sockets, then the power went out. The lightning increased to such an intensity that you could hear everything around crackle and fizz about 5 seconds before the lightning came, which was unbelievably loud. For about 5 hours our room was constantly flashing bright white like some horror film.

Being as exposed as we were on a beachfront it was a night of very little sleep!