Our first stop on Nicaragua is the northern highlands town of Matagalpa, this is the chocolate and coffee capital of the country.

The town is rather nice, a bit run down but in a nice way, the Nicaraguan people seem nice so far. And the new national beers are going down swimmingly. Things are nice and cheap here for us. a 3 hour bus costs about 70p, a 1 litre bottle of tasy beer costs just over a pound.

Of course we couldnt miss the opportunity to pass up on chocolate so off we went to the El Castillo del Cacao chocolate factory that produces the famous Nicaraguan chocolate. As with most things in Central America, it was rather small scale. No big flashy machines pumping out chocolate, no automated chocolate bar wrapping. Only two woman doing the whole process from cocoa bean to beautiful tasty confectionary.

The story goes that a cunning Chilean man appeared in this area 6 years ago and noticed the abundance of cocoa but no one making anything of it, so he decided to build a castle (as you do) to make and sell chocolate. The ladies that showed us around were there from the start and clearly take pride in what they do.

Every single chocolate bar is made by them. From heating the cocoa beans, crushing them on an old school stone rolling impliment (dont know what you call them!) so they seperate the shells from the the heavier coco beans, to then mix it with sugar, then heat it, then into the molds, freeze it and then individually wrap each and every bar. And you can really taste the quality, (they let us try some in liquid form, then a finished bit....we of course had to then buy some for later!)

After the hard effort involved in watching and eating chocolate, we then went off for a hike up a mountain, only for the now common Nicaraguan heavy rain shower to come down and rain off play. So back to our hotel where Emily made Dave watch Pride and Prejudice on cable tv........who would of though the first time Dave saw this film would be in Nicaragua?