Nicaragua is somewhere I first visited in 2005 as part of the whole Central America trip I met Mitch and Anna on. Suzy was here for a bit too when we visited The Corn Islands and Granada.

Sooo .. from a  sourcing point of view  I was keen to re-visit Masaya a town south of Managua (capital city) which has a big market of handicraft goods. There aren’t many goods you see ‘from Nicaragua’ so I was interested in seeing if there was anything for you and for Happy-Hammock here.

Another big reason to pop back into Nica was that in 2006 I met Jeff Cassel in a town called Kampot in Southern Cambodia. It’s not often you meet an Australian (we won’t hold this against him) in Cambodia who lives in Nicaragua.

So I took this as another travel omen and decided to pop in and hang out at Jeff’s here for a while. I must point out that I didn’t just turn up .. I was invited. Jeff was very kind to put me up in his tiny, modest, really quite embarrassing house in Managua. After having the luxury of being invited to stay at Sue and Dave’s in Mexcio City, it was once again lovely to be able to stay in someones home. It really does make a difference after you have been travelling for a while, and you tend to see a different side of the city.

I visited Masaya and was a little disappointed, I think my memory was playing tricks on me a bit and I had built it up to be something more than it was. There was however some great art and also some amazing matts that have pictures woven into them. These are the type of matts that are really thick and you would use to wipe your feet on outside your front or back garden door. Apparantly it’s a bit of a speciality in the villages and they do huge pictures in these matts that people hang up on their walls. I tried to find out where they were made but again I came up some similar answers that I had been hearing n Chiapas, Mexico … i.e. they are made in local villages, in peoples homes, each one takes a week to weave, no two are the same. I didn’t have enough time to follow this up so i bought c. 5 in different designs as samples. I really like these and think they really have potential in the  ‘unusual gift’ bracket, so maybe this is something else that will take a few years to develop.

Here’s a few pictures of some on a wall … they are not great (i can’t seem to rotate the pictures) .. but they will do for now.

     Rotated this is Sandina a Nicaraguan revolutionary     The fish one ( a little obscured in this picture) has already been pounced on by my mother!

So, great to be back in Nica .. even if it was a fleeting visit .. I have some ideas for sourcing and feel sure I will have to return soon in order to develop them further. Thank you to Jeff and his girlfriend Orian, for their hospitality. I look forward to catching up with Jeff again in Cambodia in a couple of months. �