Los Pueblos Blancos – The White Villages

This weekend we boarded the chicken bus (the guidebooks call them chicken buses but I've yet to see a chicken) to check out the Peublos Blancos or White villages. These are a bunch of villages which specialize in arts, crafts, ceramics, etc. The first stop was Catarina which has a very nice lookout over the crater lake of Laguna De Apoyo (we went there the weekend before last, would have made a good blog entry but I was too busy lounging in hammocks to take any photos).

Then all 4 of us crammed into a Tuk-Tuk to get to the next town of San Juan De Oriente which is renown for producing lots of very cool ceramics.

Final stop was Diriomo which is meant to have a reputation for white witchcraft and some funky alcoholic drink made from corn. On the witchcraft front we only managed to locate a tarot card lady who said she had a sore throat and therefore would not be able to accurately read our cards! We did have more success with the corn drink though, we found a guide that took us to a small drinking house (it was literally just a house) and they served us a mildly fizzy concoction. Hard to describe the taste, certainly not unpleasant but I don't think it would make a good “session” drink. The brewer said it's cooked for 8 days and then fermented for 1. I think the shortness of brewing time is what leads to the lack of depth on the pallet.

To finish the day off we went and took a photo of this guy and spent the bus ride home alternately feeling confused as to whether he's meant to be a cowboy or a shepherd and disappointed over the continued absence of chickens on the chicken bus.