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  Ometepe Island, Nicaragua
Thursday, January 1, 2009

On New Year's Day I spent all day trying to get to Ometepe Island, a crazy island formed by two volcanoes that rose out of the waters of the Lago de Nicaragua. The buses and ferries were barely running because of the holiday, but I eventually made it after spending all day wistfully looking at the island from the ferry dock on the mainland.

Ometepe is super laid back. It's an agricultural island, where everyone rides horses, pigs are tied up (or loose) in front yards like dogs, and cows sneak up on you on the road at night. I stayed at a peaceful hotel, El Porvenir, with Mary, an Irish woman who I had met previously for like 10 minutes in Honduras. We ended up on the same bus, and she asked me if I'd like to come along. The hotel had great views and was surrounded by petroglyphs made by indiginous people a long time ago. I spent my time on the island walking and biking the dirt roads, swimming in natural springs called the Ojo de Agua, horseback riding (yay!!), hiking a steep, muddy volcano, taking pictures of livestock, and searching for howler monkeys. I loved every minute on this island. You could be as active as you wanted to be or you could veg on the hotel porch, watching hummingbirds visit the garden flowers.

The 9-hour volcano hike was probably the hardest, and I had already decided I wasn't going to do it when I met Esther, a girl I had met in Leon, at the front desk of my hotel. Turns out she had arrived the day before and was leaving with a group to hike the volcano in half an hour. I did the hike because I didn't have time to think it over, I suppose. The majority of the hike was through cloud forest and everything was covered in deep, mucky mud. On the way down, I got my foot caught under a root (while trying to avoid a big mud puddle, I might add) and fell flat on my back, covering everything from my shoulders to my butt in thick mud. My companions thought it was hilarious, especially since they were both behind me when it happened and kept hiking behind me for some time after. Bastards! It was so hard coming down, but our guide wasn't concerned with keeping morale up. We asked her at one point how much time we had left to reach a lookout we had passed coming up. She replied, "an hour." Forty-five minutes later, we asked again, and her answer was still "an hour," to which I exclaimed, "Como es posible?!" I think we entered a Bermuda Triangle-like space, that, or we got lost and went in a circle.

I was truly sad to leave Ometepe, especially as on my way to catch the ferry I met the nicest old man, who talked to me for an hour about life on the island while I waited for the bus. He wasn't even waiting for the bus. That's just what people are like there! He said he was sure I would come back one day and that I should come say hi when I did.

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