Lake Nicaragua and Ometepe
Trip Start
Sep 28, 2007
1
20
33
Trip End
Ongoing
San Juan del Sur,
Nicaragua
Monday, November 12, 2007
Ometepe is an island in the the vast lake Nicaragua, the tenth largest body of fresh water in the world. The lake was formed when a seismic event threw up an isthmus isolating the now lake from the Pacific ocean. Marine creatures were trapped and some were able to adapt so that the lake now has freshwater species that are descendants of marine species. The most notable example is a freshwater swordfish. However, the lake is more famous for being home to sharks. It appears that these were not part of a population that was caught by the new isthmus, but the result of immigration up stream from the Caribbean (ie the far coast) by that most versatile of animals, the bull shark. There are very few of these animals left now as a result of a fishing industry that at its peak was finning 20,000 bull sharks a year. When you think about the tourism opportunity that was thrown away you see a very small example of the disastrous legacy of the Somoza dictatorships
Both Concepcion and Madera
. (A better example is the almost complete misappropriation of international disaster relief aid following the terrible earthquake of 1972(?). Not only was this wicked but it seems to have played a material part in promoting the Sandinista revolution.)The island is the result of two volcanoes joined together by their own output. Volcan Madera is 1394m and now dormant, but Volcan Conception at 1610m remains very active and we were told that it is not safe to climb, although people do. Both volcanoes are perfect cones and make a dramatic sight rising from the lake, with flat volcanic plain linking them.
It is difficult to describe a lake of this size, and I don't have any statistics to hand, but consider the following. It supported a population of tens of thousands of bull sharks. When I climbed Volcan Madera, I looked out across the lake from about 700m on a clear day and could not see the shore. The same night I swam in waves that would have done credit to many beaches and which arrived every five seconds.
The island itself is charming. Pigs and dogs that are not starving wonder the roads, which are mostly dirt and seriously potholed
fishing 1
. The pigs are all sizes from tiny piglets through to one giant animal that we saw defying the efforts of four people to get him into the back of a truck. He was not quite the size of a cow, but was definitely too big to consider himself a pig and would have weighed more than any calf. One local informant told me that the pigs were being saved up for Christmas slaughtering and were otherwise kept for special events such as the first birthday of children. An interesting parallel there with Tongan custom, and presumably also recognising the precariousness of that first year.Horses are common too and we saw a number laden with loads of something, and occasionally pulling carts.
