Back on the mainland we book it down to San Juan Del Sur. This place is supposedly really popular for surfing. We checked out one suggested campsites and it was “BRO CITY”. Not our scene, We searched around a bit and found a secluded spot called Matildas. $5 a night, beachfront. Sold.

We hooked up with some fellow overlanders. Our buddies from www.liferemotely.com in a 3rd gen 4Runner and our friends Zach and Jill in an Astro van from www.anywherethatswild.org. You can see us all tucked up in the trees

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The beach was gorgeous and hot. We spent most of the day lying in hammocks and drinking cold beers. Its a rough life.

At sunset the beach would fill with zillions of hermit crabs

Went on a adventure into town over this cool bridge to resupply on rum.

Drinking rum and watching the sun go down on sunset beach. Life is good.

Our dog friend howling in the sunset

After 4 days of beach chillin’ it was time to move on. Laurens Mom was showing up in Costa Rica in a few days and we needed to get closer to the airport.
Stopped for lunch and had some bull teste soup… MMMM QUE RICO!

Waved goodbye to San Juan Del Sur bay

VAMOS A COSTA RICA!!

We camped at the Volcano that night. Next morning we pushed off into Granada headed towards Isla Ometepe


Isla Ometepe is an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, a HUGE fresh water lake, 2nd largest freshwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and largest freshwater island in the world. The lake is so big is has BULLSHARKS, tarpon, and snook living in it. All saltwater species.

It also has 2 awesome volcanoes on it. One still active.

You can drive on the island but you need to take a ferry to get there. We bought some tickets and found a palapa to chill under while we waited for go time.

Not a bad view to kill a few hours. Costa Del Mar Sunglasses represent! Thanks to Costa for sponsoring Home on the Highway with some killer shades. The best sunglasses in the world hands down!

Ferrytime

Loaded up

Port town of Moyogalpa

Volcan Concepcion as seen from the road as we mash around on Isla Ometepe

Views from around Isla Ometepe.

The collapsed Volcan Madera

Banana Plantation

Main road/Airport runway. Dont get caught stalled out in the Runway when a plane comes to land

We stayed at a coffee co-op called Finca Magdalena, 25 Nicaraguan families all work the farm together. They recently built a small hostel/campground/restaurant. $3 a day for camping and around $1.50 for meals. Place was awesome.
Shot of the turn of the century processing house/hostel/restaurant

Drying platforms for the coffee beans

Our campspot under some cool shadetrees

These trees would fill up with howler monkeys every sunset

BONZAI!

Cruisin around the backroads we picked up some hitchhikers and threw them in the back with all our crap. Not much taxi/bus infrastructure out here, hitchhiking is the main way to get around

Our friends Life Remotely www.liferemotely.com giving some dudes a ride

Made some new friends at the Finca, We decided to hike to the top of Volcan Maderas together. The finca suggested we hire a guide but after our last guided death march up Volcan San Pedro we said No thanks and hit the trail solo.

Started climbing up and up. Luckily we picked an overcast day to climb, every other day it was at least 90-95F out. Today the weather was cool but you couldn’t see anything. Add in the fact we are up in the clouds and it was almost white-out at times.

Getting jungly

Cloud forest

Vegetation got thicker

And weirder

The higher we went

After about 4.5 hours we reached the top and headed into the collapsed volcanic crater lake.
It was hard to gain any scale on the lake due to the fog, but after hiking for so long through thick veg it was nice to get to some wide-open space

We messed around the crater for about 30 minutes and started back down. Snapped a photo at the top of us and our new canadian friends. Were all soaking wet from the clouds/fog

Down we go!

Clouds lifted a bit, You still cant see much but we were able to tell that we had somehow gotten on the wrong trail and were on the wrong damn side of the volcano. Too far to turn back now we pushed on, Figuring as long we kept going down we would pop out somewhere on the road and hitch back to camp.

Lots of hiking through stream beds

Coming off the Volcano we see we are about 2 miles from our camp.

The trail we were following turned out to be more of a farmers path and we followed it out into someone’s banana plantation.

Nice views of the Volcan

Path lead through cattle land

We eventually pop out into a little village of confused Nicaraguans who laugh when we tell them we got lost and are trying to get to Finca Magdalena. They point us to the road where we catch a ride back to camp.
Our 6 hour hike ended up taking around 10 hours, We were happy when we saw Finca Magdalena once again and hit the bar for some cold beers.

Pack up the next morning and head back to the ferry. The Canadian backpackers were leaving too and hitch a ride on the truck sliders, hanging on the sides of the truck for 45 mins to the amusement of all the Nicas we passed.

Loaded up on the ferry and headed to the mainland

We headed to Volcan Masaya. The only active Volcano in the Western Hemisphere you can drive to the rim of.



Look for the 4Runner on the left to compare to the crater

The volcano is surrounded by legend and lore.

The indigenous people would sacrifice young girls to appease the volcano gods to prevent eruptions. The indians considered the mouth of the volcano “the gateway to hell”

A spanish priest back in the 1600’s placed this cross at the top of the Volcano.

The volcano is spewing tons of Sulfuric gas into the air. It is the largest natural polluter IN THE WORLD. You can barely breathe up there and cough the entire time. Definitely not a safe place to hang out very long.

The volcano went off in 2005 shooting huge rocks and gasses all over the place, lots of people were injured and cars were damaged. Now they have warnings to park your car facing outwards just in case you gotta get the hell outta there!

OBEY THE SIGNS

Prepared for a speedy escape

We took a hike up to the top of the ridge, Lauren is standing in front of an older volcano that is now dormant and filling in with plantlife.

Volcan Masaya

The volcan houses an odd species of parrots who nest down in the walls of the volcano. somehow they have adapted to the sulfuric gasses.

We signed up for a night tour of the lava tubes. You don a sweet helmet and get a flashlight. The tour takes you down into an amazing dormant lava tube cave. This cave used to be full of molten hot magma.

Suited up.

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Hiking to the tubes

Cave entrance.

Suprise supirse its hard as hell to take pics in a dark cave so all our cave pics suck




The cave was also full of BATS

Look in the background of this pic to see how many bats we are working with

Very creepy

After the lava bat cave we hiked to the top of the volcano and looked down into a big cloud of gas, once every 30 seconds or so you could see the red glow from the lava bubbling up below. I tried taking pics but nothing came out.

We got check “SEE LAVA” off the bucketlist.

Border fiasco behind us we drove deeper into Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the land of volcanoes. Pretty much everywhere you turned your head your eyes would meet at least one or two of them towering over the horizon. On the road to Leon we were passing many parks that looked good for camping.



We turn down the road into one of the parks, A guard meets us at the gate. We tell him we want to camp near the Volcano. He seems confused but then explains there is a road that goes up the Volcano and points towards some farmers and their cows plying up some path.

We ask “Can we camp up there?” He says “Sure!”

So we headed off towards the “road”.

We end up in “traffic” behind a farmer, his horses and his young son. The “road” appears to be more of a cow path that farmers use to move their cattle from pasture to pasture.

After slowly creeping behind this farmer up this horribly rutted and rocky path for about 15 minutes he stops and asks us what we are doing?
We tell him we are trying to drive up the Volcano to camp….

He says he has never seen anyone drive up this road and it gets pretty rough ahead. I ask him if he thinks its possible to continue, He replies “Maybe…”

We push on further up the volcano, the road continues to deteriorate the higher we get.

I am mashing in 4×4 over huge boulders, the path is barely wide enough for the 4Runner to fit. I was having a blast tackling this challenging trail, letting the 4Runner do what she was born to do. The farmer is enjoying watching these crazy ass gringos drive up his volcano. Poor Lauren is bouncing all over the truck, worried about breaking our home while driving up this crazy path.

The farmer is now on-board with the adventure to drive up this Volcano. Him and his son are going up ahead of us clearing huge differential murdering boulders out of the way and helping me pick lines to climb up and over rocks, cliffs, and washes.

After about an hour of mashing the living crap outta our truck we reach a point where we just cant clear the differentials any longer. The farmer looks heartbroken. He offers up his horse to Lauren and I to continue our journey. He wanted to take us back up to his ranch and to spend the night with him and his family.

We considered his offer. Unfortunately, the 4Runner was wedged in the cow path, Nothing else could fit through. I figured I should probably turn around and not leave my truck out here in the middle of nowhere blocking the way.

Sadly we had to say Thank you and Goodbye to our farmer friend and his son. We reversed in 4×4 for about 1/4 mile to a wide enough spot to turn around and start heading back down the mountain

Eventually we get back to the guard at the park gate. For some reason he was laughing his butt off when he saw us drive up… turns out that bastard knew it wasn’t a trail for trucks! He was pretty impressed when we told him how far we got up though.

We caught a beautiful sunset that night as we drove into Leon, Nicaragua.

It was sweltering HOT in Leon. We found a hostel that offers free drinks with each night of stay. Our kinda place.

The bartender is pouring strong drinks of Flor De Cana, Nicaragua’s local rum. It is delicious, and now my favorite rum. Some say it is the best in the world, I am inclined to agree.

We post up for a few nights checking out the sights and beaches of Leon

Leon had some beautiful colonial churches.

Largest church in Central America (Mexico has much much larger)

Playa Penitas. A great place to escape the heat of the day.

TONA, the official beer of Nicaragua. Tastes exactly like every other beer since we have crossed into Mexico…

The beach had these creepy aids worms all over the place. Anyone know what they might be?

We say adios to the heat of Leon. We were headed to capital city of Managua to try to find some propane.

Looking back relying on these little 1LB green propane cylinders was a bad idea. They are hard to come by. Next time I am getting a white gas stove or a big refillable propane canister and mounting it outside the truck.
Rough road from Leon to Managua, no pavement for 100 miles. I later learned there is a newly paved highway that we could have taken… Oh well this was more fun anyway

Standard Nicaraguan Transportation. They usually rig these carts with old Toyota axles

Guy cut me off with his horsecart!

We spend all day in Managua trying to track down these bottles, finally we track down a SENSA which is an American style hardware store similar to Home Depot. They have the bottles and tons of other stuff we have been looking for for months. We spent way to much money there but it was good to restock the toolkit.

I also got pulled over TWICE in one day in Managua for legitimate reasons. It appears Nicaraguans actually enforce laws of the road. Passing on a double-yellow and using a turn-lane to pass is illegal here…

I explained to the first cop I was just a dumb tourist and he left us off with a warning.

The second cop actually confiscated my license and was about escort us to the bank to pay our citation. Before he pulled off towards the bank he asked where we were going for the day. I explained we were trying to get to Volcano Masaya. He starts laughing and explains we are very lost and completely off-track. All of the sudden he gives me license back, tears up the ticket, then pulls out his motorcycle, stops traffic both directions in the 6-lane highway and gives us a police escort all the way across town to the correct highway to Volcan Masaya.

Talk about a turn of events!!