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