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
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