Some days you just decide you’re going to have an adventure. And I have to admit, there have certainly been a few more rough and tumble days since Jon rejoined me on my adventure. Having two of us means we can take a few more risks, which leads to some interesting occurrences to say the least. We’ve certainly royally screwed up on at least a handful of occasions in the last month. But I’ll get to those in later posts.

For now, I’ll tell you about our adventure on Ometepe Island, which somewhat miraculously ended up okay!

Ometepe is an island in Lake Niaragua, formed from two volcanoes (as you can see above!). The views from all over the island are rather spectactular, but when we got there we kind of struggled to find things to do. The island is actually pretty massive, and you definitely need a vehicle to get anywhere outside the ‘main’ city (which consists of two streets).

At first we decided we would try out kayaking, only to be told that left from a completely different city, and that we would have to take an expensive taxi to get there. Right about this moment we saw a chicken bus that was about to leave the city though. We both just looked at each other, and then Jon just said. “Let’s get lost.”

So we jumped on the chicken bus to… god only knew where. But at least we were doing something!

Off we went around the first of the big volcanoes, with some sort of hope that we might get to the beach between them. The bus, as per usual, got very crowded, but there were a couple of other foreigners for once. From them we learned the bus was headed for the second largest city on the island (not the kayaking one), which was pretty much directly opposite where we’d been across the volcano. So we enjoyed the views of the volcano for about forty minutes, and then jumped off at the intersection to the bus.

Along with two german guys with machetes… Because they needed them for some race? I dunno, its Nicaragua.

Anyway, the guys were heading for the beach too, so we started walking the four km down the road to the beach, trying to hitchhike as we went. Eventually we were lucky enough for a hotel van to pick us up (it even had airconditioning), which got us to the beach without any problems.

The views were pretty impressive, I have to admit. Although you could really only see the far volcano properly (the trees hid the other one). The water wasn’t exactly clear though, so that was a little disappointing. But I do believe it could have been due to the volcanic ash the highly active volcanoes around the lake tend to deposit every few years, rather than pollution. We were certainly far enough away from any large cities.

After about an hour there, and plenty of discussion, we decided to try and head up to Ojo de Agua, some beautiful freshwater springs we’d heard about. The other option was some Petroglifos down the other end of the island, but we’re not that cultured