Arriving at Ometepe, i.e. Volcanoe Island, Nicaragua
We didn´t have any plans for where to stay, however on the ferry ride over we were talking to a guy who planned to stay at a hostal that had a tame deer roaming the ground. This was enough info for us to make a decision to stay there. We didn´t see the deer right away because it had lots of grounds to hide out in. My first encounter was while I was in a hammok reading, the deer came up and started licking my arm. Tara missed out on this encounter, and was so excited to see the deer that she didn´t believe me when I told her I saw it. The next morning at breakfast we were talking about the day´s plan and all of a sudden Tara´s eyes lit up, ¨The Deer!¨
That afternoon we rented bikes and explored a bit more of the island, finding an intersting, partially submerged playground. The local kids didn´t care that their playground was under water, they were perfectly happy swinging from the tree branches into the water.
That night we decided we couldn´t go to a volcanoe island without climbing a volcanoe, so we talked to a local guide working at our hostel and signed up to climb the larger volcanoe (Concepción Volcanoe). Afterwords, we walked out our hostel and looked at the intimidating volcanoe...1600 metres high
We decided to take it easy the next day and climb the volcanoe the day after, so we had a free day to do whatever we pleased. I was reading in the backyard when Tara came up and said, ¨Bus leaves in 5 minutes, you in?¨Of course I was. The plan was to go to a waterfall, but we were on a local bus where no one spoke English and unfortunately we don´t speak any Spanish...yet. So we ended up at a Mineral Lake. It wasn´t the waterfall we planned to go to, but it wasn´t a complete mission failure because there was still a small waterfall connecting the two parts of the lake. And of course it was a beautiful place to kick back for the day.
The next morning we were up at 4:30am, had some breakfast, and headed for the volcano. It was a cloudy morning so we weren´t able to actually look up at the volcano as we were climbing it, which probably was a good thing because it was a pretty long way to the top! The first 1000 m was mostly walking through trees, where our guide told us lots of survival info about which plants we could eat, which plants could kill us, which plants could calm arthritus, etc...
The last 600m was loose rock, which made for tricky ascending, and, as we later found out, even trickier descending.
Looking into the core of the volcanoe - not quite as I imagined it would be, but nonetheless interesting to see.
The treehouse building volunteer plan didn´t work out this time, but we left Ometepe with some great memories!
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